The War Against the Jews is a War of Hatred

By Col Dencio S. Acop (Ret), PhD, CPP | Date 06-13-2024

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS — In October of 2023, the Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS) attacked the Jewish state of Israel for the 5th time since it took control of the Gaza Strip from Palestinian authority in 2007. 

The surprise attacks killed more than 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals, including around 35 U.S. citizens in Israel. 

While the attacks began in 2001, Hamas intensified its bombing campaign soon after Israel left Gaza in 2005. 

Around 40,000 rockets have hit Israel so far. While Hamas justified the bombings as a counteroffensive to Israel’s blockade of Gaza, the October attack reveals far more than just that. 

When all the pieces of evidence are gathered together, they reveal that Hamas is merely the spearhead of a war that will not cease until Jews are annihilated from the face of the earth and their state obliterated. This is a war of attrition. It is a war of hatred against the Jews.

Today, it seems unbelievable that a race that has suffered so much from the holocausts inflicted upon it by a racist power is paradoxically being pictured as the reincarnation of that abomination. The world must be reminded that some six million Jews were mercilessly murdered, and at least five million others were taken prisoners of war and deprived of their basic human rights. 

The World War II holocaust was an attempted genocide of the Jews by a deluded Hitler, much like other leaders like him exterminated their own peoples and enemies out of sheer hatred and lack of compassion more than any worthy strategic goal. 

Post-war scenes such as those of the holocaust sites in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Chelmno helped lead to the establishment of the United Nations organization in 1950 and the subsequent declaration of international human rights. 

Thus, it is even more ironic now that the U.N. lends to the voice that appears to condemn Israeli actions against Hamas but looks away from the latter’s aggressiveness that brought about Israeli counteraction to defend the Jewish state. 

This present-day situation has come about due to pressure experienced by the U.N. from a significant number of member countries involving Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian territories. 

But there is a problem. While the body through its General Assembly approved a 2022 resolution that condemned Israel’s behavior in the Palestinian territories and asked for the ICJ’s legal opinion on the matter, the organization ‘failed to unequivocally reject and condemn the terrorist attacks by Hamas that took place in Israel starting on October 7, 2023’. 

Is it because the pressure from the League of Arab States, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the African Union, and 52 other countries including Russia and China, is simply too great?     

A simple review of history and recent objective facts would actually reveal who is responsible for what and why. The resolution of political boundaries and humanitarian assistance of displaced peoples following the Second World War included the creation of the state of Israel following the departure of the British from Palestine in May 1948. The British Empire’s Mandate for Palestine had ruled over the region since 1917 when the empire conquered it from four centuries of Ottoman rule. 

Israel’s declaration of independence following the British departure immediately created a problem as Palestinians also seeking autonomy for themselves were caught in the middle of the sudden declaration. 

The concentrations of these Palestinians were in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and Eastern Jerusalem. ‘The West Bank and Gaza Strip fell under Jordanian and Egyptian rule, respectively’ and this became a significant reason for the difficulty in uniting authority over these Palestinian territories. ‘

The holy city of Jerusalem remains to be the center of the three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 

It must be made clear that there are around 14.5 million Palestinians in the world the vast majority of whom are Sunni Muslims while a significant minority are Christians. ‘

Over 5 million live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and another 2 million in Israel’. The remaining Palestinians are scattered across Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.  

As to the question of who has more rights to be where they are, both Jews and Arabs have co-existed through parts of the Middle Eastern region for centuries. In fact, Palestine was inhabited by Semitic peoples, the earliest being the Canaanites. 

Tradition has it that Abraham, ‘the common ancestor of the Jews and Arabs’, migrated from Ur to Canaan. ‘Semitic’ is actually an ‘obsolete term for an ethnic, cultural, or racial group associated with people of the Middle East’ that includes Arabs, Jews, Akkadians, and Phoenicians. 

During the age of Antiquity in the 9th century BCE, two Jewish kingdoms flourished in the region: the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah. ‘However, several bordering kingdoms and empires came to conquer, control, and destroy these kingdoms.’ 

‘One of the most destructive of these was the Neo-Babylonian Empire which expanded to eventually control almost the entire Fertile Crescent region. 

This expansion was not directed at the Jewish people. The Jews were simply one of many peoples harmed by expanding powers.’ 

The Fertile Crescent region, otherwise known as the ‘cradle of civilization’, spans today’s countries of Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Egypt. 

‘As part of the Islamic conquest of the Middle East in the 7th century, Arab peoples began to settle in significant numbers in Palestine.’   

Immediately following Israel’s declaration of independence on May 14, 1948, Israel was attacked by Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. 

Six thousand Israelis died while 15,000 more were wounded in the Israeli defense, making it Israel’s costliest war. The war killed some 12,500 Arabs and enabled Israel to control the area initially proposed by the UN as well as 60% of the area proposed for the Arab state, including Jaffa, Lydda, Ramle, Upper Galilee, and part of the Negev.

In 1956, Israel joined Great Britain and France against Egypt with the objective of re-opening the Straits of Tiran and the Gulf of Aqaba following eight years of Egyptian blockade preventing Israeli passage. 

France and Britain attacked Egypt for a slightly different reason which was Egypt’s nationalizing the Suez Canal in an effort to end what Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser called the European powers’ continued colonial domination in the region. 

While Israel attained its objective, it did not go so well for France and Britain which lost face when the U.S. did not go along with them and in fact condemned their aggressive action. 

Israeli forces had moved across the border, defeated the Egyptian army in the Sinai, captured Sharm al-Sheikh, and established Israeli strategic control over the Straits of Tiran. Nevertheless, Egypt emerged victorious becoming a champion for the cause of Arab and Egyptian nationalism.  

Eleven years later, in 1967, the Six-Day War occurred. The war ended with Israel capturing the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. 

Israeli forces launched a preemptive strike against Egypt after Nasser ‘announced that the Straits of Tiran would again be closed to Israeli vessels’ and ‘subsequently mobilized the Egyptian military into defensive lines along the border with Israel ordering the immediate withdrawal of all UNEF (peacekeeping) forces’. 

The preemptive Israeli air strikes crippled Egyptian air power giving Israel complete air superiority which allowed Jewish ground troops to invade without much opposition even with Syrian and Jordanian support for Egypt. 

‘The Six-Day War resulted in more than 20,000 fatal Arab casualties while Israel suffered fewer than 1,000 fatal casualties.’

Then, in 1973, during the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, Egyptian and Syrian forces simultaneously launched coordinated surprise attacks against Israel in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. 

The Arab forces initially had tactical successes on both fronts but were eventually pushed back by Israeli forces whichreached as far as 100 kilometers within the Egyptian capital of Cairo. 

This war ended with another ceasefire cooperatively negotiated between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which supported either side and almost came to blows with their nuclear might. 

‘At the 1978 Camp David Accords that followed the war, Israel returned the entire Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, which led to the subsequent 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, marking the first instance that an Arab country recognized Israel as a legitimate state.’

Nine years later in 1982, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin ordered Israeli forces into southern Lebanon to flush out the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) following the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom. 

While gunmen from the terrorist Abu Nidal Organization (ANO) were responsible for the attempted assassination, Begin blamed the PLO operating in southern Lebanon. 

The ANO is a break-away faction of the PLO. Both the PLO and ANO advocate the elimination of the state of Israel. The break was due to a rift between leaders Yasser Arafat and Abu Nidal.

Many members of Fatah including Arafat became open to a political solution option with Israel following the 1973 Yom Kippur War but Nidal refused and split in 1974. 

Israel occupied southern Lebanon until 1985. The fighting left 654 fatal Israeli casualties, some 1,700 fatal PLO casualties, 1,200 fatal Syrian casualties, and 19,000 fatal Lebanese casualties.  

Yet again many years later in 2006, Israel crossed the border into Lebanon to retaliate against the Hezbollah which had fired rockets and launched an anti-tank missile attack on Israeli soldiers patrolling the Israeli side of the border fence. 

Hezbollah is a Lebanese Shia political party and militant group whose core ideology is the destruction of the Jewish state. 

It is one of the leaders of the broader Muslim struggle against Israel and is supported by Iran and Syria. 

The ambush left three IDF soldiers dead while two others were taken prisoner and brought to Lebanon. 

‘Five more were killed in Lebanon in a failed rescue attempt.’ The conflict is believed to have killed some 1,200 Lebanese people and 165 Israelis, displaced around 1 million Lebanese and 400,000 Israelis, and massively destroyed Lebanese civil infrastructure. The war only ended with the U.N.’s intervention and peacekeepers’ deployment.  

The latest attack against Israel is the ongoing war with HAMAS, which began in October 2023. Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya (HAMAS) is a ‘Palestinian Sunni Islamist political and military movement governing the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip since 2007’. It ‘violently rejects Israel’s existence’. Hardliner Hamas ousted the moderate Palestinian authority over control of Gaza. 

There have been ‘four previous major hostilities between Israel and Hamas: 2008-2009, 2012, 2014, and 2021. Hamas tactics included tunnel warfare and firing rockets into Israeli territory, whereas Israel generally conducted airstrikes in Gaza.’ 

While present-day media often focus on the atrocities allegedly committed by the IDF against civilian targets in Gaza, there is more merit to the fact that Hamas has been deliberately using civilians as human shields, making them collateral targets for predictable Israeli retaliatory air strikes against Hamas rocket-launch sites that kill Israelis.

In his book War Against the Jews, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz wrote that Hamas uses a playbook it calls its ‘CNN strategy’: ‘attack Israeli civilians; anticipate Israel’s response by using human shields that assure that in its effort to target Hamas terrorists, Israel will cause collateral damage to Palestinian civilians; seek condemnation by the international community and the media; demand a ceasefire; and use the ceasefire to rearm and get ready for the next cycle.’ 

Believing that theirs is a ‘holy’ war of ‘jihad’ against the infidels, fundamentalist-extremists like Hamas see no immorality in sending civilian elders, women, and children to their deaths as ‘heaven awaits them’. According to Dershowitz, ‘Hamas does everything in its power to provoke Israel into killing as many Palestinian civilians as possible in order to generate condemnation against the Jewish state’. He adds: ‘It has gone so far as firing rockets from Palestinian schoolyards and hiding its terrorists in Palestinian maternity wards. Immediately following the barbarism of October 7, many of the barbarians sought shelter in hospitals, schools, and mosques.’ ‘The reality is that the elected and de facto government of Gaza has declared war against Israel. Under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, it has committed an ‘armed attack’ against Israel. The Hamas charter calls for Israel’s total destruction. Under international law, Israel is entitled to take whatever military action is necessary to repel that attack and stop the rockets.’ (Dershowitz, 2023, p.18).

While small and surrounded by mostly Arab neighbors, the state of Israel is no pushover. This much should be obviousfrom its history alone. For one, Israel is a nuclear power. This is one of the reasons why even its conventionally powerful neighbors are cautious when dealing with their Jewish neighbors. Israel also has the support of the United States and even Russia if recent meetings between Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu are noted. While non-secular and smaller militant groups like Hamas and Hezbollah have been attacking Israel in the recent past, Israel knows that its larger threats are Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. The most dangerous of these is Iran which may already possess a hidden nuclear arsenal with the aid of Russia. Cunning and playing both non-secular and secular cards, Iran is using a ‘forward-defense’ strategy against Israel. It is letting others do its fighting, merely providing them the resources to do so. Wars with Hamas, Hezbollah, Lebanon, and Syria mean Israel may be compromised before it reaches Iranian borders. ‘The war in Gaza is pushing the shadow conflict between Iran and Israel out into the open.’ As Israel escalates the war into Lebanon and Syria, where ‘Iran wields powerful influence’, this could ignite into a full-blown regional war. Only Iran’s focus on preserving its influence in the Levant to bid more time until it is fully ready for war with Israel, more than its ‘ideological commitment to supporting Palestinians and fighting Israel’, presents opportunities for preventing a wider war. But I am not certain that ceasefires always work if all they do is give time for warmongers to arm and develop a nuclear bomb. I have a feeling that this is exactly what Iran is doing – bidding time and creating a scenario. ‘Dershowitz in his new booksays that the Hamas attack – perhaps sponsored by Iran – means Israel will ultimately have to consider its nuclear option. If Israel’s very existence is seriously endangered by an Iranian nuclear arsenal, it will, as a last resort, likely act preventively or reactively with all weapons at its disposal.’        

While Israel has done everything it could to practice religious tolerance, ‘live and let live’, and co-exist with its Arab neighbors, there are just those among these neighbors who hate the Jewish state and will stop at nothing short of its destruction. The war against the Jews is a war of hatred. And it has a flipside. ‘As Golda Meir long ago put it: We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children, but we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.’