A Tumor Among the Nations

We need not wonder what an independent Palestinian state would be like

Here’s one hostage poster that “anti-Zionist” activists would never tear down…

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When commenting on the seemingly eternal Arab-Israeli conflict, I used occasionally to note that in my view the Palestinians do have some legitimate grievances, which could easily be addressed given a modicum of mutual good will.

But no more. Never again.

I see now with crystal clarity that Palestinian nationalism, Palestinian society, are irredeemably corrupt, and that an independent Palestinian state would be a cancerous tumor among the nations. That’s the lesson that’s been driven home to me by October 7, 2023, and subsequent events. Up to now I’ve hesitated to write about my change of heart; the wholesale condemnation of a people is no trivial matter.

But then, on February 20, Hamas returned the bodies of four of the hostages it took on 10/7. One was Oded Lifshitz, a man in his eighties, well known in Israel as a peace activist and advocate for Arab-Israeli reconciliation. The other three were a mother, Shiri Bibas, and her two sons, Ariel and Kfir. When kidnapped, the boys were four years old and less than a year old, respectively. Their father, Yarden, also taken hostage, was released alive earlier this month.

In a barbaric spectacle typical of Hamas, the bodies of the slain, in locked coffins, were paraded before a cheering, singing mob of Palestinian civilians before being handed over to the IDF. Then it turned out that the keys provided did not fit the locks on the coffins. And when the coffins were finally opened, it was found that the body alleged to be that of Shiri Bibas was actually that of an unidentified Palestinian woman.

It gets worse. Much worse. All along, Hamas has alleged that the two boys, Ariel and Kfir, were killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza. This claim was certainly plausible, and it was seized upon by Hamas’s apologists as an example of Israeli “war crimes.” But forensic examination of their bodies revealed the horrifying truth: the boys had been strangled, and then their bodies were mutilated in an effort to cover up the cause of death. That is to say, Palestinians killed two small Jewish children with their bare hands. I try and fail to imagine the horror of that scene. Was their mother made to watch her sons die before she too was murdered? It seems all too likely.

This should not have come as a surprise to anyone. Given the horrifying atrocities that Hamas terrorists and the many Palestinian civilians who followed them into Israel committed on 10/7, what else was to be expected of those barbarians? After all, Ariel and Kfir were not the first Jewish children ever to be killed by Palestinian terrorists. Palestinian nationalism marinates in the blood of Jews. Its vision of a future Palestinian state is of a land cleansed of Jews, “from the river to the sea,” its soil fertilized by Jewish blood.

Such a state can never be allowed to come into being. Yet it’s precisely such a state that not only the Palestinians but their enablers in America and elsewhere wish to see established. That’s the objective of their “anti-Zionism”: genocide, a final solution, an Endlösung. One need not squeeze a trigger or drop Zyklon B crystals into the death chamber. Tearing down hostage posters bearing the photographs of Ariel and Kfir Bibas furthers the cause as well.

The antisemitic demonstrations that have blighted American university campuses and the streets of our cities since October 7, 2023, are disgusting, shameful. Cheers for Hamas and other Islamofascist terrorist groups! Open calls for ethnic cleansing and genocide! Harassment, vile expressions of hatred and outright violence directed at American Jews! And all this looked upon with tolerance and even approval by the authorities. University administrators across the nation covered themselves with shame and ignominy. While Joe Biden was president, no action—none—was taken against the “anti-Zionist” goons who were targeting Jews on and off campus. Our fellow citizens who happened to be Jewish were hung out to dry by their own government.

No doubt we’ll continue to be told that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. No doubt it will continue to be argued that a two-state solution is the only solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. No and no. However they may brand themselves, apologists for the Palestinians in America and elsewhere are supporters of a genocidal ideology. More, they’re complicit in the murder of the Bibas family—indeed, complicit in every atrocity committed by Hamas, Hezbollah, and the rest of that scurvy gang.

And the same goes for the Palestinian people. Yes, there’s a sense in which they’re victims of their terrorist overlords. But in true postmodern fashion, they’ve embraced their victimhood, they revel in it, and they’ve been profoundly corrupted by it. What it will take to release them from that prison of their own construction, I cannot say.

This is the family that Hamas and its enablers destroyed

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