If you haven\u2019t been following closely on social media or the few news outlets that use reports from Palestinian journalists, the dead might be a blur of numbers. But for some, like Dr. Tariq Haddad, a Virginia cardiologist, those numbers include more than a hundred family members. \u201cEvery single day I have to check and see who\u2019s alive and who\u2019s dead and who\u2019s suffering,\u201d he said on Amanpour and Company. One cousin died on her wedding day; another was about to receive her Ph.D. Among the rest was a physician, a pharmacist, a teacher, and children with dreams \u2014 none of them, Haddad added in weary exasperation, with any connection to Hamas. \u201cThey didn\u2019t deserve any of this.\u201d<\/p>\n
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![\"Pulling](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/people-pulled-from-rubble-Mohammed-ZaanounActivestills.jpg\")
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There have been many savage wars during my lifetime: I won\u2019t forget news images of the killing fields of Cambodia or the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia.\u00a0But I\u2019ve never seen anything like Gaza. Over two million people are now starving. All thirty-six hospitals have been destroyed or are barely usable.\u00a0All twelve universities as well. Fifth-century mosques and churches, historical archives, museum artefacts from the Bronze Age, gone.\u00a0The targeted hits on universities and schools are especially shattering and cruel, because Palestinian families prioritize education: it has been their only hope.\u00a0Contrary to Israeli rhetoric about barbarism, Palestinians are known as the scholars of the Arab world, alongside the Lebanese.<\/p>\n
Al-Israa University was less than ten years old. The campus included law and medical schools, the only university hospital in Gaza, and a new museum filled with antiquities, all built by the hands of the faculty. More than two-thirds of its students were women. \u201cMothers, single mothers; we offered so many scholarships,\u201d said Ahmed Alhussaina, the school\u2019s vice president, in an interview with Chris Hedges.<\/em>\u00a0\u201cWe had a motto that poverty will not stand as an obstacle for any Palestinian who wants to pursue a college degree.\u201d\u00a0Israeli forces turned Al-Israa into a military base. When they left, they seeded the building with mines and\u00a0blew it up<\/a>.\u00a0\u201cWe were about to do a grand opening of the museum,\u201d said Alhussaina. \u201cIt was looted out; end of story. Everything went away in the blink of an eye.\u201d<\/p>\n Making Gaza unlivable clearly has been the plan all along.\u00a0Dana Mills is an Israeli writer and peace activist who was hit hard by the Hamas attack in Israel. She knew several people who were murdered or kidnapped; members of her family were displaced. Despite her own trauma, her fears on October 7 went to Netanyahu and what was coming. \u201cIt felt like this was the perfect storm for him to just go and do something that we knew he had wanted to do, which was to create a huge amount of misery and devastation and suffering, and ensure that there will never be an independent Palestine of any kind. Not two states, not one state, not no state,\u201d she told Owen Jones, a reporter for\u00a0The Guardian,\u00a0on his YouTube channel.<\/p>\n Most of my family and Jewish friends have had nothing to say about Gaza and are offended by those who do. We now live on different planets.\u00a0While I can\u2019t bear to see another child coated in grey dust after having been dug out of rubble, my family\u2019s outrage is directed at college protesters and anyone who uses the word \u201coccupation\u201d or \u201capartheid\u201d in reference to Israel. All they can see is anti-Semitism, and they see it everywhere. They post about how unsafe they feel in their peaceful suburban neighborhoods.<\/p>\n One young cousin\u2019s Instagram story in December, as all of Khan Yunis was being flattened, left me speechless: \u201cWe interrupt this war against the Jews to celebrate Hanukkah, another war against the Jews. (Spoiler alert: we won that one too.)\u201d How did my compassionate family, always on the side of the marginalized and oppressed, become unrecognizably myopic and cruel?\u00a0How can they cheer on this slaughter?<\/p>\n I know at least part of the answer. In the eyes of my cousins, the Hamas\u00a0attack was a random act of evil that grew out of anti-Jewish indoctrination. For me, it was awful but predictable, and\u00a0had nothing to do with religion.\u00a0The disconnect between us:\u00a0my family knows only the sanitized version of Israel\u2019s history, the one in which Jews were and are perpetually victims.<\/p>\n We all were told<\/a>\u00a0that Palestine was barren and uninhabited before the Zionist movement in the early 1900s.\u00a0In truth,\u00a0half a million<\/a>\u00a0Arabs were living there when European Jews first showed up to declare it Eretz Yisrael, the land of the Jewish people, biblically ordained. Arabs were the majority population for at least thirteen centuries and enjoyed a good relationship with the small Jewish community in Palestine. But as the European immigrants\u00a0bought up land<\/a>, they began evicting the Arabs who had been farming it. Tensions spilled over to periodic violence, which continued back and forth in the decades before the UN vote on partition.<\/p>\n \u201cOf course the Palestinians resisted Zionism,\u201d said Israeli historian Ilan Papp\u00e9, director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter in England. \u201cAs long as someone knocks on that window and says \u2018I used to live there two thousand years ago,\u2019 it\u2019s okay. But if he begins to live in my house, I will try and kick [him] out. It\u2019s a natural right of colonized people to try and kick out the colonialists\u2026 Now, Israelis don\u2019t understand it.\u00a0Israelis don\u2019t know that they colonized Palestine.\u00a0They really think they came to an empty land and these nasty Palestinians started to attack them.\u201d Papp\u00e9 has said that he believed the same while growing up in Haifa and serving in the army.\u00a0It was not until his doctoral work at Oxford, when Israel began declassifying military files from the period, that he was first confronted with the truth.<\/p>\n My understanding as a child was that most of the Palestinians then left voluntarily in 1948, after the neighboring Arab countries invaded the new state of Israel. I never questioned why they didn\u2019t return home after the war. My parents said they just refused to live alongside Jews.<\/p>\n I got a radically different story on one of my first dates with my future husband, a Lebanese-American, in 1987. This was the first I\u2019d heard about\u00a0Palestinians being violently chased from their homes, and I still remember the adrenaline and anger of cognitive dissonance. I argued, called him an anti-Semite, as we do, and nearly walked out on dinner.\u00a0But\u00a0once I researched what Palestinians call the\u00a0Nakba<\/a>, or \u201ccatastrophe\u201d in Arabic \u2014 the forced expulsion of seven hundred and fifty thousand Arabs in 1947\u201348 \u2014 I had my own epiphany, and began to see the elaborate ecosystem that supports this central lie.<\/p>\n There are two components to the lie. One denies the Nakba; the other purposely muddies chronology. As the official story goes, Zionists had accepted the UN partition plan and were prepared to share the land with Arabs, but as soon as they declared the state of Israel, they were attacked from within and from multiple countries. It was in the course of defending itself, according to Jewish mythology, that Israel destroyed Arab villages.<\/p>\n Here are the flaws in this narrative.\u00a0Israeli military archives show that Zionists had methodically razed Arab villages and expelled Arabs from cities well before the war. Their intention to form a Jewish majority state had been articulated from the beginning, and that obviously wasn\u2019t possible when they made up less than a third of the population.\u00a0\u201cThe only solution is a Land of Israel devoid of Arabs,\u201d wrote\u00a0Yosef Weitz<\/a>, who managed Zionist land acquisition, in his diary in 1940.\u00a0\u201cThere is no room here for compromise.\u00a0They all must be moved.\u00a0Not one village can remain, and not one tribe.\u201d<\/p>\n Zionists had a chilling manual for getting this done.\u00a0Known as\u00a0Plan Dalet<\/a>\u00a0(Hebrew for \u201cD\u201d), it called for planting explosives, burning down homes, and leaving landmines in the debris to keep Arabs from returning. Jews even\u00a0poisoned<\/a>\u00a0the wells in some Arab towns, under a secret project led by David Ben-Gurion, the \u201cfather\u201d of Israel.\u00a0It worked: resulting outbreaks of disease did cause Arabs to abandon their homes. Psychological warfare was another tool, as detailed in a 1948 intelligence\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0uncovered by the Israeli NGO Akevot. Soldiers blasted frightening sounds from loudspeakers mounted on trucks \u2014 screams, sirens, emergency warnings in Arabic, which panicked residents and triggered a stampede to evacuate.<\/p>\n As I re-read descriptions of the Nakba massacres, they sound a lot like the Hamas attack.\u00a0Two Zionist terror groups, the Irgun and Stern Gang, launched a surprise raid on the village of\u00a0Deir Yassin<\/a>\u00a0a month before the creation of Israel, even though residents had signed a nonaggression pact.\u00a0According to a\u00a0report filed by British<\/a>\u00a0administrators in Palestine, militants stripped women and children, lined them up, photographed and executed them.\u00a0Other residents were tied to a tree and set on fire. Young, female survivors told police they had been raped. Several men were taken\u00a0hostage<\/a>\u00a0and paraded through the streets of Jerusalem, where onlookers spat on and kicked them before they were killed.<\/p>\n Six months later,\u00a0in the village of Safsaf, the newly formed IDF \u2014 which had absorbed members of the terrorist groups into its ranks \u2014 tied dozens of men together, threw them in a pit, and shot them. Some of their bodies were still twitching when they were covered with dirt, in the\u00a0words of an Israeli soldier<\/a>\u00a0who kept inventory. A fourteen-year-old girl was raped, he wrote, as were two other women. Soldiers cut off a man\u2019s fingers to take his ring.<\/p>\n I offer these gruesome details simply to contrast them with the fairy tale that Jews continue to be fed. My previous education about this period came from watching\u00a0Exodus\u00a0<\/em>as a pre-teen, crushing on the adorable Irgun fighter played by Sal Mineo. I don\u2019t think I\u2019d be wrong in guessing that most Jews still have no idea that the Irgun and the even more militant Stern Gang\u00a0were responsible<\/a>\u00a0for assassinating dozens of political figures, blowing up buses and buildings, and killing and raping the residents of Deir Yassin. Their members proudly identified as terrorists:\u00a0\u201cNeither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat,\u201d a Stern Gang member wrote in their underground newspaper in August 1943.<\/p>\n Israel has never called its own terrorists \u201canimals,\u201d as it does Hamas, or even terrorists. Instead, it has honored them with commemorative stamps \u2014 the \u201cMartyrs of the Struggle for Independence\u201d series \u2014 plaques, streets named for them, and stewardship of the country. Menachem Begin, who as Irgun leader masterminded the\u00a0bombing of the King David Hotel<\/a>\u00a0in 1946, was elected prime minister thirty years later. A leader of the Stern Gang, Yitzhak Shamir, followed Begin in office, despite having overseen two spectacular\u00a0assassinations<\/a>.<\/p>\n Most Palestinian survivors of the Nakba still have keys to the homes that they fled in fear, hoping one day to return.\u00a0But few have even been allowed to walk those streets again, no matter how close to where they live now. At age seventy, Mohamed Hadid, father of models Gigi and Bella and a prominent real estate developer in Los Angeles, managed to take a\u00a0selfie<\/a>\u00a0in front of his family home in Safad, thanks to the perks of fame. Mohamed\u2019s house had been seized in 1948, when he was an infant. According to his daughter Alana, her grandparents had let Jewish refugee families from Poland stay in their guesthouse after World War II ended. When Palestine was reinvented as Israel two years later, her grandfather returned home from work one day to find his clothes on the front lawn. The Polish refugees had moved into the main house and soldiers were blocking the door. \u201cMy grandmother had just had a child and she already had young daughters,\u201d Alana told\u00a0Middle East Eye\u00a0in February. \u201cShe put her kids literally on a donkey and they walked to Syria.\u201d<\/p>\n It was this stream of refugees, tens of thousands of them pouring into Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, that Papp\u00e9 and other historians say was the real reason for the war: Arab citizens pressured their reluctant governments to invade Israel and stop the ethnic cleansing.\u00a0By its end in 1949, Israel controlled nearly 80 percent of the land that the UN had\u00a0intended to be split<\/a>\u00a0with Palestinians.\u00a0The rest \u2014 Gaza and what we now call the West Bank \u2014 went to Egypt and Transjordan, respectively. The Palestinians got nothing.\u00a0They moved into tents in refugee camps and have remained without a country or civil rights for the past seventy-six years.<\/p>\n Owning up to the lies in your cultural narrative has a price:\u00a0my\u00a0estrangement from a beloved cousin has left my heart in pieces.\u00a0Decades of censoring myself also took its toll, though. I was so afraid of angering my brother, a religious and ardent Zionist who was a second father to me, that I mostly avoided writing about Israel. It took a two-thousand-pound bomb on the Jabalia refugee camp last October for me to stop worrying about my family\u2019s reaction.\u00a0I can\u2019t be complicit in what is clearly a genocide.<\/p>\n To my surprise and relief, I wasn\u2019t alone. Once I started research for this article, I found a large community of like-minded Jews who have faced far more upheaval than me. Some were raised in hardline families in Israel, some attended Jewish schools and summer camps in the diaspora, some served in the Israeli military. By speaking out, they braved social ostracization and death threats.\u00a0Almost all trace their awakening to the first time they visited the West Bank and saw that \u201capartheid\u201d wasn\u2019t the anti-Semitic slur that they\u2019d been told, but a sickening reality \u2014 where Palestinians live under the thumb of the military and at the mercy of\u00a0extremist Israeli settlers<\/a>, whose mission is\u00a0to confiscate their land.\u00a0My new favorite podcast,\u00a0Disillusioned<\/a>, is a series of interviews with Israelis who shed their indoctrination and have been working for Palestinian rights.<\/p>\n But rejecting the mythology is still the easy part. It is more painful to investigate the underlying behavior, which contradicts everything I\u2019d been raised to believe were Jewish values.\u00a0Long ago, when I first heard that Jews had\u00a0appropriated Palestinian homes<\/a>, I couldn\u2019t believe they would do something so deeply immoral, not to mention what the Nazis had just done to them.\u00a0Now that IDF soldiers can\u2019t stop sharing their war crimes on TikTok, I have fewer illusions.<\/p>\n My family probably hasn\u2019t followed the IDF videos, or anything that challenges their belief in \u201cthe world\u2019s most moral army.\u201d To much of the world, though, the Israeli army is the new face of evil on their phone screens. I have watched soldiers gleefully\u00a0blow up<\/a>\u00a0homes and turn explosions into\u00a0save-the-date<\/a>\u00a0celebrations with song and dance. I\u2019ve seen them laugh while they\u00a0vandalize<\/a>\u00a0small businesses,\u00a0loot and defile<\/a>\u00a0intimate keepsakes,\u00a0destroy<\/a>\u00a0household belongings out of spite. All are hard to watch. But the ones that make my skin crawl feature men rifling through Palestinian women\u2019s\u00a0negligees<\/a>\u00a0or trying on bras and\u00a0thongs<\/a>\u00a0over their uniforms. There are many such videos; each feels like a sexual assault.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t want to talk about Hamas here or compare war crimes.\u00a0It is obvious to me what created Hamas.\u00a0Until recently, I was less aware of what created the deep hatred for Arabs among Israelis and many diaspora Jews \u2014 a hatred that predated the Hamas attack by many decades and has sustained the brutal occupation. But the mystery is lifting.<\/p>\n There is widespread belief in the Jewish community that Palestinian children are indoctrinated in school to hate Jews. My cousins believe this, although a German study of Palestinian textbooks, commissioned by the European Union, proved them wrong. It\u2019s another example of every accusation being a confession: in researching her two books on\u00a0Israeli<\/em>\u00a0textbooks, Hebrew University of Jerusalem professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan found that Palestinians appeared in the pages only as \u201cracist caricatures of Ali Baba on a camel, primitive farmers following oxen, or terrorists.\u201d\u00a0Never a teacher, a lawyer, a child, a real human being \u2014 making it easy to demonize them. \u201cEver since we befriended Germany in 1953, the Arabs received the role of potential exterminators,\u201d she said on the Book Caf\u00e9 podcast<\/a> in February. \u201cThe idea is that since we are the eternal victims, we have to be very strong and domineering in the area, in order to prevent another Holocaust. And that\u2019s the main foundation of Israeli education.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Peled, Israelis are force-fed images of emaciated children and explicit Nazi barbarism from early childhood. \u201cCan you imagine what happens to Israeli children when they are exposed to these photographs from the age of three?\u201d she said. \u201cThey are afraid of anybody.\u201d In high school, they travel to Poland to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau.\u00a0\u201cThey go to the death camps wrapped in Israeli flags, accompanied by armed Israeli soldiers, and they come back nationalists imbued with the urge for revenge. But the revenge is not towards the Germans.\u201d Their rage is against the Palestinians, who have blended with Nazis in their minds.\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s a very sophisticated education that really educates the children to take revenge on the wrong people.\u201d\u00a0Her assessment comes with the moral authority of personal tragedy:\u00a0Peled\u2019s thirteen-year-old daughter Smadar was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber in Jerusalem in 1997. Then and now, she holds her government responsible\u00a0\u2014 for denying Palestinians any peaceful avenue to gain their freedom in the West Bank and Gaza.<\/p>\n For decades, some prominent voices within Israel have warned about the repercussions of terrorizing and radicalizing the population \u2014 especially under Netanyahu, who has been called the\u00a0greatest fearmonger<\/a>\u00a0in the country\u2019s history. An already traumatized population soaks up the message especially well. \u201cThe next generation removed from people who have experienced mass violence have a more exaggerated stress response to perceived threat,\u201d said Katherine Bogen, a trauma therapist and granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, on the Diary of an Empath podcast<\/a>. \u201cAnd when you have an exaggerated stress response, you really do internalize \u2018it\u2019s us or them, kill or be killed.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Now that October 7 realized their worst fears, the fruits of this indoctrination are on full display. Foreign doctors volunteering in Gaza have seen a stream of children murdered or in a vegetative state from a single sniper bullet, indicating that they were targeted. \u201cYou can maybe argue that a bomb went off and a kid just happened to be nearby, but\u00a0it\u2019s not believable that the best-trained marksmen in the world accidentally shot a three-year-old boy in the head, accidentally shot a two-year-old girl twice in the head,\u201d said Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon from California, in an\u00a0interview<\/a>\u00a0with Democracy Now after returning from Gaza.<\/p>\n I try to imagine the level of brainwashing it takes for soldiers to shoot a three-year-old.\u00a0Perhaps they heard from their rabbis that even children were legitimate targets? Rabbi Eliyahu Mali is the head of a yeshiva in Jaffa that combines religious education with military service. \u201cThe Torah does not allow you to let every soul live,\u201d\u00a0he told students<\/a>\u00a0in March. They wanted to know: What about the elderly? What about children? The same, the same, he replied. \u201cToday he is a child, today he is a boy, tomorrow he is not.\u201d Mali is not alone. A popular internet rabbi with half a million YouTube followers teaches that\u00a0babies<\/a>\u00a0must be identified as \u201cnon-militant\u201d before being safe from execution.<\/p>\n That they regard Palestinians as less than human beings is obvious. Soldiers randomly round up men and boys in Gaza \u2014 from\u00a0doctors<\/a>\u00a0inside hospitals to\u00a0journalists<\/a>\u00a0and their camera crew to grandfathers in shelters \u2014 and hold them in Israel sometimes for months without charges. Upon release from detention centers, Palestinians tell matching stories of\u00a0torture<\/a>. According to a doctor at one of the Israeli centers, who sent a\u00a0letter<\/a>\u00a0of complaint to government officials, all detainees at his facility were kept blindfolded and cuffed at wrists and ankles, day and night. The resulting infections and blood clots frequently led to\u00a0amputations of their limbs<\/a>. Detainees were also forced to defecate in diapers and eat through straws, he wrote, which has caused them to lose large amounts of weight. \u201cGuantanamo starts to seem as a resort place,\u201d said\u00a0Haaretz\u00a0columnist Gideon Levy.<\/p>\n Humiliation is a key component of nearly all interactions between the IDF and Palestinians, inside or outside of detention. Alhussaina, the vice president of Al-Israa University and an American citizen, was shocked by his treatment when moving his family from Gaza City to southern Gaza last November, as ordered by Israel. Like everyone else on the road, they had to leave their car and stand in the sun for two-and-a-half hours, arms above their heads holding an ID card that they prayed wouldn\u2019t fall and get them shot. \u201cThey call you [over]: \u2018the donkey with the red shirt,\u2019\u201d he told Chris Hedges on the Real News Network.<\/em>\u00a0Everyone had to strip naked, men and women alike. \u201cAll this humiliation. A 70-year-old man had to stand there and take all his clothes off, and they make him turn around in front of the people. \u2026Women were crying, kids were crying. My granddaughter is three years old; she was horrified.\u201d<\/p>\n It has been this routine, entrenched sadism that leaves me sick to my stomach. What civilized society withholds food and water from children? Those in the north are eating grass and donkey feed to stay alive. To put things in perspective, international agencies are calling Gaza the worst hunger catastrophe in recorded history, in terms of scale and speed. This, while hundreds of\u00a0truckloads<\/a>\u00a0of aid wait in Northern Sinai, blocked by Israel from entering. By all independent accounts, the IDF will arbitrarily turn away an entire truck because they object to one item. Examples of threatening items that have cancelled a food delivery, according to the International Rescue Committee: a pair of scissors, sleeping bags, crutches, anesthesia.<\/p>\n Even worse is the spectacle of Israeli citizens sabotaging food delivery in the middle of a famine, first by blocking the border crossings and later by hijacking aid trucks. In March, a video\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0The Grayzone documented how IDF soldiers aided the border blockades. Instead of doing their job and facilitating aid delivery, soldiers escorted protesters to the crossing gates \u2014 a restricted security zone \u2014 and then cynically used their presence in that zone as an excuse for closing the crossing, sometimes for days.<\/p>\n The situation has only gotten worse. When Israel started its invasion of Rafah in May, it closed the crossing where most aid was going through, slowing food delivery to a trickle \u2014 or nothing. At the same time, crowds of Israeli settlers and other extremists began commandeering aid trucks,\u00a0beating up<\/a>\u00a0the drivers, and\u00a0emptying bags<\/a>\u00a0of rice, sugar, and flour on the road. They set at least one truck\u00a0on fire<\/a>. Not only have soldiers and police stood by without intervening, but they actually have been tipping off the settlers, according to the\u00a0Guardian.<\/p>\n \u201cThis cruelty is beyond words, and the silence of the rest of the Israeli society watching this unfold day after day is deafening,\u201d Yahav Erez, creator of the\u00a0Disillusioned\u00a0podcast, wrote on Instagram after videos of the destruction started appearing. \u201cRecently I learned of a term that is familiar to professionals who work with war veterans \u2014 \u2018moral injury.\u2019 This whole society has been heavily \u2018morally injured\u2019 and doesn\u2019t even want to start looking for ways to heal from it. Everything about this scene is so Clockwork Orange<\/em> that I can hardly bear to look.\u201d<\/p>\n The gaslighting has been relentless, unbearable. I have spent countless hours watching news footage of the IDF committing war crimes, and later seen a spokesperson deny they ever happened, or offer some preposterous rationale.\u00a0When soldiers bulldozed at least sixteen\u00a0cemeteries<\/a>\u00a0and dug up the corpses, the IDF claimed to be looking for Israeli hostages\u00a0inside the graves<\/em>.<\/p>\n So far, the Netanyahu regime has gotten away with it by delivering lie after lie in rapid succession, Trumpian style. By the time we start investigating one dubious claim, they are on to the next. But their lies have had enduring consequences \u2014 particularly those that justified the destruction of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.<\/p>\n Under international law, attacking hospitals is a serious war crime, with only one exemption: if a hospital is being used militarily to inflict harm on the enemy. I doubt it\u2019s coincidence that before storming Al-Shifa in November, Israeli officials claimed that Hamas was using a bunker and tunnel system under the complex for its military headquarters, and that the system connected to hospital wards. A video presentation for reporters showed 3D-simulated fighters moving through tunnels in camouflage gear,\u00a0as imagined by Israel<\/a>. There was also audio \u201cproof,\u201d courtesy of a comical, allegedly intercepted conversation that confirmed Israel\u2019s hypothesis within thirty seconds. It boggles the mind that there was no pushback from foreign journalists.<\/p>\n \u201cSo, where are the main headquarters of Al-Qassam Brigades*?\u201d a man\u2019s voice challenged the woman on the other end to guess. *the military wing of Hamas<\/span><\/p>\n After the siege, which killed many patients, a\u00a0Washington Post\u00a0investigation<\/a>\u00a0found no evidence to support Israel\u2019s story about a command center. Neither did it show a way to access the hospital from the tunnels. Months later, the IDF said that the tunnels weren\u2019t as important as they thought. Or claimed to have thought.<\/p>\n All of this matters. The dog and pony show for Al-Shifa gave Israel cover as it destroyed hospital after hospital \u2014 and even as it circled back to Al-Shifa in March, this time asserting that Hamas was inside the wards and operating rooms. Artillery fire rang through the corridors for two full weeks, killing many patients and at least two doctors. On their way out, soldiers set fire to the dialysis unit, the radiation unit, the maternity ward, everything they could torch. The hospital has been completely\u00a0gutted<\/a>.<\/p>\n No doctors or other witnesses reported seeing Hamas fighters. But they did see and smell the hellscape that the military\u00a0left when it withdrew on April 1. The hospital courtyard was covered with hundreds of dismembered bodies and an overpowering stench. \u201cI have been working nonstop for the past six months covering what\u2019s happening in Gaza,\u201d wrote Palestinian reporter Hossam Shabat on X, \u201cbut what I saw today while visiting Al-Shifa hospital was unlike anything I\u2019ve ever witnessed before. \u2026The bodies were in\u00a0horrific<\/a>\u00a0conditions; many had their hands and legs tied behind their backs and were flattened by\u00a0a bulldozer. Many of the bodies were burned and left to be crushed to pieces. Several bodies were decomposed and partly eaten by stray dogs\u2026 families could only identify them by their clothes.\u201d<\/p>\n Israel called the mission a success, with no civilian casualties.<\/p>\n It took the deaths of seven aid workers for the World Central Kitchen in April for the media to finally challenge Israel\u2019s versions of events. Thanks to the celebrity of Chef Jos\u00e9 Andr\u00e9s, and the white skin of six of the victims, reporters bothered to track down enough details to conclude that they were deliberately killed, and that the IDF hadn\u2019t really seen a Hamas fighter in the convoy, as it first claimed. According to an article in\u00a0The Telegraph, which is usually staunchly pro-Israel, the commander in charge that night was an extremist settler who had petitioned the Israeli government to block humanitarian aid into northern Gaza.<\/p>\n There is a reason I am belaboring these lies, as tedious as they may be to read. I recognize how much evidence it takes to counteract cognitive dissonance. I also know it will be tempting to dismiss what I say next \u2014 unless there is a longstanding pattern of disinformation by the Israeli government.<\/p>\n When my very dear cousin closed down to discussion about Gaza, she had reached her limit of October 7 atrocities, which were playing on repeat in the media.\u00a0\u201cI don\u2019t relate to anyone who supports, sympathizes, or apologizes in any way for people who can bake a baby alive,\u201d she said in a text. \u201cThat\u2019s just a line in the sand for me.\u201d The same for someone who can \u201ccut off a woman\u2019s breast while raping her and play catch with it in the street before shooting her in the head.\u201d She told me that although she once wanted to see firsthand how things were in the West Bank and Gaza, she no longer cared about context.<\/p>\n I shared her disgust. Who didn\u2019t? But as it turned out, none of the unspeakably vile acts in the headlines those first days actually happened.\u00a0To be clear: the slaughter and kidnapping of innocent civilians\u00a0did<\/em>\u00a0happen and were inexcusable. I don\u2019t condone violence in any form, for any reason, and Hamas committed horrible war crimes that were bad enough without wild invention. There were no beheaded babies, no babies baked in ovens, no women\u2019s breasts cut off. Two babies died on October 7: one was hit by a blind shot through a safe-room door, the other died after an emergency Cesarian that was performed because the mother was shot.\u00a0The corrections have been reported in Israeli newspapers, but not much in North America and Europe.\u00a0\u201cForty decapitated babies\u201d remains imprinted on people\u2019s brains. Even Joe Biden kept repeating it long after his staff corrected him.<\/p>\n A single person was the source for many of these stories \u2014 a senior volunteer for Zaka, which is an ultra-Orthodox group that gathers human remains for religious burial after a disaster. The press couldn\u2019t get enough of volunteer Yossi Landau and his elaborate tales of horror. He repeated many times how he found a pregnant woman face down in a pool of blood, her stomach butchered open, the fetus stabbed but still attached. With each repetition, Landau collapsed in tears. And none of it was true. \u201cThis horrific incident, which the Zaka volunteer alleged occurred in Be\u2019eri, simply didn\u2019t happen,\u201d Israeli reporter Aaron Rabinowitz wrote in\u00a0Haaretz. It was \u201cone of several stories that have been circulated without any basis.\u201d Another of Zaka\u2019s grisly stories was recited by\u00a0Antony Blinken<\/a>, the US Secretary of State, in front of Congress. That one\u00a0didn\u2019t happen either<\/a>.<\/p>\n There were two things that may have sparked Landau\u2019s imagination. First, Zaka was desperate for donations.\u00a0As a\u00a0Haaretz\u00a0investigation<\/a>\u00a0revealed, the organization went from near bankruptcy at the beginning of October to almost fourteen million dollars in donations by January, thanks to Landau\u2019s emotional public appearances.\u00a0But Zaka volunteers also were urged on by Netanyahu, who gave them a pep talk in November. \u201c[W]e need to buy time, which we also buy by turning to world leaders and to public opinion,\u201d he told them, according to the official\u00a0transcript<\/a>. \u201cYou have an important role in influencing public opinion, which also influences leaders.\u201d<\/p>\n As influencers, they were very, very good. These sensational atrocities are what people still cite in defense of Israel, whether in conversation or on social media, and politicians mention babies in ovens all the time. They are what allowed Israel to call Hamas, and by extension all Palestinians, human animals. They are what condoned a supremely disproportionate assault on Gaza.<\/p>\n That leaves the most inflammatory topic. Although no victims have come forward, I don\u2019t doubt that there were individual cases of rape on October 7. But there were many red flags in Israel\u2019s narrative about widespread and systematic rape. Even the timing of that accusation caught my attention. On December 5, when Israel was getting heat for inflicting massive casualties after a week-long ceasefire, Netanyahu suddenly began railing against women\u2019s organizations that he said had shown no concern for Israeli rape victims. \u201cWhere were you?\u201d he asked rhetorically at a press conference. \u201cWere you silent because it was Jewish women?\u201d It was the first I\u2019d heard about mass rapes, and it made me suspicious when he threw in anti-Semitism. The whole thing smelled like a diversion.<\/p>\n Months later,\u00a0The Grayzone\u00a0revealed that a pollster working for two pro-Israel lobbies had run\u00a0focus groups to determine which atrocities<\/a>\u00a0most inflamed the public. \u201cRaped civilians\u201d topped the list, polling far better than murdering or burning them. The lobbyists then held meetings with politicians to tutor them on the best language to use about Hamas in speeches \u2014 a list that included \u201cunthinkable savagery,\u201d \u201cbarbaric atrocities,\u201d \u201cmassacred babies,\u201d and \u201craped women.\u201d<\/p>\n I can\u2019t say whether an independent investigation will prove that there were systematic rapes on October 7, or whether Israel will ever allow the UN or another body to seriously investigate. So far, it hasn\u2019t. I\u00a0can<\/em>\u00a0say that the big\u00a0New York Times\u00a0investigation, often cited as proof positive that Hamas had weaponized rape, was deeply problematic and its evidence has completely\u00a0unraveled<\/a>. Family members of the central victim disputed that she had been raped. Later,\u00a0new video evidence<\/a>\u00a0made it highly unlikely that the other victims identified in the story had been raped either. The\u00a0Times\u00a0cut ties with one of the reporters, an Israeli filmmaker, after a review of her social media showed that she had liked a murderous tweet about Palestinians.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, there has been no more mention of the \u201ctens of thousands\u201d of testimonies that Israeli investigators said they had taken from alleged rape survivors and witnesses.<\/p>\n As I write this, Congress and the media are obsessed with pro-Palestinian\u00a0protests on college campuses, the supposed hotbeds of anti-Semitism making Jewish students feel unsafe.\u00a0Even if the charges were valid, it strikes me as obscene to focus on how Jews feel about opposition to a genocide while ignoring the genocide itself.\u00a0Hundreds of Palestinian bodies are right now being pulled from mass graves at Gaza hospitals, some showing signs of having been buried alive. That story has been pushed out of the headlines. I am ashamed that my community is taking all the oxygen. But even more,\u00a0I am furious that anti-Semitism is being used as a cudgel to censor criticism of Israel.<\/p>\n Jewish students are in fact a major part of the pro-Palestinian movement.\u00a0Some of them are descendants of Holocaust survivors; some are observant and have held\u00a0Shabbat services<\/a>\u00a0and seders in the encampments (joined by Muslims and Christians). None of that is getting attention.\u00a0The Jewish students invited to speak on news shows are invariably those who feel unsafe. As satirist John Oliver summed up the insanity, after police at Dartmouth College dragged a sixty-five year old professor along the ground and zip-tied her: \u201cThat woman is not only Jewish, she\u2019s a professor of Jewish studies. Yet she\u2019s being brutalized by police supposedly there to keep Jewish people safe.\u201d<\/p>\n And what does \u201csafe\u201d mean exactly? With all the media hysteria, I doubt people realize that there hasn\u2019t been actual violence directed at Jewish students, on or off campus. What they typically say in interviews is that the slogans and signs and flags feel threatening. I can understand. Having your world view challenged is disorienting and scary. I\u2019ve been there and have compassion for them. But exposure to other stories is part of learning, part of the university experience, and not the same as being unsafe.<\/p>\n Those who have documented reason to be scared \u2014 and who no one is rushing to protect \u2014 are Palestinian students and their supporters. Since October 7, they have been\u00a0shot<\/a>\u00a0and left paralyzed; intentionally\u00a0run over<\/a>;\u00a0sprayed<\/a>\u00a0with a noxious chemical; and\u00a0attacked<\/a>\u00a0with wooden planks, fireworks, and mace by a\u00a0pro-Israel mob<\/a>\u00a0while the police\u00a0did nothing<\/a>\u00a0for hours.\u00a0The facts didn\u2019t stop Netanyahu from demonizing them and ratcheting up fears within the Jewish community. \u201cAnti-Semitic mobs have taken over leading universities,\u201d he said in April. \u201cThey call for the annihilation of Israel. They attack Jewish students. They attack Jewish faculty. This is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. It\u2019s unconscionable.\u201d<\/p>\n What is unconscionable is Netanyahu\u2019s weaponization of anti-Semitism and his gaslighting. The student protesters have been adamantly inclusive. Like so many other Jews, they are tired of being told by Republicans with ties to neo-Nazis that their anti-Zionism means they are anti-Semitic.\u00a0That false equivalency is glaring:\u00a0the majority of Zionists,\u00a0by far<\/em>, are Christian evangelicals for whom\u00a0Jews are a means to an end<\/a>\u00a0and expendable.\u00a0According to their beliefs, Israeli Jews are necessary to set in motion Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ\u00a0\u2014 at which point those who don\u2019t accept Jesus will die. So Netanyahu has set up a nonsensical situation whereby a large sect of Orthodox Jews who\u00a0don\u2019t accept the state of Israel<\/a>\u00a0are de facto anti-Semites, yet the founder of Christians United for Israel, who famously wrote that Hitler was sent by God to return the Jews to Israel, is not.<\/p>\n This censorship also feels fundamentally anti-Jewish. One of the things that I treasured most about my upbringing was the encouragement to question and debate, to be politically engaged. My parents were committed to Israel, but I believe that they would have been appalled by what is unfolding now. Empathy and commitment to social justice were what I was taught, not blind support for any government \u2014 and certainly not paranoia, cruelty, and vengeance.<\/p>\n \u201cBe boldly critical of Israel \u2014 not despite being Jewish, but because you are.\u00a0There is no tradition more central to Judaism than prophetic truth-telling\u2026,\u201d\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0Bernie Steinberg in\u00a0The\u00a0Harvard Crimson\u00a0in December. Steinberg had served as executive director of Hillel at Harvard for eighteen years and was so disturbed by congressional grandstanding over anti-Semitism that he pulled together the op-ed while dying from cancer. In May, the House passed a\u00a0bill<\/a>\u00a0that would make certain critiques of Israel a crime \u2014 such as calling it a racist state or drawing comparisons with Nazi policies. Steinberg didn\u2019t live to see the legislation, but the words he left behind were rebuke enough: \u201cIf Israel\u2019s cause is just, let it speak eloquently in its own defense\u2026 Smearing one\u2019s opponents is rarely a tactic employed by those confident that justice\u00a0is\u00a0on their side.\u201d<\/p>\n Sadly, the campaign is working. The prospect of receiving death threats, or getting fired or blacklisted, has left people afraid to criticize Israel, which has allowed disinformation to flourish.\u00a0I feel like we\u2019re back in the Trump years, when every accusation was projection and every day brought new\u00a0gaslighting<\/a>. What baffles me is that my family and friends were expert at seeing through all of it. Where did that awareness go?<\/p>\n Once again, we are told that day is night and up is down. Here\u2019s a well-worn example: \u201cHamas uses human shields and hides among civilians.\u201d Israel has been making this claim for at least two decades, as justification for the massive civilian casualties the IDF has inflicted. It is repeated as fact by politicians, journalists, government officials, and my family without actual proof. According to investigations by Amnesty International of two major wars in Gaza, in 2009 and 2014, there was\u00a0no evidence<\/a>\u00a0that Hamas had used civilians to protect them. Instead, Amnesty documented several instances of\u00a0Israeli soldiers<\/em>\u00a0forcing Palestinians to act as their human shields. The Israeli human rights group B\u2019Tselem describes it as a\u00a0longstanding practice<\/a>\u00a0by Israel, and IDF soldiers themselves have\u00a0testified<\/a>\u00a0to using it routinely. Recent video\u00a0evidence<\/a>\u00a0shows that the practice continues, despite court orders to stop what is a war crime.<\/p>\n It would not bode well for Israel if more Jews started seeing these contradictions and asking questions, as college students are doing.\u00a0Widespread awareness would inevitably lead to support for BDS \u2014 boycott, divestment, and sanctions \u2014 the movement that brought down apartheid in South Africa and is at the heart of student protests. That is surely why Netanyahu has blurred the line between Israel and Jews: to lead all of us into an emotional state of high alert, which blocks our rational brain from absorbing facts on the ground. When he keeps repeating that October 7 was the worst attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust, the idea is\u00a0to stir feelings of persecution and unity.\u00a0But the attack was not on \u201cJewish people.\u201d It was an attack on a country \u2014 one that has been keeping Palestinians oppressed.<\/p>\n That fact is obvious to anyone who looks closely at Palestinian life in the West Bank. In the aftermath of October 7, one of my cousins said she had checked into my claims and determined that neither \u201coccupation\u201d nor \u201capartheid\u201d applied there. I was disappointed but not really surprised: disinformation is hard to get past when you don\u2019t have facts to challenge it. But Nelson Mandela, who recognized apartheid when he saw it, was\u00a0haunted by the oppression<\/a>\u00a0of Palestinians until his death. Human rights groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Israel\u2019s\u00a0B\u2019Tselem agree<\/a>\u00a0with his assessment, as do some former\u00a0military generals<\/a>\u00a0in Israel. \u201cAnyone who observes the reality on the ground can have no doubt about the nature of this regime, whereby three million Palestinians live under one set of laws and half a million Jewish settlers live under another set of laws,\u201d said Omer Bartov, an Israeli professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, to\u00a0Vox.<\/p>\n For doubters like my cousin, here is what Bartov means.\u00a0While Jewish settlers are subject to civilian law, with its safeguards and rights to free speech, Palestinians live under much stricter military law, which defines a protest as illegal assembly.\u00a0Children as young as twelve are tried in military court, where they are often interrogated blindfolded without a lawyer present and coerced to sign confessions in Hebrew, according to reports by\u00a0Save the Children<\/a>, the\u00a0Association for Civil Rights in Israel<\/a>, and\u00a0Military Court Watch<\/a>. Conviction rates are nearly one hundred percent. But even without a conviction or charges, they can be\u00a0detained indefinitely<\/a>.<\/p>\n In everyday life, Palestinians are constantly\u00a0harassed<\/a>\u00a0and treated as if they all were potential threats. The idea is to \u201ccreate the feeling of being persecuted\u201d to counter any temptation to cause trouble, said former IDF soldier Yehuda Shaul on France24. He described the nightly patrol for a typical pair of soldiers: \u201cYou walk in the streets of the old city of Hebron, break into a house. Not a house we have intelligence about \u2014 I\u2019m the sergeant, I lead the patrol and choose a random house. Wake up the family, men on one side, women on the other side, search the place\u2026 Climb to the roof, jump from one roof to another, come out through another house, wake the family. And basically that\u2019s how you pass your eight-hour shift. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, from September 2000, when the second intifada started, until today.\u201d<\/p>\n Shaul grew up in an Orthodox family and started his army service with a sense of purpose. He left as an activist for Palestinian rights who co-founded\u00a0Breaking the Silence<\/a>, a forum where disaffected IDF soldiers share testimony about the occupation. \u201cWhat I did at the end of the day was enforcing our military rule over all the Palestinian people,\u201d he said, \u201cmaking sure they are stripped from dignity and freedom, that they\u00a0don\u2019t live as equals to us<\/a>.\u201d Aside from the endless\u00a0checkpoints<\/a>, where they can be strip searched or detained for hours, Palestinians can\u2019t even\u00a0drive on the same roads<\/a>\u00a0as Israelis or have the\u00a0same access to water<\/a>. If this isn\u2019t apartheid, I\u2019d like to know what my cousin would call it.<\/p>\n Incredibly, the average Israeli or diaspora Jew knows next to nothing about any of this, or about the gun-toting settlers who have been staging\u00a0pogroms on Palestinian villages<\/a>\u00a0while the IDF watches. With few exceptions, Israeli news organizations avoid reporting about conditions within the territories, whether out of\u00a0their own biases<\/a>,\u00a0fear of retribution<\/a>, or their own ignorance. Foreign journalists, for their part, face\u00a0challenges in the West Bank<\/a>\u00a0and are barred entirely from the Gaza Strip; only a handful have had permission to enter during the war, and only if embedded with the IDF.<\/p>\n In May, Israel expanded the news blackout by using a new \u201csecurity\u201d law to close Al Jazeera\u2019s offices in Israel, block its website domestically, and ban local channels from airing its content.\u00a0This is a big deal: not only is it the\u00a0behavior of a dictatorship<\/a>, but Al Jazeera is the lone international news organization with correspondents inside Gaza.\u00a0Most media outlets have used its reports in some capacity during this war.<\/p>\n Palestinian journalists have paid a steep price for being the world\u2019s eyes and ears. [As of November 13, 2024, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists<\/a>, at least 137 journalists and media workers have been killed covering this war \u2014 more than those killed in WWII and Vietnam combined. \u2014Ed<\/strong>.] In some cases, there is proof that the IDF targeted<\/a>\u00a0them; in others, there is strong suspicion. What is very clear is that Israel wants to control the narrative. Al Jazeera reporter Anas Al Sharif has said he has to change SIM cards five times a day, because Israel keeps blocking his phone signal. He has also received several messages from the IDF ordering him to leave the north, as he explained on an\u00a0Al Jazeera report<\/a>\u00a0about the hardships journalists face in Gaza. When he stayed and kept reporting, his father was killed by an airstrike on their home. Another reporter in northern Gaza, Hossam Shabat, actually\u00a0filmed himself<\/a>\u00a0and colleagues running from IDF bullets \u2014 while wearing clearly marked Press vests.\u00a0Like Al Sharif, his home was bombed following a phone message to leave. \u201cWe built this house with our blood and sweat,\u201d he wrote on X. \u201cAnd now, my family of thirteen finds themselves living in a tent.\u201d<\/p>\n The Committee to Protect Journalists has been scathing about Israel\u2019s treatment of journalists, which started years before the Hamas attack. \u201cWe produced a\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0back in May of last year that identified a pattern of killings of mainly Palestinian journalists by the Israeli army with no accountability,\u201d said the group\u2019s CEO, Jodie Ginsberg. \u201cSo this pattern, and particularly one in which journalists are smeared as terrorists, is something we have frequently seen from Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n Even filmmakers are subjected to institutional intimidation and threats. Israeli Yuval Abraham and Palestinian Basel Adra are co-writers and directors of\u00a0No Other Land<\/em>, a 2024 documentary about settler appropriation of the West Bank region where Adra lives. Their film won the best documentary award at the Berlin International Film Festival in February. I cried listening to Abraham\u2019s speech:<\/p>\n \u201cWe are standing in front of you now, me and Basel are the same age\u2026 And in two days we will go back to a land where we are not equal\u2026 We live thirty minutes from one another, but I have voting rights. Basel is not having voting rights. I\u2019m free to move where I want in this land. Basel is, like millions of Palestinians, locked in the occupied West Bank. This situation of apartheid between us, this inequality, it has to end.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The next day, Israel\u2019s ambassador to Germany vehemently attacked Abraham\u2019s speech and the German cultural establishment on X. \u201cUnder the guise of freedom of expression and art, anti-Semitic and anti-Israel rhetoric is celebrated,\u201d he wrote. \u201c\u2026Cultural so-called leaders, your silence is deafening.\u201d Berlin\u2019s mayor and other German politicians rushed to pile on condemnation of the speech.\u00a0Abraham had to cancel his flight home due to death threats; his family in Israel went into hiding to escape a right-wing mob.\u00a0I don\u2019t know how\u00a0Abraham controlled his rage<\/a>\u00a0over the absurd situation: an Israeli Jew, whose family members were murdered by Germans, was schooled and scolded by Germans about anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n This is not an isolated incident. Last fall, four US colleges tried to censor\u00a0Israelism<\/em><\/a>, a documentary film made by Jews about their Jewish experience \u2014 in the name of protecting Jewish students. The colleges had been bombarded by up to fifty thousand copy-paste emails generated by pro-Israel groups. \u201cOne email literally says that our film supports people who chant \u2018kill the Jews,\u2019 which is obviously very offensive and upsetting to us, as an almost entirely Jewish team of filmmakers,\u201d co-director Sam Eilertsen told MovieWeb. What the film actually did was tell the story of Jews like myself, who discovered the truth about their history.<\/p>\n If I\u2019ve given too many examples, it is because so many in my family and circle of friends are artists, writers, and actors who strongly oppose government censorship at the same time as they strongly believe that Israel is \u201cthe only democracy in the Middle East\u201d \u2014 and don\u2019t see a contradiction. But democracies have thick skin and don\u2019t try to quash those that expose their secrets. Some Israeli officials even tried to\u00a0strong-arm<\/a>\u00a0Netflix to deplatform\u00a0Farha<\/em><\/a>, a touching film about a Palestinian girl during the Nakba, because they insisted it was libelous propaganda.<\/p>\n The\u00a0Farha<\/em>\u00a0commotion may sum up my anguish better than anything.\u00a0Israelis know the pain of having their trauma denied; they even have a law against Holocaust denial. Why, then, do they stubbornly deny the Nakba and deprive Palestinians recognition of their own trauma? In a recent CNBC interview, Netanyahu gave me the answer. A Palestinian state would be \u201ca tremendous reward,\u201d he said \u2014 \u201ca historic precedent of giving those people who committed the worst massacre against the Jewish people since the Holocaust on a single day, giving them a prize.\u201d<\/p>\n There it is. Acknowledging the Nakba would mean acknowledging that Jews were rewarded with their own state after massacring and displacing Palestinians.\u00a0It would explode this sanctimonious argument and place the Palestinian struggle for independence in proper context.<\/p>\n And so, they choose to lie instead.<\/p>\n \u201cWere there no Israel, there wouldn\u2019t be a Jew in the world that is safe,\u201d\u00a0Biden said at the White House Hanukkah party in December.\u00a0I couldn\u2019t disagree more, and couldn\u2019t be more fed up with the Christians who keep speaking for me. My parents were born in the U.S. long before Israel existed. At what point did Israel take\u00a0charge of my security?\u00a0I resent that Biden has tossed my fate to the country that made me feel less safe in the first place, by linking all Jews to its atrocities.<\/p>\n I also feel less safe since the Israeli government stripped \u201canti-Semitism\u201d of meaning through overuse \u2014 at a moment when far-right, neo-fascist movements are rising around the world.\u00a0But Netanyahu doesn\u2019t seem too concerned about them: he is busy forging alliances with their leaders, Viktor Orb\u00e1n in Hungary, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Marine Le Pen in France, and Donald Trump. Orb\u00e1n likes to peddle tropes about Jewish power cabals, yet is \u201ca\u00a0true friend<\/a>\u00a0of Israel\u201d in Netanyahu\u2019s opinion. Meloni presides over a party with fascist roots and sympathies. Our focus should be on these threats, not on students opposed to war.<\/p>\n I am proud of my Jewish heritage. I am proud of our commitment to scholarship, the arts, and activism, of our role in the civil rights and union movements. I am proud of the young Jews speaking out on college campuses and the older ones who\u00a0took over the Cannon Building<\/a>\u00a0in the Capitol last November.\u00a0This is the culture that I know and connect with \u2014\u00a0people whose hearts are capable of\u00a0aching\u00a0for the Israeli hostages and the Palestinians at the same\u00a0time.<\/p>\n There is a small movement of peace activists in Israel who work on everything from water rights to the treatment of Palestinian children in detention, and even offer themselves as\u00a0human shields<\/a>\u00a0to keep settlers\u00a0from attacking aid trucks<\/a>\u00a0or West Bank olive harvests.\u00a0But with the exception of this very brave minority, I don\u2019t feel a cultural connection to Israelis who I meet or see in the news. What I see is an openly racist society where a\u00a0rap song<\/a>\u00a0calling for the death of Dua Lipa and Bella Hadid (among many others) can top the charts. Where a news anchor can\u00a0refer to Palestinians<\/a>\u00a0as \u201cthese animals\u201d to audience applause, and a colleague on another channel can\u00a0demand<\/a>\u00a0\u201ca lot more rivers of Gazans\u2019 blood\u201d without risking his job. Where a large majority of the population can\u00a0oppose<\/a>\u00a0humanitarian aid to Gaza and more than half can think that the destruction there has been\u00a0insufficient<\/a>.<\/p>\n Those who accuse Israel of oppression are quickly admonished with \u201cshame on you\u201d \u2014\u00a0how dare you call victims the perpetrators?<\/em>\u00a0That was the crux of Israel\u2019s defense to South Africa\u2019s eighty-four page\u00a0accusation of genocide<\/a>\u00a0before the International Court of Justice. According to Brown professor Bartov, who has written several books on the Holocaust, it is not unusual for countries to progress from oppressed to oppressor without realizing. \u201cGroups that engage in a great deal of violence against other groups often do that because they see themselves as victims,\u201d he said on Owen Jones\u2019s YouTube channel. \u201cAnd they see themselves very often as victims of those that they are killing.\u00a0This kind of cycle of victims becoming perpetrators, you actually take it back to the Germans, who saw themselves as the great victim of World War I, of the unjust peace, of the stab in the back by the Socialists and the Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n Netanyahu and others keep invoking Germany of the Thirties to describe the current situation and atmosphere. Some of us see Germany, too \u2014 just not the way he does.\u00a0Writer Masha Gessen, whose grandmother\u2019s family was largely wiped out during the Holocaust, wrote a\u00a0New Yorker<\/a>\u00a0essay<\/a>\u00a0that compared Gaza to a Jewish ghetto and Israel\u2019s current campaign to liquidation by the Nazis. That essay caused an uproar, but Israelis have themselves voiced similar opinions.<\/p>\n A prominent Israeli philosopher,\u00a0Yeshayahu Leibowitz, coined the term \u201cJudeo-Nazis\u201d decades ago to describe soldiers in the occupied Palestinian territories. And months before the current war began, a former IDF general compared \u201capartheid\u201d (his word) in the West Bank to what Jews experienced under the Nazis.\u00a0\u201cWalk around Hebron, look at the streets,\u201d said Amiram Levin, who had been chief of Israel\u2019s Northern Command, to\u00a0Haaretz. \u201cStreets where Arabs are no longer allowed to go on, only Jews. That\u2019s exactly what happened there, in that dark country.\u201d Like Leibowitz before him, he believes that the occupation has\u00a0left the military morally bankrupt<\/a>, \u201crotting from the inside.\u201d<\/p>\n It is frankly terrifying to make such comparisons in public: the backlash is swift and fierce, and if Republicans in Congress get their way, may include arrest. But the parallels are inescapable. Many times during this war I have had the chilling sensation of watching an old newsreel. The blindfolded, half-naked Palestinian detainees\u00a0kneeling in front of a ditch<\/a>, which some later said they thought would be their grave, was one. Another was seeing detainees numbered. And it is hard not to think of concentration camps when confronted with the\u00a0emaciated bodies<\/a>\u00a0of children in northern Gaza, or men\u00a0returning from detention<\/a>. According to Alex de Waal, an expert on famine and director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, the first thing Germany tried as part of the Final Solution was the\u00a0Hunger Plan<\/a>, which used starvation as a weapon of war. They switched tactics when it didn\u2019t work fast enough, de Waal said in an online interview, but in the end starvation took the most lives.<\/p>\n I have been letting all this marinate for seven months, as I researched and wrote. Immersed in the suffering of Palestinians, I needed to understand how so many in my community could trivialize or even laugh at it. What kept floating to the top was the damage that I think comes from elevating the Holocaust above all other atrocities and making comparisons a sin or crime.\u00a0For starters, defining Jewish trauma as more important has left Israelis and many diaspora Jews blind to the pain of others, especially if it overlaps their own.\u00a0I have been shocked by the black and white thinking, as if caring for Palestinian lives means you supported the October 7 attack.<\/p>\n Forbidding comparison to the Holocaust invites history to repeat itself.\u00a0\u201cI think that we have a moral and one could also argue, legal obligation to compare the Holocaust and the atrocities committed during the Second World War to the present,\u201d Gessen said on NPR. \u201cIf we take the promise of never again seriously, we once again have to constantly be asking ourselves, \u2018are we laying the foundations for the mass murder of millions of people? Are we employing or is part of the world employing the same kinds of tactics that were employed by the Nazis?\u2019 I think there\u2019s every reason to say that that is exactly what\u2019s happening.\u201d<\/p>\n There are parallels as well in the West Bank, where violent, unchecked nationalism from the half million Israeli settlers \u201cthreatens not only Palestinians living in the occupied territories but also the State of Israel itself,\u201d according to a\u00a0New York Times\u00a0investigation in May. Some in Israel have been warning about this threat, too, for decades. In 1995, in the aftermath of a mass murder of Palestinians by an extremist settler, historian Moshe Zimmermann was quoted as saying that the children of settlers were being indoctrinated with hatred and pumped with delusions of superiority, which reminded him of German youth.<\/p>\n
\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/Al-Israa-University.jpg\")
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<\/a>
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<\/a>
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\n<\/em>\u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d she replied. Where?
\n<\/em>\u201cUnder the compound Al-Shifa,\u201d he said.
\n<\/em>\u201cGod forbid! Are you serious?\u201d
\n<\/em>\u201cYes, the leadership headquarters are under the Al-Shifa compound.\u201d
\n<\/em>\u201cOh my!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n
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