Throughout its history, the State of Israel has fought two defensive conflicts at once—a battle for survival against its Arab neighbors and a PR battle to expose the world to truth. The current nexus for these two conflicts is Israel’s war against Hamas.
While much of the world had sympathy for the Jewish state in the immediate wake of Hamas’ October 7 pogrom, it quickly changed to hostility against Israel once it began defending itself.
If we listen to news reports and the radically ill-informed on college campuses, we might think that Israel is the aggressor or that there exists a moral equivalency between the sovereign Jewish state and the Palestinian terrorist organization. Such comparisons include “Mistakes have been made on both sides” or “What Hamas did on October 7 is terrible, but Israel targets Palestinian civilians.“
These claims of moral equivalency are outrageous because of their disconnection from reality and lack of factual evidence. Israel and Hamas are in entirely different categories.
War Aims
Hamas’s primary aim is not a better economy, more freedom, peace with its neighbor, or even a Palestinian state. Its raison d’être is the destruction of Israel and the genocide of the Jewish people.
In its original 1988 charter, Hamas explicitly declares this goal. Quoting Imam Hassan al-Banna, a founding member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the covenant states, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
What does obliteration mean? According to the charter, it means a full-scale genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of Arabs and Muslims: “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 realised.”
This aim of vanquishing the enemy and bringing victory to Allah directly motivated the October 7 attack on Israel. On that day, more than 1,200 people, most of them Israeli Jews, were heinously murdered. Hamas’s charter tells us it will do much more with additional time and resources
Israel, on the other hand, does not call for the destruction of Arabs, Muslims, or any other peoples. In fact, its declaration of independence says, though it is a Jewish state, it “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”
Israel’s stated aims of its war with Hamas are “the destruction of Hamas military and governing capabilities, the freeing of all hostages and ensuring that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel.” In other words, while Hamas is intent on the death of its neighbors, Israel’s aim is life and security for all people.
No comments:
Post a Comment