OPINION:
Of all the myths of the Arab-Israeli conflict, one of the most persistent is that residents of Gaza are somehow victims — that they are held captive by Hamas. This is light-years removed from reality, but comforting to believe.
In 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza, territory taken from Egypt during the 1967 Six-Day War.
In the process, it evicted more than 8,000 Jewish settlers from 21 thriving communities. It even took its dead, knowing that Gazans would desecrate any graves left behind.
Israel moved out, and the terrorists moved in.
In a 2006 election, Hamas won a majority of delegates in the Palestinian Parliament, then governing both the West Bank and Gaza.
Hamas seized power in Gaza, its stronghold. The Palestinian Authority maintains its power in the West Bank and keeps its president, Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas, in power by force.
Hamas recruits are drawn from the local populace. When Israeli women who had recently been raped were paraded naked through the streets of Gaza City, Gazans applauded.
The time for pretending there’s any daylight between Hamas and the people of Gaza is over.
Like other Palestinians, Gazans are born and bred to hate Jews.
For them, antisemitism is mother’s milk. It saturates their media. It’s taught in their schools and preached in their mosques. Bookstalls offer the antisemitic fraud “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”
Palestinian textbooks have repeated calls for the total destruction of Israel and the annihilation of Jews. Maps show Palestine encompassing all of Israel.
They claim that Jews fabricated their history in Israel, which has had a continuous Jewish presence for over 3,000 years.
Archaeological sites that verify this reality are called fraudulent. A 10th grade Arabic-language textbook explains: ”The conqueror has built for himself an artificial entity that derives its identity and the legitimacy of its existence from tales, legends and fantasies and has tried in various ways and means to create live material evidence for these legends.”
Texts describe Jews as the enemies of Muslims dating back to Muhammad. Jews are accused of “repeated attempts to kill the Prophet.”
Zionists are charged with planning the mass murder of Palestinians, a classic case of Freudian projection. “The Zionists have established their entity upon, terror, extermination and colonialism.”
The murderers of Israeli women and children are described as heroes and martyrs.
A 2020 study of Palestinian textbooks commissioned by the European Union found “frequent use of negative attributions related to the Jewish people … suggest a conspicuous perpetuation of anti-Jewish prejudice, especially when embedded in the current political context.”
Europeans are masters of understatement.
Based on this and similar reports, Britain decided to stop funding Palestinian schools.
Now, the usual suspects — including the American Friends Service Committee, Doctors Without Borders, Black Lives Matter and the “woke” wing of the Democratic Party — are demanding an immediate cessation of hostilities and negotiations.
Israel has created a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, they whine. The level of civilian casualties is unacceptable.
It’s as if the Oct. 7 pogrom, with more than 1,400 dead and atrocities to rival those of the Holocaust, is an unfortunate aberration instead of part of a consistent pattern predating the establishment of the state of Israel, like the 1929 Hebron massacre.
To understand the absurdity of the current caterwauling, consider another war in which Jews were murdered en masse.
In 1945, after six years of global conflict, few in the West doubted the justice of total war to force unconditional surrender on Germany.
Between years of bombing — including the firebombing of Dresden — and the ground invasion from the west and east, most of Germany was reduced to rubble.
Between 300,000 and 600,000 German civilians died in the bombing alone, which was necessary to stop war production and bring the nation to its knees. When tanks rolled into the Fatherland, again from two directions, more died.
As Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman is reputed to have said, war is hell. Civilians who support butchers brought the Gaza war on themselves.
Like the Allies in World War II, the Israelis understand that their survival depends on the outcome of this conflict.
The civilian population of Gaza is the water Hamas swims in. To get the sharks, it’s necessary to drain the swamp.
I believe Israel is doing everything possible to avoid civilian casualties. But it is under no moral obligation to do so.
• Don Feder is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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