Chapter one:

Early on Saturday morning October 7, 2023, my wife abruptly awakened me. Our daughter’s young family in Tel Aviv had already taken shelter in the reinforced room of their apartment: Starting at 06:29, missiles from the Gaza Strip had been fired at Tel Aviv, Israel’s most populous city, and other towns.[i] The air-raid siren was sounding in our town, warning us to prepare for an attack.

We called our daughter from our own home shelter, our laundry room, where thick walls and a blast-resistant door offer safety from incoming missile and rocket fire. She and her husband had scooped up their month-old son from his crib and joined our older grandson, thirty-months old, in his bedroom, their saferoom. We have shelters or saferooms in our homes because Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have fired on Israeli civilian centers for years; given distances from Gaza and the velocity of the rockets typically shot from there, we living in central Israel have 90 to 120 seconds to reach our saferooms before projectiles hit. Residents near the Gaza border have only 15-30 seconds warning to take shelter before a missile strikes.

Alerts were sounded in our town, twelve kilometers west of Jerusalem, at 8:14. By then, my son, a reserve officer in a special forces unit, was already driving south to his base with a colleague. They had not yet received a call-up from the army, but the breadth and intensity of Hamas’s rocket attack throughout Israel, along with the disturbing text messages they were receiving from friends and comrades on what was supposed to be a quiet holiday marking the end of the autumn High Holy Days, suggested that something was seriously amiss.

So, the war that began early that day became very personal for me from the start. It resonated of previous clashes between Israel and Hamas since the latter had taken control of the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian Authority (PA) in 2007. On November 11-12, 2012, Hamas and its junior partner, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), fired more than 200 rockets into Israel, prompting the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to launch an eight-day operation, Pillar of Defense, during which 1,456 rockets were shot into Israel, striking civilian centers as far north as Tel Aviv.[ii]

Another clash, deadlier and longer, was fought during July and August 2014. Dubbed Operation “Protective Edge,” it was characterized by intense fire on both sides and a limited ground operation lasting fifty days during which the danger of the tunnel system beneath Gaza, that had been engineered by Hamas and its allies, was revealed. During that time, 4,258 rockets were fired into Israel, to which the IDF responded with over 5,000 airstrikes on Gaza. At its conclusion, the war left 74 Israelis dead, six of them civilians, and 2,200 dead on the Palestinian side; the latter included hundreds if not thousands of Hamas and PIJ fighters. Thirty-two tunnels were destroyed.[iii]

My son was then a junior officer in a combat unit and, on the final day of that war, after a truce had already been declared, his unit was drawn into an ambush just inside the Gaza border. His direct commander, a communications specialist, and another officer of my son’s rank were killed; the latter’s body and that of another soldier killed earlier were dragged into the tunnels under Gaza and are still being held by Hamas.

All this was very much on my mind that day in October, when the horrifying scale of the jihadi invasion became slowly and painfully apparent. The invasion was of unbelievable proportions. Strong emotions surged in me: incredulity — that our defenses had failed, resulting in mounting numbers of dead, entire communities being overrun and rising numbers of missing people, with reports of many being captured by terrorists — and rage, directed at the invaders and their enablers. For the first day or two of the Gaza War, if I could have made a meaningful contribution to the defense of the country, I would have rushed to the front and taken up arms. But at the age of 68, my place was at the home front, where there is and remains, even at this writing a year later, much to do in the wake of a war that has changed everything in Israel and certainly in me.

The truth is that, along with hundreds of thousands of other Israelis representing additional millions, I had been serving on a different “home front” since the start of the year, when the latest government of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu formed an extreme right-wing coalition and began legislating laws that we viewed were meant to concentrate power, erode democracy, divide the public and subvert state institutions to serve a clericalist and radical right-wing agenda. Since January 2023, we had congregated at highway junctions, the President’s Residence, the Prime Minister’s Residence and the Knesset in the capital and in downtown Tel Aviv, Haifa and Beersheva, demanding a stop to a government that represented what we viewed as Israel at its worst. The “people power” that we exercised was effective in stonewalling the abhorrent legislation, at least for a time. In early October, following Parliament’s summer recess and the autumn holidays, we were preparing to return to the streets.

Then the jihadi war against Israel began, in part due to Hamas’s belief that the protests had so divided Israel that it would be unable to unite to resist attack. Our struggle bifurcated to face a second, more immediate and vicious threat, an external one. And amid these attacks, yet a third front opened, one which continues and is no less menacing: The delegitimization campaign against Israel, orchestrated by our enemies, which has ebbed and flowed since Israel’s independence, has grown in the past months to a deafening crescendo on campuses, at protest rallies, in print, in broadcast and social media, and through the Internet.

To be sure, not everyone who criticizes Israel’s actions and policies share the nullification calls so neatly summed up by Hamas’ slogan “From the River to the Sea.”[iv] It is possible to be critical of Israel without advocating its eradication. But whether out of the noble aspiration to protest injustice and express solidarity with the beleaguered Palestinian people, or out of ignorance, social conformity, anti-establishmentarianism or other less laudable motivations, a raging storm of anti-Israelism with influence in high places and over hearts and minds, has gathered with the aim of delegitimizing, if not eliminating, Israel.

Distorting Zionism, now a dog-whistle for Jews collectively, has become commonplace: The movement for the self-determination of the Jewish people has been equated with the dark banner of right-wing nationalism, exclusivism and supremacism, advocated by extremists who enable Prime Minister Netanyahu to cling to power, but which has historically been a minority stream of Zionism. Ironically, in the Palestinian national movement, those who rejected coexistence with Israel and other extremists were dominant and they continue to be the most vocal and influential segment today. One can only hope that a Zionism and Palestinianism of coexistence will one day succeed in ending bloodshed.

As an Israeli patriot, critical of our recent governments, who supports a two-state solution and regards himself as a citizen of the world, this book aims to place the events preceding and subsequent to October 7,2023 in a broader context. I hope to cast light on the various forces and complex processes that form the background to the War and that power the tenacious and seditious anti-Israel campaign that has been fanned around the globe. They are deeply intertwined.

Well-meaning people have been unwittingly recruited to a campaign, nominally in support of Palestinian “liberation:” After all, every people should be released from limits to their freedom and the situation in post-October 7 Gaza makes that all the more urgent. However, summoned to rallies and asked to sign petitions, the humanitarian instincts of these well-meaning people have been exploited, tethered to the cause of jihadism, hatred, and fundamentalist religion well concealed by its proponents.

Concerning the West Bank, where the situation is more nuanced and contentious, there is enough blame to go around to implicate all the parties involved. With respect to Gaza, however, anyone who thinks that Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and their allies, Hezbollah, pro-Iranian militias in Iraq and Syria, the Islamic Republic of Iran and its satellite in Yemen, the Houthis, are the vanguard of world liberation is badly mistaken. Those who organized rallies from London to Jakarta following the launch of Israel’s counter-offensive against Gaza and with equal zeal on the anniversary of the infamous events that sparked the War, know this: Yet to advance the “revolution,” they foster the view that Israel is solely responsible for the bloodshed. They claim that Israel is an illegitimate state engaged in capricious warmongering, “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “collective punishment,” convoluting the truth: Had Israel not repelled the invasion and sought to finally rid itself of a regime that has taken hold in Gaza with the sole aim of destroying us as part of a holy war to “liberate Jerusalem,” the Middle East and beyond, we would have effectively been capitulating to its well-demonstrated intention: Our annihilation.

This is not speculation or “spin,” but the expressed objective of the jihadists who launched their October 7^th crusade, as I will document in the chapters below.

≈≈≈

During the first days of this war, I was often taken back to the defining experience of my adult life: the onset of the Yom Kippur War, which began almost exactly fifty years to the day (October 6, 1973) earlier. I was then eighteen, a sophomore who had just transferred to Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA when, as I sat in the rear of Beth Israel Synagogue on Yom Kippur, one of the community leaders announced that the armies of Egypt and Syria, supported by other Arab military forces, had invaded Israel that morning. They had struck on the most solemn day in the Jewish calendar, when many Jews refrain from eating and go to synagogue to engage in deep prayer and introspection. It was a surprise attack, though it should not have been, as subsequent research showed. Our enemies sought to strike us at our most vulnerable moment.

I had not yet visited Israel, but I had a visceral reaction to the outbreak of the 1973 War: The enemy had struck my people. That was intolerable to this Costa Rica-born Jew, raised and educated in the US by parents born in Poland whose own parents transplanted them to a land halfway around the world because, anticipating the Holocaust, they were unwilling to raise their families amid the anti-Jewish hostilities of their native country.

Israel had always been an important, if abstract, part of my life; we were a traditional family who were keenly aware of our ethnic identity. While growing up in America, my Jewishness was acute. I never felt part of the mainstream nor of the racial classification that was still so dominant: I never considered myself to be White, as my father was dark-skinned, and my brother and I were raised as stakeholders in the Civil Rights Movement. When I was a boy of five or six, I remember my identity awakening while visiting family friends in Skokie, Illinois. Late that afternoon someone called out “Kaddish” and the men rose to their feet to recite the traditional prayer to sanctify life as we remember our dead. They were all new immigrants, mostly Holocaust survivors who were still mourning their murdered family members. It was then that I began to understand that I was a Jew, born of a nation on the Mediterranean at the western edge of Asia. My roots were there.

On Yom Kippur 1973, as a young adult on my own, my solidarity with Israel and the Jewish people, indeed my very identity, crystallized. While my connection to that distant land of Israel on the edge of the desert had always been a latent part of me, the coordinated assault by Arab armies on Israel, for the fourth time in the 25 years since we Jews had reconstructed our independent national home, affected me profoundly.

The entire trajectory of my life was redirected to getting “home.” Within days of the start of the 1973 War, I renewed my passport at the JFK Federal Building in Boston and prepared to travel to Israel and volunteer in the war effort — just as my father’s youngest brother, Avraham, Abe, had done during the 1948 War of Independence. Uncle Abe, the youngest of three brothers and the only one born in Costa Rica, had been attending university in the US as a pre-med student when he dropped everything to join the effort to erect the first independent Jewish commonwealth established in our homeland in two thousand years.

Abe fought in the war, then made his home and raised a family in Israel, but he never completed his studies. I had always known of him, but the first time I heard his voice was when he called me during that first week of the Yom Kippur War, after my father told him that I intended to leave university and my scholarship to follow the same road that he had. Abe invited me to join him in Israel — but to wait until after I completed university. The whole family was counting on my being their first university graduate.

I reluctantly relented then, but eventually made aliyah, the Hebrew term for ascent, which is how we describe immigrating to Israel. In Jewish tradition, one who returns to our native land has been uplifted. The Land of Israel is central to our worldview, as reflected in our calendar: The High Holidays during autumn begin with Rosh Hashanah (New Year) and conclude with Sukkot, which commemorates the harvest season in Israel. During Sukkot, one of our three pilgrimage holidays, Israeli and Diaspora Jews eat meals and often sleep in booths (sukkot) reminiscent of the makeshift shelters that the people of Israel used during harvests, and on the desert trek during deliverance from Pharaonic Egypt back to the land of their forebears, Israel. We ceremonially bless four plant species native to the Land of Israel.

Shavuot, in late spring, marks the end of the planting season in the Land of Israel. Throughout the summer, we pray for dew, and in the winter, wherever we may be, observant Jews pray for winds that bring rains, as if they were living in the Levant; Orthodox Jews do so three times a day. Our wedding vows reaffirm our yearning for Jerusalem and our sorrow over its destruction. Our dead are buried with their bodies situated toward Jerusalem. For Jews throughout time, our entire civilization was and remains oriented to Zion, a hill that is a symbol of Jerusalem, which for us is the center of the universe.

The final holiday of the harvest celebration, Simchat Torah, a time of great joy and rejoicing that marks the ending and beginning of the yearly Torah reading cycle, fell on October 7, 2023. That was the day Hamas chose for their surprise attack. The following day, the Hezbollah Shiite militia of Lebanon, a much larger army with greater capacity and representing a much more potent threat to Israel, decided to join the jihadis of Gaza and opened a second front in the north when they began firing on Israeli civilian centers throughout the Galilee. In the West Bank, where extremists on both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian divide had ignited passions leading to violence during the previous weeks, a third front was opened.

Hamas and its allies in Gaza and the West Bank rely on the support of Iran and the Assad regime in Syria, the latter being a hereditary dictatorship which has survived the civil uprising against it since 2011 solely due to the assistance provided by Hezbollah and its Iranian and Russian patrons; mass slaughter and the displacement of half of Syria’s population were the outcome. Syria abuts Iraq, which has a sizeable and radicalized Shiite population; Iraq borders Iran, where a radical Shiite Islamic regime makes no attempt to hide its ideology and values and exports its fundamentalist revolution far and wide. And throughout the region, Sunni jihadis like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) attempt to overthrow governing regimes while launching terror attacks, often specifically targeting Jews, the world over.

There would be no joy for Jews on that Simchat Torah in the year 5784 on the Hebrew calendar, which fell on October 7, 2023. What Hamas and their allies inflicted on us that day was the bitterest harvest we could imagine.

≈≈≈

After the siren had stopped wailing, my wife and I waited in our saferoom for ten minutes, the prescribed time that the IDF’s Home Front Command, the country’s civil defense authority, specifies is necessary to avoid falling missile parts and shrapnel from interceptions by our aerial defenses. As we moved to our living room, we received an anxious phone call from a friend: She had been hiking in the Jerusalem Hills, a short car ride away from our home, when the rocket fire began, and she asked if she could take shelter with us. As we awaited her arrival, we turned on the television for information on what was happening. Regular programming had been interrupted and the skeletal crews in the newsroom were themselves scrambling to find out what they could, replaying the first snips of video that they had received from the field and the bits of information coming their way, almost all from non-official channels.

Those amateur videos showed the sky sliced by the contrails of projectiles launched from Gaza and their interception by shells of the Iron Dome system, which Israel had originally developed to defend the civilian population from Hezbollah rocket fire. It would take a few hours until we understood that these volleys were intended both to incur casualties and damage, while also serving as a diversion for three thousand marauders from Gaza as they overtook our border defenses and entered nearby army posts and communities, mainly collective and cooperative agricultural settlements known as kibbutzim and moshavim. Our friend had arrived and, as we watched the television screen in disbelief, another rocket alert rang out. The three of us, along with our family dog, crowded into the saferoom to wait out the latest alarm. Afterwards, amid continuing air attacks from Gaza, our friend rushed back home to Tel Aviv to join her family. Her tears of desperation brought home to me that our lives would never be the same.

I was surprised as text messages began arriving from family and friends in Latin America and the US, where it was late at night; they had heard that something deeply worrisome was occurring in Israel, though the information they were hearing was fragmented. My first response, which would become daily or more frequent as the War proceeded, was sent in Spanish to cousins in Costa Rica:

… we are in a state of war as of this morning. [My son] has been called up and is already mobilized. It will take time until the situation in the communities on the Gaza Border stabilizes. We are [counter-] attacking Hamas on its territory. There were missiles and other alerts in our vicinity this morning, but not during the last few hours. We hope that other fronts, for example, with Hezbollah in the north, do not open. Hugs

As the day progressed, I shifted to group messages in English sent via WhatsApp, to inform a larger number of family and friends, all quite worried,

[My son] just wrote: He is on his base and conveys that there was great valor on the part of civilians. News reports: The army is slowly retaking Gaza-area kibbutzim and towns, but fighting continues and people are being evacuated. More than 250 fatalities and 1500 injured, many seriously. There are hostages both in Gaza and in Israel and many missing. A major volley of rockets struck the Tel Aviv area with casualties several hours ago. Since then, relative quiet. Widespread outrage at the lack of preparedness: Truly inconceivable, a major failure. An emergency government is under discussion.

By midday it became clear that major military, intelligence, and governmental failures had occurred. Though the information filtering in was piecemeal, it was soon apparent that an audacious, blood-thirsty assault on southern Israel, well beyond anything we had known before, had taken place. More than two months later, over a meal at home during the first unrushed talk we had with our son since he had been called to duty, he recounted what he and his fellow reservists experienced that day and those that followed; we already had an inkling of what those days were like from anecdotes and news reports, but what he recounted was staggering: The debacle had been huge, but so had been the bravery and gumption of the reserve forces and civilian security squads who had rushed to the front to augment the sparse army units in the area and engage the enemy with whatever weapons they had on hand. With communication and intelligence networks in disarray, they improvised ingeniously to dispatch forces, rescue survivors, and hunt down attackers. The events in which he had taken part, though he could not reveal everything about them, defied belief in terms of heroism, resilience and resourcefulness.

That was true in the civilian sphere as well. Within the first hours and days, ordinary Israelis spontaneously self-organized to assist in evacuating and lodging some 260,000 civilians from communities along the Gaza and Lebanese borders. An outpouring of support — food, gear, apparel, items for personal hygiene — were assembled in neighborhoods throughout the country and promptly driven to the front by volunteers. Others rushed to assist the families of the hostages, the missing, and those killed and injured. The entire corpus of Israel, though bleeding and staggered, rose up as one, even as missile attacks continued unabated and terrorists were still prowling deep in our hinterland. The solidarity was unrivaled and embraced all sectors of the population. At a time of profound disappointment, this camaraderie buoyed us. It is what has seen us through twelve months of unrelenting war, rocket fire from multiple fronts, and realization of the extent of the killing machine that had been erected to rip us to shreds.

All of Israel shared disbelief that the military had failed to detect the imminent threat and prepare for it, but no less disconcerting was that the government was nowhere to be found. The truth is that the latest government assembled by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, ten months before, was a menagerie of some of the least qualified people in Israel, who had been granted ministerial posts and generous budgets based on one criterion: fealty to their political patron. Aside from their incompetence, during the previous ten months these sycophants had advanced a series of “reforms” to the legal system that drove hundreds and thousands of Israelis, representing millions of others, into the street where we conducted increasingly vehement protest rallies, marches, and sit-ins, opposing what we perceived as a dangerous authoritarian assault on our democracy. We believed that Netanyahu’s inchoate coalition of nationalists, Jewish supremacists, clerical and extremist parties, the only assemblage of factions he could cobble together to support his premiership, was disinterested in the welfare of the country’s citizens. These long-time loyalists and representatives of sectoral special interests were intent on promulgating policy and legislation that would effectively do away with the separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches in order to bolster their own power and maintain Netanyahu as prime minister even though he faced charges of fraud and influence-peddling, suspicions of irregularities in military acquisitions, and attempts to stifle the press and dissent. Following the War’s outbreak, however, we would learn that he was capable of even greater malfeasance.

So, by October 7, having participated in many demonstrations, I already had no confidence in the government, a sentiment revalidated as the events of that day and those following became clearer. I felt outrage and incessant worry, but I was determined to keep them in check given that a war of self-defense had been foisted on us.

In size, Israel is a tiny country of fewer than ten million people with a land area of 21,640 square kilometers, smaller than El Salvador; accordingly, every place and person here is proximate. With people killed and taken hostage, land being held and missiles overhead, the imperative of the moment was to limit damage and dispose of the threat; investigating governmental missteps and lack of preparation would have to wait. Concretely, we — and the importance of the word cannot be overstated, all of Israel bonded during the war as never before — had to focus on containing our losses and removing the latent threat that Hamas and its partners had long constituted.

Those who had planned the massacre took advantage of what became known as the conceptzia, the prevailing official mindset that the threat from Gaza could be managed with Qatari money, lulling us into a false sense of security. It is important to expand on what is meant by the term conceptzia in this context. Normally, nations deal with collective external threats by consigning the monitoring and preparation for such contingencies to governments and their emergency and military services. Although we in Israel have had to be much more conscious of the unceasing threats of attack and efforts to eradicate us, basically we are no different from other nations. Accordingly, the Israeli public lived under the assumption that the claims of our governments, which were then parroted by security chiefs,[v] and which suggested that the Gaza front was under control, were true. Supposedly, the armed factions who ruled Gaza had been bought into maintaining a status quo consisting of “only” occasional rocket fire in exchange for regular infusions of cash provided by the Emir of Qatar, a Hamas patron. In return for this baksheesh, reducing skirmishes with terrorists to those that we could readily squash, the notion went, Hamas should be tolerated as the lesser of two evils. The alternative, the Palestinian Authority, wanted a state, which was anathema to Mr. Netanyahu.

Averring that only he could protect Israel from the perils of Palestinian statehood, and in order to satisfy the demands of the increasingly extreme coalitions he assembled to sustain his rule, the prime minister had effectively downplayed the jihadi threat that Hamas and PIJ represent, though it is clearly expressed in the Hamas Charter, formulated in 1987 and on the basis of which it continues to act. Its introduction reads:

This Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS), clarifies its picture, reveals its identity, outlines its stand, explains its aims, speaks about its hopes, and calls for its support, adoption and joining its ranks. Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious. It needs all sincere efforts. It is a step that inevitably should be followed by other steps. The Movement is but one squadron that should be supported by more and more squadrons from this vast Arab and Islamic world, until the enemy is vanquished and Allah’s victory is realized.[vi]

To make their meaning clear, Article 13 of the 1988 Covenant states: “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals, and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.”

The conceptzia blew up in our faces early in the morning of October 7^th, when the jihadis launched Operation “Al-Aqsa Flood,” a reference to the mosque in Jerusalem’s Holy Basin, what we Jews call the Temple Mount, our holiest site and the third holiest in Islam. We were no longer dealing with a group of fedayeen armed irregulars affiliated with the local branch of the global Moslem Brotherhood, who had seized power over Gaza and its 2.2 million inhabitants in a bloody putsch in 2007. What swept over our border was a fanatical army deployed by a fundamentalist Islamic regime lavishly supported by Iran and Qatar, tolerated by the international community, and even praised by an international cohort of so-called leftists who embraced these highly militarized religious fanatics as freedom fighters.

Hamas and its junior partner, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), are integral parts of the “Axis of Resistance,” aligned with Hezbollah, various Shiite militias in Syria and Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen, all armed and orchestrated by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Gazan jihadis had taken hold of that 25-kilometer-long coastal enclave, run it into the ground, and used the considerable foreign aid they had received not for the welfare of their people, but to construct a subterranean labyrinth of tunnels hundreds of kilometers long and to build a full-fledged killing machine aimed at eradicating us. They subjugated Gazans using police-state means to ensure conformity to their brand of religion and imposed penury. All this in the name of “Islamic Resistance.”

So, then, the concept that Hamas and PIJ, which was generally, but not always, subordinate to Hamas, could be “managed,” was a disastrous notion that had served Mr. Netanyahu politically, but which had lulled our security heads into complacency. Heightened threats in the West Bank were provoked by settler-extremists, whom the prime minister had not only brought in from the margins of our society but sanitized and then married to a zealous religious nationalist party so that their combined strength would support him in forming a coalition. Key defense forces that could have staved off, or at least softened, the blows that we experienced on October 7^th had been transferred to the West Bank in the days preceding the attack because of expectations that the acts of settler-extremists would blow up an already tense and dangerous situation there.

The conceptzia that exploded on October 7^th is an outgrowth of an even more foolish belief: That our conflict with the Palestinians can be shrunk, ignored, or made to disappear.

Our Palestinian interlocutors, and for much of Israel’s existence, their patrons among the Arab states, have not made it easy to convince Israelis that a two-state solution is the only feasible one. But we Israelis who view Israel’s role as the national home of the Jewish people as essential to our security and welfare, and believe that two states for two people is the only feasible path forward, are also acutely aware that the Palestinian rejectionists have a mirror-image on the Jewish side: radical settler-supremacists who believe that dominating the Palestinians is their natural right, a Biblical commandment.

Those extremists have taken over both the Israeli and Palestinian “street,” and that is a curse that both peoples must remove if there is to be any chance of escaping the deadly embrace in which we are locked.

≈≈≈

On that Shabbat Sh’chora, or Black Sabbath, as I watched, riveted, the television images of scores of rockets striking Tel Aviv and central Israel where much of Israel’s population is concentrated, I slowly abandoned my disbelief – this was real, war was happening barely an hour’s drive from my home — and followed an all-too-familiar drill from previous wars, making emergency preparations according to script: I filled water bottles, placed food supplies and medicines in the safe room, checked and positioned flashlights, candles and matches around the house, packed a backpack with first-aid supplies, and made sure that mobile phone batteries were charged. I do not own a firearm, although given what was being reported about families being slaughtered in their homes in the border communities, I regretted that at the time.

I was deeply concerned about my daughter and her family in Tel Aviv. I did not know what would have been better, all of us being together or apart; I just wanted them to be safe. As for my officer son serving in an infantry special force reserves unit, you never stop worrying, you only learn to repress it. I had no doubt that he was experiencing the war much more intimately than we were.

Given the extreme danger they were in, I asked myself if I had somehow been remiss by raising my children in a country subject to mortal threats from hateful neighbors on our doorstep.

It didn’t take me long to conclude I had no reservations about having made my life in Israel and raising my family here. The hopes and dreams of hundreds of past generations are invested here, and the future of my people is dependent on Israel being our anchor in this world. Being rooted here allows us to live freely and to be judged by what we do and who we are as individuals, rather than being reduced to a stereotype shadowed by ever-threatening bigotry — or worse. Unencumbered by that shadow, which dogged us for generations, I could subscribe to Archimedes dictum, “Give me a place to stand… and I will move the world.” I could devote myself to my profession, geography and international development, specifically helping to find a sustainable path forward as planetary crises — global warming, resource scarcity, the loss of biological and other natural resources, and health threats —barrel down on all the world’s citizens.

Yet, we felt betrayed by having dwelt in the belief that we were safe, that the military and security forces had our backs, that any attempts by our enemies to take advantage of our internal divisions and attack us would be contained. That confidence was shaken as the events of October 7^th unfolded. It was difficult to make sense of what was being reported and the footage being broadcast: Our much-touted security fence and technological surveillance systems had been easily overrun by invaders on light-weight trucks, motorcycles and hang gliders. Entire communities were being decimated, people were being kidnapped and burned alive while community self-defense squads heroically defended them with whatever arms they could muster as they waited for soldiers to come to the rescue. To hold the line, individuals or ad hoc groups of soldiers, police and civilians were engaging swarms of terrorists armed to the teeth with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades.

News from the Nova Festival site, where the slaughter left hundreds dead and numerous victims kidnapped — only later would we learn of the vicious rapes and sexual assaults — became the subject of images that were streamed in real time across social media. ­Our son-in-law advised us not to view what was being broadcast, unedited and unconfirmed; it was a horror show, he relayed, replete with graphic images in vivid color of the murder and kidnapping taking place.

So this, then, is what the commanders of Hamas/PIJ fighters had in mind when they wrote, “Resistance and jihad for the liberation of Palestine will remain a legitimate right, a duty, and an honor for all the sons and daughters of our people and our Ummah,” as stated in Article 23 of A Document of General Principles and Policies, issued by Hamas in 2017 to “clarify” its more venomous charter.[vii] This is what inspired the orgy of blood that transpired that day, an extension of the thousands of missiles and terrorist attacks undertaken by the Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, since its formation in the late 1980s.

This movement conceives of liberation in terms of unabashed terror applied domestically against its own people, but especially against Israelis. Its targets are not “occupiers” — Israel disbanded its settlements in Gaza and pulled out its armed forces in 2005 — but as they demonstrated on October 7, 2023, the “Zionists” they hunted were civilians — Jews, Arabs, Druze, Bedouins, and foreigners of all ages and genders — in service to their twisted notion of liberation. Ironically, among those killed on their kibbutzim or taken to Gaza and killed were no small number of Israeli peace activists who strove for coexistence. Arab Israelis were also killed, and many lost their jobs in the charred remains of the communities where they had worked. Others were killed in defense of our shared country.

As I sat in my living room, processing the images on the screen and the text messages I was receiving, the scale of the attack and its detailed planning came into focus and I came to several tentative conclusions: 1) Our over-reliance on surveillance technology had proven woefully mistaken; there had not been enough boots on the ground near the border, 2) Iran must have been involved in an attack as sophisticated as this one was,[viii] and 3) Those among our brothers and sisters who had been captured by the jihadis were unlikely to survive in good health or be released promptly, if at all, given the raw savagery the attackers displayed that day and the exorbitant price that Hamas/PIJ would surely demand for any survivors: During the previous Hamas-Israel prisoner exchange in 2011, 1,027 security prisoners were released for one of our soldiers. Among those freed was the Hamas leader in Gaza responsible for engineering the October 7th massacre: Yahya Sinwar, and many of his closest associates.

A fourth premise derived axiomatically from recent trends in Israel itself: The war had been inflicted on us by an external enemy whose aim was to eliminate us. It had been a well-planned and executed assault. That external threat had identified what it believed to be an exploitable opportunity to strike in the social unrest roiling the country. That turmoil had been spawned by a government that, though legal, was arguably illegitimate, engaged in ensuring its own survival and that of its beleaguered head above all concerns, including social cohesion.

The prime minister had shown himself contemptuous not only of a huge swath of the public, but it seemed that he was prepared to sacrifice even our security to his goals. This reached a pinnacle on the night of March 26, 2023 when the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, was fired by the prime minister for demanding that the judicial reforms be stopped, as they were socially divisive and threatened military readiness.[ix] Following his dismissal, which never took effect, demonstrators in unprecedented numbers took to the street in the middle of the night in protest, and the prime minister was forced to retract his decision.

Netanyahu became increasingly dismissive of the continuing warnings he received from the upper echelons of the army and security services warning that the government’s conduct endangered our national defense.[x] On July 24, 2023, he declined to meet with IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzl Halevi; this was the eve of a Knesset vote to abolish a key “reasonableness” criterion used by the Supreme Court in overruling undemocratic legislation. In Israel, which lacks a constitution, this criterion is key to preserving the separation of powers between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the Israeli government.[xi] As a result, tens of thousands of reservists were threatening not to serve if called up, and Halevi intended to hammer home the implications of the situation to the prime minister.  Nonetheless, the government was insistent and the legislation was passed before the parliament recessed for the summer.

As scheduled, the Knesset reconvened on October 16, 2023, which was then ten days after the Hamas invasion. By that time the IDF had recovered and had launched a counter-offensive, while the prime minister and his cabinet ministers were still dysfunctional. As for the reservists, the number who reported for duty topped one hundred percent; many Israelis who had been abroad or who had deferments from service voluntarily swelled the ranks of the people’s army to defend Israel — despite the contempt with which many viewed the current government.

It very quickly became clear that this was not just another flare-up, the latest confrontation in the long series that Hamas had launched over the years. This event was much bigger, more expansive and savage. When we ended our previous full-blown war with the armed factions in Gaza, in 2014, I felt that we had stopped too early. Had we not, we might have preempted Black Sabbath 2023 by destroying the jihadis’ military capacity at that time and subsequently moving toward a two-state solution.

The consequence of that incomplete mission in 2014 was the Gaza War, which still rages as I write these words a year later. It began when a horde of combatants were dispatched by the leadership of a de facto governmental authority to launch a blood-drenched crusade. That authority, Hamas, cynically controls a territory and the people inhabiting it in order to further its primary cause, jihad; Palestinian sovereignty serves as a mere instrumentality for this larger aim. Operation “Al-Aqsa Flood,” the name given by Hamas leaders to the debauchery unleased on October 7, 2023, aimed at “recentering Palestinian, Arab and Muslim unity around al-Quds, Jerusalem and all its holy places.”[xii]

This was confirmed half a year later, on March 27, 2024 during the height both of Ramadan, the Moslem holy month, and of the fighting, when Hamas released a speech by its military chief, Qassem Brigades commander Mohammed Deif, who has since been eliminated in an Israel Defense Force strike, when he called on “Our people in Jordan and Lebanon, in Egypt, Algeria, the Maghreb, in Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and in all parts of the Arab and Islamic world…Begin marching today, now and not tomorrow, towards Palestine, and do not let borders, regulations, or restrictions deprive you of the honor of jihad and participation in the liberation of Al-Aqsa Mosque.”[xiii]

As proclaimed in its Charter, Hamas’s creed, “From the Sea (Mediterranean) to the River (Jordan)” is clear: to eliminate the State of Israel at genocidal scale, as amply demonstrated by the wanton mass violence it launched against civilians on October 7, 2023. I doubt very much, though, that they would have been content with just taking Jerusalem and eliminating Israel. Were they and the various other jihadi militias and factions throughout the Middle East, Africa and Asia to succeed, no secular or heterodox Moslem, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, or non-believer would escape the repression and totalitarianism of their vision, which they aspire to realize across borders.

Also obvious to me on the first day of the Gaza War was that, due to the necessity of launching a counter-offensive and uprooting the terrorist threat once and for all, there would be civilian losses — and not only on our side. I deeply regretted that, but while no one yet knew the full extent to which Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad had embedded itself underground and in private residences, businesses, schools, hospitals, and even UN sites, clearly Palestinian men, women and children with no direct connection to the conflict were being used as human shields by the warlords and would suffer from their hubris and misanthropy. Were we, though, to leave the jihadi threat in place, as we did at the end of the 2014 War, with both Gazans and Israelis remaining captive to them? After what had been inflicted on our people during those weeks, no Israeli would agree to that.

We knew there would be international criticism of a ground operation against the jihadis, but with a jihadi storm having just swept over the border, taking hostages and leaving a copious amount of blood and ruin in its wake, our very survival was on the line.

≈≈≈

During my undergraduate years following the Yom Kippur War, I played an active role defending Israel’s official positions. I was proud of the achievements of the socialist Zionist movement, the pioneering kibbutzim and moshavim, Israel’s social welfare system and socialized medicine, and the Israel Defense Forces, a people’s army based on reservists with a small professional staff. Millions of refugees and immigrants seeking to return to our ancestral home had been absorbed. I was opposed to the positions of the minority Revisionist stream in Zionism, which aspired to achieving control over “Greater Israel,” the entirety of Biblical Israel which was represented by the Herut Party and its successor, the Likud that would come to power in 1977. The latter’s penchant for privatization and neo-classical economics further alienated me. Despite the libels fomented by our enemies, subjugating another people was never on the agenda.

I wrote a master’s thesis on Israel’s historical relations with the international left and the Third World and began to focus on international development as a better course toward improving the world than rhetorical politics; the sloganeering, partisanship and, to a large extent, ego that characterizes political endeavors seemed an ineffective path to achieving the deep social changes that would significantly improve people’s lives. Given the relative material hardship that I had experienced growing up and the injustices in the societies I was directly acquainted with, if I really wanted to improve the world the best way to do so, I reckoned, was to help societies use their resources and environments more sustainably.

I devoted a lot of time to educating myself on the different streams of Zionism – —socialist, liberal, cultural, revisionist and religious – and on the history of Israel. I made my first visit to the country during the summer of 1974 and finally met my Uncle Abe, my hero, with whom I had a loving relationship until his death a decade later. I returned to the US determined to return to Israel as soon as possible and, while living in New York, I edited Israel Horizons, a periodical published by Americans for Progressive Israel which was associated with the socialist Zionist Mapam party, later subsumed into Israel’s Labor Party, and the Kibbutz Artzi Federation.

I also served as the consultant on Third World Affairs to the World Jewish Congress American Section and began delving into the history of the Middle East. Armed with tools in political economy from my masters’ degree, I began probing the literature, which gradually led me to what was for me quite a revelation: The state system that had emerged in the Middle East following World War One was not intended to give political expression to the peoples living there, but had been designed for the strategic and economic benefit of the then-dominant European powers, principally the UK, France, and Italy. Initially, these countries had exercised direct control over the colonies and protectorates they had acquired, but with calls for decolonization mounting among the subjugated populations after the Second World War, the world powers shifted to indirect methods, chiefly by creating new states governed by elites amenable to serving their interests. As I will discuss in Chapter Four, these entities were defined by borders without historical precedent that divided and recombined social and ethnic formations,[xiv] fusing them into new “nations.” These artificially constructed polities were governed by dubious elites whose most notable claim to rule was their willingness to support the orderly export of petroleum and other resources to Europe and North America via western corporations, and to provide the former colonial powers access to land routes and strategic waterways leading to the East.

As I elaborate below, from Lebanon to Saudi Arabia and westward across North Africa, states were created by the coupling of local elite interests with those of their foreign patrons. Local nationalist uprisings, Marxist-oriented rebellions, pan-Arabist projects and sundry ideologies characterized these newly minted states, although most of these movements fell into obscurity, largely due to the ruthlessness of local elites who seized power in anti-monarchal putsches, coups d’etat and other irregular transfers of power. Elsewhere, the prevailing system of government, as in Lebanon and Syria, was simply based on economic and institutional arrangements negotiated by locally dominant elites.[xv] Despite the unrepresentative nature of these polities, and disregarding the repression practiced by their rulers, they were duly admitted to the League of Nations and later the United Nations; this despite their not being nations, but entities created for political and economic expediency. They received support and guidance from Washington, London and Paris and fell into the orbits of either the US or the Soviet Union (some, as Egypt, eventually switching sides) to bolster their economies, increase their influence and equip their militaries.

Ironically, in all this muddle two popular movements (in the sense of having the support of the people they purportedly represented) received international recognition for their respective rights to self-determination: the Jewish community in pre-state Israel and the Palestinians. That recognition, which culminated in the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan, envisioned a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian one, with an international authority ruling Jerusalem, and was accepted by the representative body of the Jewish community (the Jewish Agency), but rejected by the local Palestinian leadership and the Arab states.[xvi] At that time, the consensus of the international community was that a two-state solution served the interests of both populations. Although it offered the Jews a territorially gerrymandered polity consisting largely of desert, had both sides accepted the plan then, it would have resolved the Israel-Palestinian conflict in a manner consistent with the two-state solution moderates advocate today.

Based on my research, I authored a New York Times Opinion piece, “Mideast Pariahs,”[xvii] which was followed by a similar article in the Los Angeles Times. I was then asked to write a chapter in a scholarly anthology about how these processes had played out in Iraq. I prepared a book proposal, which led to the publication of a book, Self-Determination in the Middle East[xviii] in 1982 and several other works describing my findings.

My conclusions were that the decolonization of the Middle East had given rise to regimes that were on the whole no more representative of the interests of the people they governed than the colonialist powers had been — which was definitely not to be taken as an endorsement of colonialization or any other form of foreign rule. In a chapter below, I limn the history of empires, ancient, medieval, and modern that have swept across the Middle East and how the rapid replacement of the Ottoman and Qajar empires after World War One gave rise to colonies and protectorates serving European interests. Those of the peoples residing in these lands, a mosaic of communities, languages and creeds, were of only marginal relevance.

I also concluded that seeking to forge a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict based on parsing out which of the two vying peoples had weightier historical “rights” to the Land of Israel/Palestine was irrelevant and dangerous, in that it offered no prospect for a resolution: Each side was insistent on its narrative, and the only way to reconcile them was by a sharing of the territory, not in the form of a single state, which would not serve the needs of either party, but in two states.

I also noted a glaring inconsistency in the claims made by regional elites: It behooved them to keep the world disproportionately focused on the Palestinian issue, notwithstanding the fact that other groups in the Middle East/North African region were also deserving of self-determination and had been denied it by the state-system imposed there. Especially prominent among these are thirty million Kurds, who had been divided and eclipsed by the new borders of republican Türkiye, Syria, Iraq and multi-ethnic Iran. By imposing Turkish, Arab and Iranian identities – along with denying civil and human rights, democratic process, free press and other fundamentals of enlightened government – these regimes have repressed the Kurds and other groups like them, all while advocating for the Palestinian cause as the keystone issue in the region. Depicting Israel as an interloper in a homogenous Arab expanse enables them to deflect attention from internal problems and unrest and helps them retain power. For much of the final quarter of the last century and into the present one, the elites governing in Benghazi, Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, Tehran (under the ayatollahs), Khartoum and Saana have been keen to maintain the Palestinian issue unresolved, using and disregarding it as suits their purposes.

In other words, injustice was inbuilt to the contemporary Middle East state system, and the world community accepts this blithely. It remains focused on maintaining that system in which Israel, as a representative democracy, is an outlier.

≈≈≈

I moved to Israel in 1984 and, despite the difficulties of learning Hebrew and adjusting to the vagaries of daily life here, I was especially glad to be “home.” I realized fairly soon that I would need to advance my studies, and several years later, after being offered a fellowship, I returned to the US to complete a doctorate at the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University, my alma mater.

When I came back to Israel in 1996, I had a young family in tow. Our arrival coincided with a process of political moderation that led to the Oslo Accords and an agreement to a two-state solution based on mutual recognition between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which renounced terror. Tragically, the assassination of Israeli premier Yitzhak Rabin and continuing Palestinian terror derailed rapprochement; by the late 1990s, Israeli and Palestinian rejectionists joined forces to keep the conflict aflame. As I will explain in later chapters, the extremists fuel one another.

Recognizing that both sides have their extremists, however, does not mean that they exist in equal proportions. It also does not imply that both parties were culpable for what occurred on October 7. Averring so is very au courant in diplomatic circles, though misleading: There is no parity of blame, and by extending that fiction into calls for immediate ceasefires and de-escalation, would-be mediators and power-brokers were issuing a macabre summons: It would have been absurd for Israel to succumb to those calls. Given the vast lethal infrastructure that Hamas/PIJ had emplaced above and below ground in Gaza and what is now being uncovered in southern Lebanon and the West Bank— tunnels, staging grounds for attacks, weapons stores, launch pads — to have ceased operations may have warmed liberal hearts, but it would have left a blazing fire unextinguished.

Even after the considerable achievements that the IDF has recorded in identifying and eliminating tunnels, arms caches and weapons laboratories, my family and I still must race to our saferooms even now, a year after the war began, whenever isolated cells from Hamas/PIJ and the commanders of its allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Yemen act on the urge to fire. After what we had been through and witnessed, nearly the entire Israeli public, on the political left, right and center, viewed the elimination of the jihadi menace from our proximity as imperative. It is amazing to me that this is not obvious to so many critics. In view of the way in which these groups have seized the territories in which they operate and planted weapons and explosives in the midst of the peoples they control, how were we supposed to neutralize the threat? Appeals to reason, invitations to dialog? “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals, and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors,” Hamas’ Covenant states.

After October 7, 2024, did we have any choice but to take them at their word?

Hamas/PIJ and their Hezbollah confederates did not attack us because radical settlers had taken another hilltop or an irresponsible partner in the governing coalition had uttered another idiocy, much though these actions should be condemned. The real impulse motivating Hamas/PIJ in mounting their invasion went far deeper, as I will show in chapters below. Their program is much more ambitious and nefarious than protesting Israeli misdeeds.

The only way that self-determination for Palestinians and for Jews can be achieved is by shunting the extremists to the side. To achieve coexistence, one has to accept the other — and that is anathema to the Resistance Axis and its Palestinian affiliates, as I document in the next chapter.

≈≈≈

The events of October 7, 2023 had a seismic effect on me: That day shook me and the entirety of Israel — and Jews everywhere — as if the cosmos had convulsed. Along with my son and son-in-law and many of their friends, some of whom rushed home from abroad to take part in the war effort, over 350,000 male and female reservists were mobilized to eliminate the manifest threat. On that day, we all became drafted to the defense of our people and our homeland, and we remain conscripted even now, a year later.

As the magnitude of the carnage became more apparent each day, I scrutinized every credible information source I could access, Israeli and non-Israeli, to assemble as accurate a picture of what was unfolding as possible. I did this for my own knowledge, as well as to keep my growing list of update recipients fully informed. Israel is a highly networked society where the degree of separation between people seems, at times, to approach zero. Our soldiers may be a family member, a next-door neighbor or one down the street, or are related to a colleague or a former student, and information is readily circulated; nothing stays hidden for long. The names of fallen soldiers, kidnapped kibbutz members, and police gunned down in battles with Hamas infiltrators are quickly disseminated. They are profiled and mourned by the entire nation. Every battle is described in newspapers, on web-based platforms and on the evening news, which over various times during the past year seemed to run around the clock. The social networks have been in hyperdrive and the supply of detailed information of each tragedy that took place that day and since is accessible to us, often quite graphically. With each death, my heart breaks anew.

For the first week or two after the October 7th attack, when we were not busy collecting supplies for our troops and the residents of evacuated communities, we noted with appreciation the visits of world leaders and the empathic statements received from around the globe. Yet, before long I also noticed that there was a significant proportion of global opinion that was silent and even hostile.

 Reviewing the international media, the truth of the adage, “don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers” took on renewed meaning: Many foreign writers and editors seemed to have forgotten what had caused this war and the victims, we in Israel, were increasingly depicted as the aggressor. Israel has long been held under a magnifying glass, exacting a level of inspection disproportionate to that applied to conflicts elsewhere and to other countries. I find unseemly the inordinate amount and slant of attention devoted by The New York Times, The Guardian and El País to every wrongdoing – real, alleged or exaggerated – that takes place in Israel, particularly compared to the scant and passing coverage of copious other Middle East maladies that receive minimal coverage, if at all: The shambles that Lebanon has become; Syria’s hereditary dictatorship; Türkiye’s increasing authoritarianism and occupation of both northern Syria and northern Cyprus and other foreign adventures; the humanitarian crises in Iraq, which has become a political auction block; the depth of human misery in Yemen, where Houthi control has established a regime that is the epitome of evil — not to mention the fundamentalist police state with Tehran as its capital. I have often wondered: Why this morbid fixation on Israel, when so many of our neighbors languish in far deeper crises affecting many more people?

Part of the problem lies in the way that the world communicates today. Among the many impacts of the digital revolution is dwindling newspaper readership, which places traditional print-based news outlets and their websites under increasing pressure to retain, if not attract, readers by appealing to current popular sensibilities. With attention spans getting shorter and competition growing over reader engagement amid torrents of information, in-depth reporting and analysis often suffers. Also, anyone, seemingly everyone, can casually or maliciously forward every shred of opinion, rumor, detached factoid and image instantaneously to multitudes as if it carries a certificate of authenticity.

Yet, the reportage I read in the foreign press is often only partially correct and excludes essential parts of the backstory, suggesting a preference for hypercriticality, suspicion and condemnation — against Israel, but not against the aggressors. Regarding the latter, I am not speaking of the Gazans who twice fell victim to Hamas/PIJ: first, by enduring their authoritarian rule and the diversion of resources that should have provided for civilian needs rather than funding military ones, and second, for being left totally exposed when Israel counter-attacked; those people are most certainly victims. Hamas/PIJ initiated the warfare, yet much of the continuing coverage abroad frequently neglects this significant fact. The civilian losses in Gaza are extensively covered, yet the human toll in Israel is often only passingly mentioned, if at all. Without belittling the suffering in Gaza, where is the compassion for the Israeli victims: families of the dead, wounded and hostages, the thousands of displaced citizens, the reservists absent from their homes and workplaces for months on end, the economic burden we citizens carry, the indiscriminate rocket fire on civilian centers and the disruption of life and trauma this entails, and the deployment of armed cells that continue to carry out attacks in Hamas/PIJ’s name?

On October 27, 2023, I posted:

One hundred and twenty-two (122) missile alerts sounded in Israel today so far. Three salvos, extensive in intensity and scope, hit the Greater Tel Aviv area with direct hits in Petach Tikvah and Rishon LeTzion. In the former city, a missile struck an apartment on an upper floor of a building and a second apartment beneath it was heavily damaged. A fire ensued and 36 families living in the building were evacuated. Those living in the first apartment had just left their residence. The Rishon LeTzion-area attack on farmland resulted in a Thai farm worker being moderately wounded. Another salvo at around 19:30 this evening sent people to shelters as far east as Modiin. There was at least one direct strike on Sderot.

I continued two days later by noting that:

While the international press seems to have concluded that these attacks are no longer newsworthy, millions of people are affected each time the alerts are sounded, forcing them to drop whatever they are doing and run for shelter. One nine-year old girl died today after sustaining a heart attack running to a shelter during a missile alert. This is quiet terror, which has become routine for virtually all of the country. Ordinary people should not have to flee to safety just because religious fanatics committed to genocide decide to rain hatred on them with lethal intent. This is abnormal: it would never be acceptable anyplace else. But Hamas and its allies are impervious to these concerns and the mindless supporters cheering them on elsewhere in the name of “liberation” seem to have lost their moral compass (if ever they had one). Yes, civilians in Gaza are dying, but they are not targeted by the IDF. Causing casualties among our civilians is the exclusive raison d’etre of Hamas’s armed forces. It is the exclusive objective in their game plan as the movement has no domestic policy except for repression and Islamic fundamentalism at home.

It was astounding to me that “progressive” activists aligned with Palestinian militants at vociferous demonstrations and sit-ins, zealously labeled the IDF, Israelis and Jews “baby-killers” and “Nazi-Zionists,” as if the military incursion into Gaza had occurred with no good reason and out of the blue. It was as if the louder and more outrageous their chants were, the truer their claims.

No doubt many good and decent people participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, marching in Brussels, Manchester, Amsterdam, and on American campuses on behalf of a people they perceive to be suffering and deserving of support. I applaud those people for their conscience – the Palestinians do deserve better that what they have endured – but I doubt that these demonstrators are aware of the lies and distortions they are being fed. Aghast by the often-shocking images of the war in Gaza and its human costs, they seem to forget that, though a picture may be worth a thousand words, photos are snapshots that capture a moment and are often misleading and devoid of context. This has often been the case concerning the Gaza War, where the victim of the moment was the favored theme and the victims were all portrayed as being on one side.

I wonder how many of those good people understood the implications of the slogans, “From the River to the Sea,” “Free Palestine,” or “Revolution Until Victory,” given that their pro-Hamas organizers failed to reveal the jihadi totalitarian vision they advocated? Were these people aware that beneath the impassioned, militant calls and accusations, indiscriminate, ethnically-targeted violence was recognized, not as an option for pursuing liberation, but as its gold standard? Do they understand that what occurred on October 7th against ordinary Israelis in their homes was not the product of a few rogue ruffians, but the weaponization of an ideology? How many of the Hollywood influencers, chic celebrities and pious fashionistas who have joined the “cause” comprehend that they have been enlisted into a campaign of sustained hatred and bigotry that gaslights its Jewish victims, as well as other “undesirable” groups such as homosexuals, nonbelievers and westerners in general?

Palestinian solidarity rallies seemed chock-full of people seeking to add their voices to the call for a better world, but who have been unwittingly coopted into an increasingly radical anti-Israelism that has grown more strident since October 7th. The militants behind the masks and keffiyehs, perhaps not all but most, advance a binary notion of the conflict — you are either for one side or the other and there is only one right side. Those shouting the loudest demand a bizarre form of penance for Israel’s alleged “original sin,” the audacity of existing as a national home for the Jewish people: For this unspeakable offense, it must cease to exist. This is what “From the River to the Sea” and “Palestine Will be Free” call for. Those who are in the know and demand the realization of these slogans are calling for a land without Jews or with Jews subordinated to its “rightful” owners.

The architecture of this call is based on claims that Israel was established on stolen land, or that Israel’s establishment was preceded by the mass expulsion of the Palestinians; the fact is that any “conquest” was by dint of the labor of pioneers working desolate land or tracts that had been legally purchased. Those Palestinians who fled, and yes, perhaps some were encouraged to flee by Jewish soldiers, were displaced by war and the invasion of the new Israeli state by the Jordanian Legion and the armies of other Arab states.

Arguments that Israel has appropriated Palestinian culture, that the institutions of a pre-existing Palestinian state were destroyed by racist foreigners, and that Zionism is a European colonial project have become pervasive and well-sold, but this does not make them true. These claims, though inaccurate, are useful cudgels in the historical exclusivism of the Palestinian narrative. This is not to say that the Palestinians were not traumatized by the creation of Israel under the 1948 Partition Plan; they were, as were the Israelis, many of whom were Holocaust survivors or people who had been expelled from their homes in Arab countries and built new ones in Israel.

The optics of Israel’s campaign in Gaza were intrinsically unfavorable. After all, extensive bombardment is never pretty, and when it occurs in population centers, it is particularly repellent. Yet, in the past, few of the “progressives” pillorying Israel have condemned the firing of thousands of rockets by Hamas on Israeli civilian centers since it took control of Gaza. This silence presumably derives from the implicit notion that the “Israelis had this coming,” a mindset which has slowly spread and become axiomatic to clueless would-be “justice warriors” who would not consider participating in an academic boycott of Hamas or Hezbollah (or Iran for that matter), sign a petition calling for these upstanding entities to cease using terror and dispense with calls for the obliteration of another people, or question the bombastic accusations of its supporters — if for no other reason than those masked men in the crowd look intimidating.

Claims that Israel undertook its military counter-offensive in Gaza to “get back” at the Palestinians began to circulate quite early at the start of the war, and among those who made such allegations were world figures who either intentionally distorted the reasons for Israel’s undertakings in the war,[xix] or recklessly made the claim without grounds.

For anyone who thinks that Israel would risk its troops and an expanding conflagration for reasons of pride or revenge is absolutely wrong: the public would not stand for this. Other messages that the world needs to hear are that while the inhabitants of Gaza are suffering miserably from the hostilities, tens of thousands of Israelis have been displaced with many now homeless, fifty communities (to date) have been left in ruins or evacuated, tens of thousands of the most economically active population are involved in national defense, while missiles are still being launched and terrorists keep attempting to attack [October 21, 2023].

Yet, that Israel was motivated by revenge seemed to be implied when UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stated a few days later (October 24) in his address to the Security Council that “It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.”[xx]

 As I wrote then,

I am dumbfounded by UN Secretary-General Guterres’ comments today. I identify with his work on climate change, poverty reduction and other development-related issues. But his remarks this afternoon smack of blaming the victims and are deeply regretted. They add salt on our wounds even as we continue to be fired on and infiltrated. This strengthens the hand of those who seek to portray the Israeli Palestinian conflict as a zero-sum game. There are shades of gray when it comes to the situation in the West Bank, but there is only black in describing Hamas and their allies across the Middle East [October 24, 2023]

In the same speech, Guterres noted that he “condemned unequivocally the horrifying and unprecedented 7 October acts of terror by Hamas in Israel,” and that “nothing can justify the deliberate killing, injuring and kidnapping of civilians – or the launching of rockets against civilian targets,” and that the “grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.” The balanced condemnation was well and good, but the implication that Israel had launched the attack to “punish” the Palestinians for October 7^th cannot be taken as a mere slip of the tongue, but a highly inaccurate characterization of Israel’s motivation for undertaking the fighting.

The implication was that Israel’s counter-offensive was designed for the purpose of reprisal, not defense. Yet the war’s explicit objectives were the destruction of Hamas’ military and governing capacities and a return of the hostages, and while there were marginal figures in Israeli society calling for revenge and establishing settlements in Gaza, and not a few people spoke harshly about the perpetrators of the October 7 attack, this war was a defensive one. Yet, the UN Secretary-General again insinuated that this was a war undertaken against the Palestinian people in his remarks to the Security Council on December 6, 2023: “The brutality perpetrated by Hamas can never justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”

Even if we assume that the UN secretary-general has no particular antipathy toward Israelis and that his concern about the Palestinian civilians in Gaza is rooted in humanitarian sentiments, he certainly is aware of the political and diplomatic context of the conflict, which has become increasingly dominated not by condemnations of Israel’s government policy, which like those of any other government are legitimate objects of criticism, but on vilifying Israelis, and Jews, as a people. His repeated assertions that Israel launched the war out of a desire for retribution contributes to the climate of Israel-bashing, which is increasingly assuming the shape of a blood libel.

Significantly, the notion that Israel was committing “collective punishment” against the Palestinians predates the secretary-general statements of October 24. Within five days of the Hamas/PIJ invasion, as Israel was still struggling against their fighters within its territory and ongoing bombardment from both Gaza and the jihadi’s allies on the Lebanese front, “independent” UN experts including “U.N. special rapporteurs” visiting Gaza reportedly concluded that Israel had committed “indiscriminate military attacks against the already exhausted Palestinian people of Gaza,” and continued by stating that “This amounts to collective punishment. There is no justification for violence that indiscriminately targets innocent civilians, whether by Hamas or Israeli forces. This is absolutely prohibited under international law and amounts to a war crime.”[xxi]

You can disagree with West Bank settlement expansion and with the wisdom of the border controls imposed by both Egypt and Israel following Hamas’s ascent to power in 2007; you can oppose the policies of Benyamin Netanyahu’s government (as I often do); but most assuredly, neither Israel nor the Jews deserved what Hamas and its allies inflicted and continue to hope to inflict.[xxii] No one does.

Yet, there are opinionators, including international officials, who too easily accept these narratives, collapsing the nature of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians into simplistic, propagandistic terms. They are, I would suggest, too trusting of some of the “special rapporteurs,” not a few with documented history of partisanship, whom they dispatch for lightning trips to preselected sites in the war zone.

As I discuss later in this book, a partial explanation for this is that the international community has no mechanism to deal with the rising and potent threat of nonstate armies, particularly those who operate from within the population they control and who usurp governance, seize institutions and security apparatuses, and take over resources to support their aggression. For Israel, the consequence of this lacuna is that we are left to contend with an aggressive menace that is situated not thousands of kilometers away, but on our very doorstep. What is a country’s correct course of action when a neighboring nonstate army has taken over a territory – even more so, a sovereign country like Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen – and has entrenched itself in civilian and humanitarian structures, threatening to destroy your people, and then tries to actualize the threat? Would any country agree to leave the danger intact so that the aggressors could await an opportune moment to strike anew?

And when the offender hides behind its civilian population, should you refrain from defense knowing that the adversary’s strategy is based on claiming immunity from counter-attack? The enemy’s human shields are indeed vulnerable to harm, but if you refrain from removing the threat, then both peoples are held captive to the offender, and, in effect, the failure to defend is suicidal. When the defense is launched, should warning of its coming be made to the enemy, and thereby enable them to target your forces?

As a matter of fact, Israeli forces took extensive precautions not to harm civilians and did not target them. Humanitarian zones and evacuation corridors were established, even at our troops’ peril. The IDF’s attempts to avoid harming non-combatants may not have worked flawlessly, but much more often than not innocents were harmed when caught in the crossfire after Hamas/PIJ operatives infiltrated into these zones to continue attacking under civilian cover. The Israeli military command stipulated that every precaution had to be made not to harm civilians. The jihadis have no such compunction. Civilians are a favored target, as amply displayed on October 7, 2023.

≈≈≈

More than 3000 anti-Semitic incidents were reported in the country with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, the US, between October 2023 and January 2024, representing a three-fold increase over the same period during the preceding year.[xxiii] In the UK, the number of attacks against Jews since October 7 was reportedly 589% over the previous year.[xxiv] By November 9, 2023, Germany saw an upsurge of 300% in such incidents relative to a year before.[xxv] In France, with a Jewish population estimated at half a million, within the first five weeks after the October 7th invasion there were three times more such incidents than in all of 2022.[xxvi] Some of these attacks have been lethal.

On January 13, 2024, a “Global Day of Action” in solidarity with the Palestinians took place, with activities in more than thirty countries. The London rally, the seventh national demonstration in the UK since October 7th, was cosponsored by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which on the face of it has a noble humanitarian commitment that extends, one presumes, to all humans equally. Among the cosponsors of the January 13 march, in which an estimated 200,000 people participated,[xxvii] were the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Palestinian Forum in Britain, Stop the War Coalition, Friends of Al Aqsa and the Muslim Association of Britain, which is quite a partisan array of partners. In its notice announcing the event, [xxviii] the CND claimed that “Israel continues its indiscriminate attacks on civilians and infrastructure” and that “Israel’s unrelenting attacks bear all the hallmarks of genocide under international law.”

Paraphrasing the UN secretary-general, such distortions do not occur in a vacuum: They descend from the careless if not malicious pronouncements at the UN and other forums and are made, in large measure, as I will discuss in a later chapter, to satisfy political ends. The UN’s political and diplomatic functions have become dominated by automatic majorities and transactions that have been reflexively skewed against Israel for decades.

As revealed during the Gaza War, the harm is not solely verbal or declarative. UN and international agencies have become the sub-contractors that enable Hamas, the de facto authority in the territory, to evade responsibilities they never intended to fulfill: providing for the basic needs of the people of Gaza, whom they purportedly represent. This not only perpetuates dependency and victimhood, but it also enabled the jihadis to build their formidable war machine and focus on their ultimate goal: Victory on the battlefield and flying the banner of radical Islam over an endless expanse.

The suggestion that Israel is fighting in Gaza, and now in Lebanon, for genocidal purposes or to punish its attackers is a vile and baseless accusation. Yet, when people associated with international bodies or political figures make such allegations, there are consequences. These claims fuel the Israel delegitimization campaign and its spinoffs, blaming Jews everywhere. Jews, it is said, are not only responsible for the plight of the Palestinians and instability in the Middle East, but also for more far-reaching maladies: Growing militarization in the world, the plight of migrants in European cities, racism in the US, even Islamic terrorism in Russia.

I will outline below how states “in good standing” with the international community, particularly Qatar and Türkiye, and so-called “charities” associated with the Moslem Brotherhood, are active enablers of Hamas/PIJ. Their funding and political support for Hamas/PIJ also include informational services deployed to delegitimize Israel, Jews and other supporters.

“Progressive” organizations have jumped on the bandwagon in the name of decolonization and international solidarity. They have embraced a one-sided narrative, one that is reductionistic, exceedingly narrow and historically flawed. Rather than supporting rights and self-determination for both Jews and Palestinians, they prefer to see the conflicts in monochrome, in black and white. Egged on by hate-filled celebrities, Roger Waters coming readily to mind, and disgraced politicians like former UK Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn, the veracity of the “truth” purveyed goes unchallenged and disinformation is spread at breakneck speed.

This goes so far as denying that the October 7th assault even took place. Basem Naim, a senior Hamas figure, helped pioneer this approach in an interview on October 17, 2023 when he refuted as “Israeli propaganda” that Israeli civilians had been harmed, despite this being only ten days after the attack when there was already abundant evidence of what had taken place.[xxix] Naim, a physician and former Palestinian Health Minister, continued his denials, including dismissing that sexual assaults had been committed by Hamas/PIJ fighters, six months after the October 7th events.[xxx] Such disinformation has impact: The results of a poll taken in March 2024 by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research show that only 17% of the population living in Gaza and the West Bank who viewed video evidence of the attacks believe that Hamas fighters committed atrocities; 83% maintain that they did not. Among those who did not see footage, more than 90% insist that Hamas fighters did not commit the alleged outrages.[xxxi]

Deliberate falsification is propagated online by such groups as Electronic Intifada, which describes itself as “an independent online news publication and educational resource focusing on Palestine, its people, politics, culture and place in the world.” Yet, the banner headline on a random reading (March 29, 2024) reads “EU wants everyone to accept Israel’s mass rape lies.” Another headline on the home page reads “Israeli ‘Commission’ on 7 October Rape Claims Exposed as Fraud,” [xxxii] which totally misleads the reader concerning the acclaimed work of Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy in documenting the widespread sexual assaults committed by Hamas/PIJ fighters on October 7th. The Israel Prize, one of the country’s highest honors, was awarded to Dr. Elkayam-Levy for her work on the subject.[xxxiii]

Yet Electronic Intifada’s comments and those of other groups and influencers are creating concentric circles of lies and disinformation to fire hatred across campuses and communities throughout the US and elsewhere[xxxiv] where group-think and herd mentality hold sway. They do so by echoing “big lies” such as those articulated by Hamas’s Basem Naim and assorted activists and supporters who align with his cause.

When I first began what has essentially become a war diary on the morning of October 7, 2023, as missiles were fired throughout Israel, including at my town outside of Jerusalem, news of the developments were still disjointed and murky. I launched my daily updates on October 7th to both inform and strengthen my family and acquaintances abroad, who I knew would lack sufficient and accurate information about the events taking place here if left to headlines in the foreign press alone.

By the spring of 2024, I knew that the focus of my attention had to be on counteracting the information war launched on Israel from afar; I felt strongly that I had to write this book. I tried to imagine a title that would encapsulate the key message, and had a eureka moment when Leonard Cohen’s final collection of songs, You Want it Darker, released in late 2016, came hauntingly to mind. Cohen, the famed poet/songwriter and one-time Buddhist monk, though always a committed Jew, wrote lyrical odes celebrating love and amity that had the air of prophesy about them; Cohen, who had written songs like So Long, Marianne, Suzanne, First We Take Manhattan and Hallelujah, died at the age of 82 a few short weeks after the album was released.

The timing of his death seemed prescient. I remember listening to the album as I sat with my Uncle Bill, of blessed memory, on the patio of his home in Santa Ana, Costa Rica about a year after it had been released. “He knew,” Bill insisted, suggesting that Cohen had sensed his impending death and had signaled that in his song Hineni, (Hebrew for “Here I am,” my Lord), a phrase from traditional prayer uttered at fateful moments when we confront our mortality. On Cohen’s album, the cantor of his synagogue in Montreal and its choir chant the phrase with exquisite poignancy.

While Bill’s supposition seemed plausible, the entire album summoned in me something quite different: a sense of foreboding. I surmised that Cohen was trying to convey something to us, his people, the Jews. He was, it seemed, sounding a warning to us, though what he was alluding to was unclear.

Those thoughts and feelings are, of course, speculation. But the possibility that Leonard Cohen was relaying something to his fellow Jews intrigued me. The collection’s name seemed to aptly describe the extremists, fanatics and rejectionists on both sides of the Israel/Palestinian divide and those who abet them.

So, I have adopted the theme and adapted it: “You want it darker,” became “They want it darker,” as the title of this work. It poignantly conveys what I have felt since that black October day a year ago: lament, hurt, and determination: We will not be moved.

This book aims to illuminate the background to the Gaza War as truthfully as possible, although I cannot claim to be neutral. In the best of cases, objectivity is an elusive quality and, as deeply affected as I have been by the events of this War, I have no pretensions of being a detached observer. I am, though, an experienced, academically trained researcher who summons evidence, not propaganda, to reveal meaning and to enlighten. In offering this essay to readers, I have done my level best to adhere to these standards. I hope to provide insight concerning how this hugely tragic course of events came about. For this reason, I have heavily referenced the work so all who wish to can examine the evidence for themselves.

The war has taken a toll on me: There is the deep worry I feel when my son is on reserve duty and the anxiety I feel for all our sons and daughters in uniform; the incessant wait for the homecoming of our hostages and displaced persons (101 and 60-80,000 respectively, as of this writing in early October, 2024); the rehabilitation of our wounded, those scarred physically and emotionally, will occupy us indefinitely; and healing the rifts in our society and improving our system of government – all lie ahead and will be formidable tasks.

Direct threats persist: Air-raid warnings shriek from my phone even as I write this. In the past weeks, ballistic missiles in the hundreds have been shot from Iran and Yemen and there has been unceasing rocket fire from the remnants of Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and its allied militias in Syria and Iraq.

But since October 7, we continue to battle for the future of our people, and I owe it to my children and grandchildren to do my part. I respond to that call with this analysis using the best tools at my disposal: fact, reason and the perspective of history.

---

NOTES

[i] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/07/israel-gaza-timeline-videos-maps/

[ii] Lessons from Israel’s Wars in Gaza. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9975.html. 2017.

[iii] Udi Dekel, 2014. “Operation Protective Edge: Strategic and Tactical Asymmetry,” in Anat Kurz and Shlomo Brom (eds.), The Lessons of Operation Protective Edge. Institute of National Security Studies. Tel Aviv University. https://www.inss.org.il/wp-content/uploads/systemfiles/Operation%20Protective%20Edge%20Strategic%20and%20Tactical%20Asymmetry.pdf

[iv] “Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea,” HAMAS, A Document of General Principles and Policies. May 2017.

[v] Uri Bar-Joseph, Israel’s Deadly Complacency Wasn’t Just an Intelligence Failure. Haaretz. November 11, 2023. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-11/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/israels-deadly-complacency-wasnt-just-an-intelligence-failure/0000018b-b9ea-df42-a78f-bdeb298e0000

[vi] The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement. August 18, 1988. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp

[vii] Hamas Media Office., May, 2017. A Document of General Principles and Policies. https://irp.fas.org/world/para/docs/hamas-2017.pdf.

[viii] There have been conflicting reports about Iran’s involvement. On the one hand the US intelligence community avers that “Iranian leaders did not orchestrate nor had foreknowledge of the HAMAS attack against Israel” (Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, February 2024), although in the same report, it states that the Oct. 7^th attack was “triggered by a highly capable non-state terrorist group in HAMAS, fueled in part by a regionally ambitious Iran,” (ibid., Foreword). Also, Hamas was said to have been disappointed by what it regarded as tepid support for the operation on the part of Iran and its proxies, which is attributed to Tehran’s disapproval that the invasion was not coordinated with it in advance. Yet, according to a Ynet report, a massive Distributed Denial of Service cyber-attack against Israel occurred in the hours preceding and the days following the Oct. 7 invasion. The magnitude of the cyber-attack was so massive that the only regional actor with such capability is Iran. Time will tell what Iran’s role in preparing for the attack was. Al Arabiya, a Saudi-based news outlet, states that the Iranians “knew only in general terms that the movement was planning a major operation and did not know the timing or the details, according to a regional source familiar with the group’s thinking,” https://english.alarabiya.net/News/middle-east/2023/10/11/How-a-secretive-Hamas-commander-masterminded-the-attack-on-Israel. Oct. 11, 2023.

[ix] Associated Press, March 26, 2023. Netanyahu fires defense minister who urged a halt to overhaul of Israel’s judiciary. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2023/03/26/1166134644/benjamin-netanyahu-fires-defense-minister-yoav-gallant.

[x] Times of Israel, Live Blog, “Top intel official said to have twice warned PM of security risks posed by overhaul tensions.” November 21, 2023. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/top-intel-official-said-to-have-twice-warned-pm-of-security-risks-posed-by-overhaul-tensions/

[xi] Michael Hauser Tov, Netanyahu Refuses to Meet Israeli Military Chief Before Key Judicial Overhaul Vote. Haaretz. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-07-24/ty-article/.premium/netanyahu-refuses-to-meet-israeli-military-chief-before-key-judicial-overhaul-vote/00000189-87ea-def4-a7ef-a7fb6ed30000.

[xii] Ramzy Baroud, “A Day to Remember: How “Al-Aqsa Flood” Altered the Relationship Between Palestine and Israel Forever.” Washington Report of Middle East Affairs, Oct. 15, 2023. https://www.wrmea.org/israel-palestine/a-day-to-remember-how-al-aqsa-flood-altered-the-relationship-between-palestine-and-israel-forever.html.

[xiii] Jerusalem Post Staff, March 27, 2024. ‘March toward Palestine’: Hamas releases Mohammed Deif speech from October 7. https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-794051. See also, Naharnet Newsdesk, March 28, 2024. In rare speech, head of Hamas fighters calls on Muslims to liberate Al-Aqsa. https://www.naharnet.com/stories/en/304253-in-rare-speech-head-of-hamas-fighters-calls-on-muslims-to-liberate-al-aqsa.

[xiv] Such as the Kurds, Baluch, Berbers and numerous other ethnonational groups.

[xv] Such as the confessional system in Lebanon, where the highest offices are proportionately reserved for representatives from certain religious communities; the minority Alawite rule of the Assad family in Syria, with its limited concessions to the Sunni mercantile class; and the various monarchies and emirates that still control much of the region.

[xvi] Victor Kattan, 2021. “The UN Partition Plan for Palestine and International Law.” Oxford Bibliographies. DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780199796953-0221.

[xvii] Mideast Pariahs, NY Times Opinion, August 14, 1980

[xviii] Yosef Gotlieb, Self-Determination in the Middle East. Praeger, December 1982. ISBN: 9780275908089.

[xix] Which was not launched against the Palestinians, but aimed to dismantle the jihadi military threat against us, which was amply demonstrated that day, as well as to return our hostages.

[xx] UN Secretary-General, Oct. 26, 2023. Secretary-General’s remarks to the Security Council – on the Middle East. https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/speeches/2023-10-24/secretary-generals-remarks-the-security-council-the-middle-east%C2%A0

[xxi] Reuters, Oct. 12, 2023. UN experts say Israel’s strikes on Gaza amount to ‘collective punishment. https://www.reuters.com/world/un-experts-say-israels-strikes-gaza-amount-collective-punishment-2023-10-12/.

[xxii] On November 2, 2023, The New York Times, quote Ghazi Hamed, a member of Hamas’ political bureau as stating during an interview with a Lebanese outlet that the Oct. 7th attacks “was just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth,” and that ““We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do this again and again.” https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/02/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news#hamas-official-promises-more-attacks-against-israel-similar-to-those-of-oct-7

[xxiii] Nicole Chavez, January 11, 2024. ADL records more than 3,200 antisemitic incidents since start of Israel-Hamas war. CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/10/us/adl-antisemitism-reports-soar-reaj/index.html.

[xxiv] Harriet Sherwood, February 15, 2024. Huge rise in antisemitic abuse in UK since Hamas attack, says charity. Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/feb/15/huge-rise-in-antisemitic-abuse-in-uk-since-hamas-attack-says-charity.

[xxv] Shira Li Bartov, November 29, 2023. Antisemitic incidents have surged 320% in Germany since Oct. 7, watchdog finds. Jewish Telegraphic Agency. https://www.jta.org/2023/11/29/global/antisemitic-incidents-have-surged-320-in-germany-since-oct-7-watchdog-finds

[xxvi] Le Monde with AFP. November 14, 2023. Anti-Semitic acts in France rise to 1,500 since October 7. https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2023/11/14/anti-semitic-acts-in-france-rise-to-1-500-since-october-7_6253987_4.html.

[xxvii] Agencies and TOI Staff.  January 13, 2024. Hundreds of thousands of anti-Israel protesters march in London ‘day of action.’ Times of Israel. https://www.timesofisrael.com/hundreds-of-thousands-of-pro-palestinian-protesters-march-in-london-day-of-action/.

[xxviii] Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.  January 10, 2024. Global Day of Action for Gaza – Saturday 13th January. https://cnduk.org/global-day-of-action-for-gaza-saturday-13th-january/.

[xxix] 60 Minutes Australia, Oct. 17, 2023. “Our fighters haven’t committed any crimes”: Hamas leader Dr Basem Naim. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7PxmhbaTvI

[xxx] Jeremy Diamond and Abeer Salman, March 15, 2024. Senior Hamas official says he ‘cannot reassure anyone’ that hostages in Gaza are safe. CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/15/middleeast/hamas-interview-diamond-hostages-ceasefire-intl/index.html.

[xxxi] Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, Mar. 20, 2024. Public Opinion Poll No (91). https://www.pcpsr.org/en/node/969.

[xxxii] Electronic Intifada. https://electronicintifada.net/

[xxxiii] American Friends of Hebrew University, Mar. 25, 2024. Hebrew University’s Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy Awarded Prestigious Israel Prize for Investigation of Hamas Crimes Against Humanity. https://www.afhu.org/2024/03/22/hebrew-universitys-dr-cochav-elkayam-levy-awarded-prestigious-israel-prize-for-investigation-of-hamas-crimes-against-humanity/.

[xxxiv] Elizabeth Dwoskin, January 21, 2024. Growing Oct. 7 ‘truther’ groups say Hamas massacre was a false flag. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/01/21/hamas-attack-october-7-conspiracy-israel/.