Oversimplified and catch-all adjectives don’t capture the horrors of the Israel-Hamas war 

“Oh, Little Town of Bethlehem.” It has a different meaning this year. It was once a symbol of peace and good will, but no more.

October 7, 2023, was a day that will “live in infamy,” not only because of the Hamas terrorist attack on peaceful civilians—an attack that claimed more than a thousand lives and took hundreds of hostages—but because of the retaliatory outrage that has since ensued.

Less than three months have passed since that fateful day. At the hands of the IDF, 2 million people have been displaced from their homes—homes that no longer exist. Roughly 21,000 people—mostly innocent Palestinians—have been killed, according to international news services, roughly 7,700 of the dead are children and close to 70% are women.

In addition to the dead, over 50,000 Arabs have been injured, many of them dragging useless limbs behind in a world where there are no hospitals to save their lives, and no anesthesia with which to do a proper amputation. And there’s no end in sight.

One doesn’t need to be an astute observer or an expert on war to see the obvious: Israel’s goal is to rout an entire people from their homes and make it impossible for them to ever return. And that’s nothing new; Israel has never been willing to share with the other rightful inhabitants of the Holy Land.

After kicking the Palestinian people in the ribs for three quarters of a century, and forcing them to live in a we-control-everything police state, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now livid that the Arabs weren’t just happy to lie there and take the abuse. With no real status beyond a prescriptive form of incarceration, how dare these people have the nerve to finally lash out!

Oh sure, nobody can stand up for Hamas’s wanton murder of Israeli civilians and its over-the-top terror tactics. What happened on Oct. 7 was an outrage to the entire world, and humankind was of one mind—to retaliate against the terrorists, root them out and destroy the Hamas organization. That plan would have found few critics.

Perhaps Hamas could have even been the recipient of world sympathy, had it merely murdered a few hundred Zionist settlers who had stolen Palestinian homesteads from their rightful owners. Something like that might have been viewed as a reasonable tit-for-tat, but the Hamas massacre went far overboard, killing whatever world sympathy could have otherwise been generated.

The U.S. has some culpability. Don’t ever forget that the ongoing criminal activities of the Zionist settlers were given a blessing by Donald Trump—who promoted the invasive outrages carried out by Israelis on the Arab population, and disrespected the sanctity of its shared religious shrines. He’s partly to blame for the current tragedy.

No matter how you feel about Israel and its rightist core of Zionist fanatics, you can’t deny that the Arabs who live within the supposedly-Holy Land, have been handed a really sorry lot.

But, criticize Israel and you’re antisemitic. Here you go. Take the test to see if you’re antisemitic. Three or more “yes” answers show that you are as prejudiced as the Third Reich.

Do you think it’s wrong to kill 7,700 Arab babies in order to make Israel safer?
Do you think that the Palestinians have a right to live in the Holy Land?
Is it wrong to destroy hospitals, schools, private homes and businesses in order to achieve a scorched-earth devastation into which there’s no going back?
Do you believe that “retaliation” against an enemy should not seek to wipe-out an entire civilization?
Do you believe it’s wrong to murder Arab journalists to prevent the possibility of Israeli war crimes being exposed?
Do you think it’s wrong for the U.S. to provide munitions, its own military, and billions in aid to a country that has no respect for the lives of its neighbors?
Do you believe that the U.S. should be heavy-handed in withdrawing aid from Israel as a sanction against its blood-thirsty policies toward the Palestinians?

Sadly, the word “antisemitic” has become Israel’s go-to for describing anyone who is against the atrocities it’s now committing against its neighbors. In short, that means that if you’re a humanitarian, a person of conscience or an objective observer of what’s going on in Gaza, you will receive your stamp of shame.

If you’re a Christian, Hindu, Jew, Buddhist, Muslim or principled atheist, you believe in peace, love and honor. But with the current grading scale adopted by the Netanyahu thugs, you all fall into the same category: All the things you thought you were, and all the things that your belief system dictated, have been condensed into one simple adjective. “Antisemitic.”

If you disagree with Israel’s current strategy, you’re the equivalent of those responsible for the Holocaust.

It’s time to restore the correct meaning of “antisemitism,” and for moral people, everywhere, to insist that Netanyahu’s destruction of the Palestinians comes to an immediate end.

Once that’s accomplished, it will be time for a world to donate billions for the restoration of a Palestinian homeland, provide trillions in compensation for those who Netanyahu has murdered, and make a new world resolve: The world must remember and make sure that this will never be allowed to happen again.

The author is a retired businessman, novelist, columnist and former Vietnam-era Army assistant public information officer. He resides in Riverton with his wife, Carol, and their adorable and ferocious “Poppy.”