OPINION:
There is a saying that has become popular in recent years: When someone shows you who they are, believe them. The barbarity of Hamas and other Iranian proxies leaves no doubt about their murderous intentions. Islamists consider any Jewish social and political equality an “occupation.” History tells us as much.
On Oct. 7, Hamas and other Gaza-based terrorist groups launched hundreds of rockets and infiltrated the Jewish state. More than 1,400 Israelis were murdered, thousands wounded, and hundreds taken hostage and brought back to Gaza. At one music festival, more than 260 attendees were shot, beaten, and stabbed to death. Women were raped on the corpses of their friends.
Small communities in Israel’s south were subjected to unimaginable horrors. Children were shot in front of their parents, babies were murdered in their cribs, older adults were set on fire in their own homes, and family dogs were dismembered in front of screaming children. The brutality was planned.
Documents recovered from slain terrorists show that Hamas intentionally targeted youth centers and kindergartens. Interrogated Hamas operatives have also acknowledged that civilians were deliberately targeted, raped and tortured.
As for Hamas, it was proud of its handiwork. The group livestreamed its barbarism.
But instead of condemning Hamas’ wanton brutality, some in the West have excused it. Hours after the massacre — before the Israel Defense Forces even responded — college campuses and city streets filled with those celebrating the violence.
Some in the press, such as Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, have even claimed that the Hamas attack was but the inevitable result of Israel’s “occupation” and the lack of a Palestinian state. History and the facts say otherwise.
The scale of the atrocities is new, but they are not without precedent.
In 1920, Jews were massacred in Jerusalem by Arab rioters led by Amin al-Husseini, a future Nazi collaborator. Husseini wanted to sway ruling British officials from supporting a separate Jewish state in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland. The rioters chanted “the Jews are our dogs” and “we will drink the blood of the Jews.” More violence followed.
In 1929, Husseini instigated attacks on ancient Jewish communities in Hebron and other towns. Homes were ransacked, their inhabitants slaughtered.
Indeed, the accounts of the massacres could have been ripped from today’s headlines. One British policeman, RJ Cafferata, later testified that he discovered “an Arab cutting off a child’s head with a sword.” Cafferata shot the man before seeing another armed with a dagger and “standing over a woman covered with blood.” Cafferata shot him too.
Women were raped en masse. Both men and women were tortured.
The Dutch Canadian journalist Pierre Van Paassen came upon one rabbi’s house and found that “the rooms looked like a slaughterhouse. … Not a single item had been left intact except a large black-and-white photograph of Dr. Theodore Herzl, the founder of political Zionism” and “around the picture’s frame the murderers had draped the blood-drenched underwear of a woman.”
Van Paassen later wanted to “gather up the severed sexual organs and the cut-off breasts we had seen lying scattered over the floor and in the beds.” A Jewish baker, Noah Imerman, was burned to death with a kerosene stove.
A week later, another pogrom unfolded in the village of Safed. One eyewitness, David Hacohen, “saw the mutilated and burned bodies of the victims of the massacre, and the burned body of a woman tied to the grille of a window.” Homes were set on fire, and victims stabbed “to pieces … bursting into the orphanages,” and the terrorists had “smashed the children’s heads and cut off their hands.”
On May 13, 2011, Hamas’ Al-Aqsa TV broadcast an interview with Sara Jaber, a 92-year-old Palestinian woman who looked back at these atrocities with fondness. “We, the people of Hebron, massacred the Jews. My father massacred them and brought back some stuff,” according to the Middle East Media Research Institute, a nonprofit organization that translates foreign media. The woman told her interviewer: “Allah willing, you will massacre them like we massacred them in Hebron.”
This history of violence is as revealing as it is revolting. The barbarism wasn’t committed in the name of a separate Palestinian Arab state. Rather, it was committed to vanquishing the very idea of a Jewish one.
Indeed, Israel wasn’t created until 1948. And it did not seize the areas of Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank, and Gaza until 1967, when it won a successful war of defense. The West and some in Israel came to believe that these territories were the root of the conflict. Israel, the thinking went, just needed to give up land, and it would receive peace in return.
In the 1990s, Israel withdrew from the West Bank as part of the U.S.-backed Oslo “peace process.” Israel left the Gaza Strip in 2005. Gazans responded by voting for Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group that calls for Israel’s destruction.
Israel has surrendered land, but it hasn’t received any peace. And the reason is simple.
Hamas and its rival Fatah, which has ruled the West Bank since Oslo, explicitly state that they consider all of Israel to be an “occupation.” They seek to “wipe it off the map” as Hamas’ patron, Iran, advocates. And they’re on the march.
For more than a century, terrorists have targeted Jewish civilians, including women and children, in a bid to destroy any semblance of Jewish social and political equality.
By murdering children and families, they’re seeking to blot out a Jewish future. And they’re enabled by those in the West, filled with hate and ignorance, who pretend otherwise.
• Sean Durns is a senior research analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, based in Boston.
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