OPINION:
Hamas is a terrorist organization whose avowed goal is to give the Holocaust a sequel by annihilating the Jewish state. It is firing thousands of rockets at Israeli cities, forcing three-quarters of Israel’s population to flee several times daily into bomb shelters with only seconds’ warning. These attacks have killed a dozen Israeli civilians, including a 5-year-old Jewish Israeli boy, Ido Avigal, and a 16-year-old Arab-Israeli girl, Nadine Awad. No country could tolerate this. And yet, the world overwhelmingly supports Hamas. How is this possible?
A key reason is the deliberate distortion of facts by mainstream media.
The conflagration began with a court case. In 1876 Jewish trusts purchased land in eastern Jerusalem. During the 1948 war Transjordan (now Jordan) seized this land while ethnically cleansing eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank of all Jews. In the 1950s Jordan settled Palestinians there as tenants. (They never owned the land.) When Israel regained eastern Jerusalem in 1967 after being besieged and attacked, the Jewish trusts sought their land back. Under a 1982 agreement the Palestinians were to remain there in perpetuity. But the Palestinians later reneged, refused to pay rent, and face eviction. This is a private land dispute; Israel’s government isn’t removing anyone.
Tensions spilled over to the Temple Mount, where Palestinians attacked Israeli security forces with rocks and fireworks. When the Israelis responded in self-defense, Hamas in Gaza used this as a pretext to fire missile barrages at Israeli cities. Because Hamas uses its own people as human shields (it launches rockets from residential areas, stores bombs in schools, and its military headquarters is in the basement of Gaza’s largest hospital) it engineers Palestinian civilian casualties when Israel responds in self-defense or when Hamas’ own rockets crash prematurely. Yet it is Israel, not Hamas, that is cynically blamed.
STEPHEN A. SILVER
San Francisco
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