February 10, 2024 was four months since Hamas invaded Israel from Gaza, killing 1200 people, raping and brutalizing women, beheading babies, kidnapping 240 people. We know that Hamas tortured some, probably all of the hostages they freed. We know that they killed some of the hostages; we don’t know how many.
HAMAS IS ATTEMPTING GENOCIDE.
This picture, an Israeli Jew praying, holding a Torah scroll in his hotel in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, is believed to have been the trigger, the provocation, but not the cause.
“For Hamas, Israel’s mere existence is a provocation,” – Avi Shavit.
Tom Friedman, writing in the New York Times October 10, 2023, here, wrote,
I have covered this conflict for almost 50 years, and I’ve seen Israelis and Palestinians do a lot of awful things to one another: Palestinian suicide bombers blowing up Israeli discos and buses; Israeli fighter jets hitting neighborhoods in Gaza that house Hamas fighters but also causing massive civilian casualties. But I’ve not seen something like what happened last weekend: individual Hamas fighters rounding up Israeli men, women and children, looking them in the eyes, gunning them down and, in one case, parading a naked woman around Gaza to shouts of “Allahu akbar.”
While this operation was surely planned by Hamas leaders months ago, I think its emotional origins can be explained in part by a photograph that appeared in the Israeli press on Oct. 3. A few Israeli government ministers had gone to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for their first official visit ever, to attend international conferences in late September and early October, and it got a lot of coverage in the Israeli press.
But having lived in both Beirut and Jerusalem, I was struck most by that unusual photo — an image that I knew would trigger completely different emotional reactions in both worlds.
It was taken by the team of Israel’s communications minister, Shlomo Karhi, who was attending a U.N. postal conference in Riyadh, as they were conducting a prayer service in their hotel room for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. One of them took a picture of a colleague wearing a traditional Jewish prayer shawl and yarmulke while holding up a Torah scroll with the Riyadh skyline in the window beyond.
For Israeli Jews, that picture is a dream come true – the ultimate expression of finally being accepted in the Middle East, more than a century after the start of the Zionist movement to build a modern democratic state in the biblical homeland of the Jewish people. To be able to pray with a Torah in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam and the home of its two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, is a level of acceptance that touches the soul of every Israeli Jew.
But that same photo ignites a powerful and emotional rage in many Palestinians, particularly those affiliated with the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The essence of Hamas’ message to Netanyahu, [Israel, and the West] is this: “You will never be at home here.”
Hamas [and its backers in Tehran and Qatar] did not send [terrorists] to the Israeli-occupied West Bank (and it has plenty there) to attack Jewish settlements. It focused its onslaught on Israeli villages and kibbutz farms that were not part of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
“These were the homes of the people of pre-1967 Israel, democratic Israel, liberal Israel – living in peaceful kibbutzim or going to a life-loving disco party,” the Israeli writer Ari Shavit remarked to me.
For Hamas, “Israel’s mere existence is a provocation,” he said.
Tom Friedman, “Israel Has Never Needed to be Smarter Than In This Moment,” New York Times, October 10, 2023.
The attack by Hamas on October 7 is clearly an attempt to drive the Jews out of the Middle East. It is an attempt at ethnic cleansing, an attempt at genocide. In addition to war crimes against the Israelis, by locating its command centers under apartment buildings, hospitals, and schools, Hamas is clearly committing crimes against the Arabs of Gaza, crimes against humanity.
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Note that I have edited Friedman’s article slightly, correcting his or the Times’ bending over backwards to attempt to remain neutral.
I wrote:
The essence of Hamas’ message to Netanyahu, [Israel, and the West] is this: “You will never be at home here.”
The Times published:
“The essence of Hamas’s message to Netanyahu and his far-right ruling coalition of Jewish supremacists and ultra-Orthodox is this: “You will never be at home here.”
Hamas is not only threatening Netanyahu and his far-right coalition. It is threatening Israelis, including Israeli Arabs. And its cheerleaders in Europe and the Americas threaten Jews globally.
Similarly, I wrote:
Hamas [and its backers in Tehran and Qatar] did not send [terrorists] to the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
The Times published:
Hamas did not send “operatives” to the Israeli-occupied West Bank…
We can describe the Hamas terrorists as “operatives” or “soldiers,” giving them the imprimatur of legitimacy, but also underscoring the fact that Hamas is the de facto and de jure governing authority of Gaza / Hamistan. But we must also keep in mind that Gaza under Hamas is a failed state and a terrorist state.