Dearest College Students,
This fall you will be entering campus with many important choices to make. You will be choosing majors, thinking about career opportunities and figuring out which exciting extracurricular activities to participate in. You will also be faced with a choice that students in years before you have not had to make.
The choice you have is whether to join the hordes from this past spring semester who spent their time cheering and shouting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and other such witty and rhyming phrases. I know that there are some who would like to convince you that you will find a just cause in the “free Palestine” movement. That you are defending innocents from genocide and colonization, standing up for the oppressed. But really what you are doing is allowing yourselves to be used as a tool to indirectly throw support to murder, rape and torture.
It sounds harsh, but it is the bitter truth. Attacking Israel for defending itself is really just a form of supporting Hamas and its patron, the terror state of Iran. On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas invaded Israel and murdered men, women and children in the most barbaric ways. They brutalized women, raping them and cutting off body parts and recorded the acts to share with the world. Israel had no choice but to go after those murderers and make sure that they could not do that again. And make no mistake, Hamas has every intention of doing it again and again. They have said so, gleefully. Their track record as an organization has been murder through suicide bombing, shooting, stabbing, launching missiles and any method they can find.
They have taken innocent civilians hostage and have terrorized and tortured them. They have tortured the families of these poor individuals by releasing false news about them and cruelly failing to give almost any information about them or allowing the Red Cross to visit them.
Hamas’ record with how they treat their own people is no better, one example being the killing of fellow Palestinians who belonged to Fatah and who they saw as political threats in 2007. They are not concerned with the welfare of their own citizens, but rather with the destruction of Israel and murder of Jews. They are truly evil, believing that their salvation comes through the destruction of others.
If what you would really like is for Palestinians to be free and better off, what you should be doing is protesting Hamas and rooting for Israel to wipe them out. The sooner that Hamas is completely defeated, the closer the Palestinians in Gaza come to having a better, more representative government.
Israel is being criticized for attempting to fight the last battalions of Hamas in Gaza and for not coming out with a comprehensive post Gaza war plan. These two are connected. Imagine for a second that Israel had a plan to bring forward certain tribal or other leaders for the Palestinian people in Gaza who would form a non-homicidal government. If they were to announce that plan before destroying the military capabilities of Hamas in Gaza, what would happen to those leaders? They would be murdered in their beds, thrown off rooftops, or have their body parts dragged through the streets. And actually, that has already happened to some degree.
Well wait one second, you say. Isn’t Israel to blame for the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians? Aren’t they committing genocide? Ethnic cleansing? Isn’t this a murderous revenge by Israel against the Palestinians for Hamas’ attack?
No, it is not. Genocide is when a group of people is being systematically killed for who they are. What Israel is doing is fighting a war. Unfortunately, when fighting a war, innocents are killed. Civilians are killed. This is especially true when your enemy is Hamas, who cynically and evilly uses their citizens as human shields. Hamas hides their fighters, weapons and rocket launchers in schools, hospitals, ambulances, mosques and homes where they have a double advantage – Israel may not decide to strike those areas because of their sensitive nature. Or, if Israel does strike them – they can then cynically complain that Israel is targeting those places and killing innocents!
The real genocide here was committed by Hamas, when it indiscriminately killed as many people as possible, because they lived in Israel. And Hamas claims that they will do it again and again.
So how come so many innocent people are dying? Well, interestingly, not as many are dying as was being claimed. Earlier this year, the United Nations announced that the number of woman and children killed was off, by about 50%. So, it turns out that out of the number of people killed, most of them are in the target age of male terrorists. Hamas is notorious for lying. Trusting the news of out of Gaza which is controlled by Hamas is really just a fool’s errand.
Israel takes extreme care, probably more than any army in history, not to harm innocents. It often tells them when missile strikes are coming, it warns citizens to move out of neighborhoods, and it has a lawyer approving each strike according to international law. This is so far from a genocide that anyone claiming that it is a genocide can very likely be applying a terrible double standard to Israel, the one Jewish state. That often is a result of antisemitism, or what really should be properly called Jew-hatred. If you think that the protestors cannot be involved in antisemitism or Jew hatred, then ask yourself, ‘Why do they care about this issue so much, twisting the truth to falsely accuse a moral, idealistic, democratic people, and completely ignore the real genocide happening in Sudan or the massacres that have happened in recent years in Syria and many other places around the world?’
Israel left Gaza in 2005 and was rewarded with wars and attacks and stockpiling of missiles and murder and mayhem. Hamas was basically running a Palestinian state for 18 years and instead of creating a healthy society and the ‘Singapore of the Middle East’, they terrorized their own people, and murdered anyone they saw as a rival: Christian Palestinians, homosexuals, and anyone they did not like. The people who are responsible for the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza are the leaders of Hamas.
And dear student, if you have been told that the reason why it is ok for them to act in this barbaric murderous way is because they are the poor indigenous people who have been kicked off their land by Zionist settler colonialists, well, we need to sit down and learn some actual history. We will save that for another letter.
You may also have been sold a pile of lies about Israel being an apartheid state. Another completely obvious falsehood that we will save for another letter.
For now, I encourage you to consider if you really want to be supporting murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and hatred of Jews as you start up your fall semester.
Instead, perhaps you should be cheering Israel on, hoping they will rid Gaza of Hamas, so that the people there can start to live a better life. There is enough room in that small country for Palestinians and Jews to live side by side, and/or for them to share the land. It requires goodwill on both sides. First, however, it requires the destruction of Hamas’ military capabilities, so that Gazans can have the safety and freedom to perhaps choose to create something better.
That would indeed be something worth cheering and shouting about.
I don’t envy your position. You are being put in an unprecedented and uncomfortable situation and being given a challenging choice.
Please choose wisely.
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