Last month, a video clip showing the capture of five female IDF soldiers by Hamas terrorists was released along with all the brutality of the terrorists, their intentions to rape and abuse these women, laid bare to see. Even so, the video is far less gruesome than other images of Hamas's murders, torture, rapes and innumerable acts of barbarity on October 7, 2023. Those show what Hamas really is.
Hamas did shock the Western world for a few weeks, but the West quickly forgot. Demonstrations in support of Hamas began the day after the massacres, October 8, before the victims' bodies were cold, and swept across the US, Australia and Europe. A wave of anti-Semitism not seen since World War II has accompanied the protests.
The attention of the mainstream media and Western politicians quickly turned from the slaughtered wounded and kidnapped Israelis to the Palestinian inhabitants of the Gaza Strip.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's response to the massacre of 1,200 of his people and the abduction of 240 more – which he called "equivalent to 29 9/11s in one day and the equivalent of 50,000 Americans slaughtered — burned, maimed, raped, beheaded — and 10,000 Americans taken hostage, including mothers and children" -- was immediately treated as unacceptable and unjustified.
The death figures given by the "Gaza Ministry of Health" under the rule of Hamas -- and which Hamas was soon forced to "correct" -- were quoted by many journalists as if they did not come from a terrorist group.
That Hamas used human shields, deliberately placing their own civilians in harm's way to increase Gaza's death toll -- a strategy which Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar admitted -- was left aside.
"We have the Israelis right where we want them," the Wall Street Journal reported Sinwar writing, calling the Gazans' deaths "necessary sacrifices."
Instead, as Sinwar planned, the Israeli army was accused of deliberately killing women and children.
Israel's war goals were portrayed as impossible to achieve, as if to encourage Israelis to give up defending themselves.
After initially showing support for Israel and supplying weapons to its army, the US, after grumblings from Democrat anti-Israel activists in Michigan, quickly slid towards open hostility to the Israel's defense.
Prominent European leaders, faced with street protests, expressed hostility to Israel and began delivering slanderous accusations against it. "These babies, these ladies, these old people are bombed and killed... there is no reason for that," French President Emmanuel Macron said on November 11, 2023. He knew perfectly well, as did the world, that Hamas was responsible for those deaths. He chose not to say that.
On November 16, European Union foreign policy representative Josep Borrell scandalously tried to establish an equivalence between the terrorist group Hamas, who were the aggressors, and the Israeli Defense Forces trying to defend against them. "One horror does not justify another horror", he said.
"We are witnessing a killing of civilians that is unparalleled and unprecedented in any conflict since I am secretary-general", UN Secretary-General António Guterres inaccurately intoned on November 21. He avoided talking about the more than 34,000 civilian deaths caused by Russia in its invasion of Ukraine, the hundreds of thousands of deaths in the war in Syria or the ongoing civil war in Sudan, also leaving thousands dead. He wanted to target only one country: Israel.
Soon, false accusations against Israel became even more odious. On March 21, 2024, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken implied that Israel could become "indistinguishable" from Hamas.
On March 25, Macron was the first to accuse Israel of a "war crime."
Borrell, again, although he could not have ignored that there is and has been no shortage of food in Gaza, just corruption in distributing it, accused Israel of using "hunger as a weapon of war. "Nothing can justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people", Guterres said, pointing at Israel instead of the Hamas, who were shooting at civilians trying to take the aid for whom it was intended.
By having said that Gaza's people are experiencing "severe levels of acute food insecurity", but without accusing Hamas, Blinken rustled up an unfounded accusation against Israel. Having said in a recent interview that it is "uncertain" whether Israel commits war crimes, Biden suggested that Israel might be committing war crimes.
The accusations made by International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan against Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant were also totally unfounded. A war crime is the use of cruel treatment, torture or intentional attacks against a civilian population. Israel's actions do not fall into those categories. A crime against humanity is a widespread attack launched against an entire civilian population.
Hamas not only uses its civilians as human shields, but may be the first government in history that wants to see its own people killed in order to blame another country, Israel, for their deaths. Meanwhile, Israel goes out of its way – seriously risking the lives of its soldiers – not to commit any crimes against humanity or indiscriminately bomb, as Russia does in Ukraine.
"Israel implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any nation in history," wrote John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point. How come no one takes any notice?
The demands of Nawaf Salam, president of the International Court of Justice, saying that "Israel must... immediately stop its military offensive" in the name of the "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide" are also unfounded. A genocide is the deliberate mass killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group. Israel is not committing any genocidal actions; in fact it goes out of its way and endangers the lives of its own soldiers not to.
Behind this massive Jew-hate and outright lies appears to be a propaganda operation which has continued to gain ground for several decades.
For decades, many of the countries of the Arab world have wanted to erase Israel from the map. Each time, they have failed. Their project consists of trying to destroy the Jewish state and kill every Jew, as Hamas' 1988 Charter requires. No one in a Western country could support it without being seen as an anti-Semite.
A radical change occurred, however, in 1964. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded and the myth of "Palestinian cause" invented. Zuheir Mohsen (زهير محسن) a leading PLO member responsible for Damur massacre, admitted:
"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese.
"Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism. For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva, and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan."
[James Dorsey, "Wij zijn alleen Palestijn om politieke reden", Trouw, 31 March 1977]
A "national liberation struggle" was, in fact, fabricated by Soviet Union's KGB, according to Ion Mihai Pacepa, who served from 1972-1978 as deputy chief of Romania's foreign intelligence service and advisor to Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Pacepa said:
- "The PLO and the Palestinian Narrative was dreamt up by the KGB, which had a penchant for 'liberation' organizations."
- "First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat's birth in Cairo, and replaced them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was, therefore, a Palestinian by birth."
- "According to [Soviet leader Yuri] Andropov, the Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep... We had only to keep repeating our themes — that the United States and Israel were "fascist, imperial-Zionist countries" bankrolled by rich Jews. Islam was obsessed with preventing the infidels' occupation of its territory, and it would be highly receptive to our characterization of the U.S. Congress as a rapacious Zionist body aiming to turn the world into a Jewish fiefdom."
So, the "Palestinian people" appeared. Israel was no longer described as a small Jewish state besieged by much larger, powerful Arab countries filled with despicable intentions. Israel was suddenly presented as an "imperialist" power oppressing a small deprived people and supposedly having stolen their land. Anti-Israeli terrorist acts were presented as "resistance". The aim was to seduce the West; and quickly seduced it was. The "struggle of the Palestinian people" quickly became a sacred cause for many political parties and movements in Western Europe.
Egypt and Syria, with their large armies launched a war against Israel in 1973. It was the last large-scale conventional war for Israel. Afterwards, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) took center stage. The group, benefitting from the support of the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, used terrorism and waged a war of influence. The "Palestinian cause" gained ground.
Western European leaders, then some American leaders, said that the Palestinian people deserve a state. Israel had refused to negotiate with a terrorist PLO. But finally in 1993, yielding to mounting pressure, the Israeli government under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin began secret negotiations with the PLO, in order to reach an agreement.
In 1993, the Oslo Accord was signed. Israel recognized the PLO as the "legitimate representative" of the "Palestinian people" and agreed to give to transfer authority over parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the PLO, which became the Palestinian Authority (PA).
An illusory "peace process" began. In reality, it was a war process. The PA areas became a base for bloody anti-Israeli attacks which did not diminish in intensity until a security barrier, begun in 2002, was mostly completed in 2007.
Two Israeli prime ministers proposed the creation of a Palestinian state: Ehud Barak in 2000, Ehud Olmert in 2008. Each time, the leaders of the Palestinian Authority refused, without so much as a counteroffer. In 2005, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unconditionally donated the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority, in the hope that they would build a "Singapore on the Mediterranean". Two years later, Hamas forcibly ousted the PA from power and seized control of Gaza.
Since 2009, with the exception of an 18-month period from June 2021 to November 2022, Benjamin Netanyahu has been prime minister of Israel. Called by Andrew Roberts "The Churchill of the Middle East," he evidently sees that Israel has no "partner for peace". Netanyahu has stated that any resumption of negotiations with the Palestinian Authority would need to be conditioned on the Palestinians recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, which the PA does not seem particularly eager to do. International attempts to relaunch negotiations have led nowhere.
During that time, the PA successfully used international institutions to delegitimize Israel and disseminate an extremely falsified version of the history of the Middle East. In 2011, "Palestine" became a member of UNESCO in 2011, even as the PA continued supporting terrorism and is therefore a terrorist entity. This reward for terrorism marked the first time that a terrorist entity was granted a seat in an organization purporting to promote world peace.
A year later, "Palestine" was granted "non-member observer state" status at the United Nations: the first time that a terrorist entity achieved such status.
By 2012, Hamas had transformed the Gaza Strip into another terrorist entity.
In 2015, the Palestinian Authority became a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC) -- the first time a terrorist entity was admitted into an institution established to combat war crimes and crimes against humanity, which include not just terrorism, but also support for it. Although there is no Palestinian state, the PA nevertheless joined the ICC under the name of the "State of Palestine".
So-called human rights organizations, as well as the media and so-called educational institutions, have been complicit.
American universities and colleges have received donations "that have no recorded nor reported dates of receipts" currently estimated at $22 billion. University World News reported in December 2023:
"More than 50% of this has come from authoritarian and antidemocratic Middle East governments, according to the veteran accountant hired on the recommendation of international accounting firm KPMG..."
After these billions, in almost all universities in the US, the history of the Middle East is taught in accordance with the "Palestinian cause". No one says that this "cause" was invented in 1964.
Even though the Palestinian Authority is still a terrorist entity, its president, Mahmoud Abbas, now in the nineteenth year of his four-year term, is received in the Western world as if he were a legitimate political leader.
Although PA officials have never said that they are ready to live in peace alongside Israel, and have even affirmed their support for the atrocities committed on October 7, most leaders in the West continue insist that they want the creation of a Palestinian State entrusted to the PA.
The Biden administration rarely, if ever, criticizes the Palestinian Authority, nor Hamas and its sponsors Qatar and Iran.
The Biden administration also leaves aside that the Palestinian Authority -- which pays its people for life if they murder Jews – is still a terrorist entity, and instead treats it as if it were a legitimate interlocutor.
Three European countries, Spain, Ireland and Norway, recently decided to recognize a "State of Palestine" and joined the 143 countries which already do. As the State of Palestine does not actually exist, deciding to "recognize" it will not bring it into being. On the contrary, the announcement will reinforce the belligerent actions of the Palestinian Authority and the leeriness of the Israelis. The Israelis clearly saw the Palestinians violate an official ceasefire on October 7; murder, rape, torture, kidnap and start an unprovoked war; then complain to the international community when the Israelis were inconsiderate enough to fight back.
Ironically, Europe's insistence that Israel accept an openly seething, genocidal state on its doorstep will understandably delay the existence of such a state.
These countries in Europe will not have to live with the consequences of such a state next to them. On top of that, to insist that Israel fight under rules more appropriate for gin rummy than for combat, has caused a war that would have ended weeks ago to be dragged out interminably. More importantly, their stance has made their real motivations look distastefully suspect.
If Spain, Ireland or Norway actually had to live next door to a Hamas or an ISIS or an Al Qaeda, their recognition of a state might not have been as fast or enthusiastic. Recognizing a terror state as supposedly legitimate will simply delay that state being born.
"I personally favor the creation of a Palestinian state as a consequence of making best efforts to end terrorism, not as a reward for increasing terrorism as a carefully calculated tactic to achieve statehood", wrote the great lawyer Alan Dershowitz, in The Case for Israel.
The haste of Spain, Ireland and Norway can only lead Hamas leaders and their supporters to think that terrorism works and achieves results. Just wait until they try it again in Europe, especially after Iran has its nuclear bomb.
A recent poll shows that 71% of Palestinian Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank support the October 7 massacre. If elections were held today in the territories governed by the Palestinian Authority and in the Gaza Strip, Hamas would win triumphantly.
The 2017 revised Hamas charter, rumored to be less anti-Semitic than its 1988 Hamas charter, nevertheless states that the Zionist entity must be destroyed by the "armed resistance". That, ostensibly, is supposed to be an improvement.
If Hamas manages to survive the current war – as its patrons, Qatar, Iran and the Biden administration apparently wish -- Hamas will be able to continue organizing terrorist acts. In fact, Hamas official Ghazi Hamad has vowed to do exactly that:
"Israel is a country that has no place on our land. We must remove that country, because it constitutes a security, military, and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation, and must be finished. We are not ashamed to say this, with full force.... We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do this again and again. The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth, because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight. Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.
Currently, despite pressures, betrayals and attempts at destabilization, Netanyahu stands firm and fights. He appears under no illusion about what will happen if Hamas, after the fighting is over, is allowed to continue as a terrorist threat.
The Biden administration, meanwhile continues to betray and defame Israel, and is evidently either unwilling to pressure Qatar and Iran to get Hamas to lay down their arms, return the hostages, and stop.
And Hamad disclosed this month that Egypt and Qatar have exerted no pressure on Hamas whatsoever to accept Biden's proposed ceasefire, and that media reports about threats to expel Hamas leaders from Qatar are false.
Of course, Hamas, Qatar and Iran do not want to stop; they want to have the international community and America tell Israel to stop -- permanently -- and leave them free to continue their attacks.
Biden now seems to want an end to the war as quickly as possible, any end. A war apparently does not correspond to his election campaign agenda. On May 31, he presented a plan, falsely calling it "Israeli", which was actually a Hamas-Qatari-Egyptian plan, calling for the complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the release of "a number of hostages" (not all) in exchange for the release of hundreds of Palestinian terrorists by Israel, and a full and complete ceasefire.
The following day, Netanyahu had to clarify on X:
"Israel's conditions for ending the war have not changed: The destruction of Hamas military and governing capabilities, the freeing of all hostages, and ensuring that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel".
On June 3, US State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller had to admit that the plan was "almost identical" to Hamas's proposals. On June 6, Hamas rejected it.
Biden's determination to end the war without letting Israel win continues. His apparent plan to increase pressure on Netanyahu and bring down his government is in full swing. This week, an opposition party that was part of the Israeli war cabinet resigned, with its leader and calling for "new elections", professedly because there was no day-after-the-war plan. You could probably bet there is, but thank goodness that Netanyahu knows better than to talk about it, so that the jackals currently interfering in the Middle East will not be able to start interfering in that too.
Israel is in major danger from Lebanon, where Iran would like one of its other proxies, Hezbollah, to finish what Hamas could not. Iran doubtless sees a closing window of opportunity from a US administration that has rescued it from impoverishment and is not remotely a threat. It is likely also trying to achieve nuclear weapons breakout before the US election as well. For the moment, Israel can no longer consider the United States, distracted as it is by a well-funded and well-radicalized base that is anti-Jew, anti-Israel and anti-American, as a reliable ally.
America's November 5 election will be particularly crucial for the future of Israel and the Middle East, as well as for the survival of the US against adversaries such as Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
There are those in the US administration who say that even if Hamas is dismantled militarily, Palestinians will still remain indoctrinated. One might have said the same after World War II about the populations of Germany and Japan. There are probably still Nazis in Germany but they are not able to do much about it. After ISIS was defeated, the ideology of its former members probably remained the same, but they are no longer a physical threat.
Currently, Biden is trying to "sell" his Hamas-Qatari-Egyptian plan back to Hamas through pressure from the UN. Hamas, unsurprisingly, refused for the umpteenth time, to accept its own plan.
Hamas is interested only in a "permanent ceasefire" by Israel, not a temporary pause. Why should they agree to a pause when they see the whole world attacking Israel? To them, everyone is roughing up Israel: it looks as if they are winning. Now the US is reportedly trying to cut a separate deal to release the five American hostages, leaving the other 120 hostages, and Israel, high and dry. Some believe that at least a third of them have been killed. That would be the ultimate triumph: having the US grant the aggressor, the terrorist group Hamas, a big reward for its massacre, to induce it to go to sleep before the November election.
As far as the Saudis are concerned, the last thing they want is a Palestinian state. They just cannot say so publicly.
The Trump administration crafted the biggest step toward peace in the Middle East in decades: the Abraham Accords. It was expected, before the election of Biden, that the Abraham Accords would lead to the signing of more new peace treaties between Israel and countries of the Sunni Arab world.
By 2021, the mullahs' regime in Iran had been economically asphyxiated and could no longer finance Hamas and Hezbollah, and those two terrorist groups would not have been able to carry out an attack against Israel. For four years, Israel's enemies were largely powerless and silent. It would be so helpful for the Free World, the US, and even the indoctrinated, abysmally governed Palestinians, to have those policies back.
Dr. Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, is the author of 27 books on France and Europe.
Yael Alon