Barry Shaw – Misconceptions of Israel’s War against Hamas & South Africa’s Case of Genocide Against Israel
Misconceptions of Israel’s War against Hamas
Putting things in context.
It’s easy for pundits in Western countries watching Israel fighting its way through Gaza in hot pursuit of Hamas to demand that Israel act with restraint and proportionality. But would American armchair pundits be talking a different language had their country been hit by terrorists targeting isolated communities of the southern states murdering 120,000 men, woman, and babies, raping hundreds of young girls, and taking thousands as hostages back across the border into a Mexico operated by criminal terrorist cartels?
Would they be yelling against the US military when an enemy-embedded media begins to quote Mexican death figures? I doubt it. Would they demand “proportionality,’ or a ceasefire, while American hostages remain in cartel hands? I doubt it.
Would proportionality mean, misquoting Douglas Murray, that US troops have to kill precisely the same number of enemies as Mexican slaughters in America, rape precisely the same number of Mexican girls as their terrorists did, and drag exactly the same number of Mexican hostages back into America?
No, of course, it doesn’t. This proportionality has never been applied in the history of warfare. So why is it trotted out only when Israel is forced to respond to obscene attacks against its civilians?
That is the real proportionality problem at play here. The world is unfair and completely disproportionate against Israel in our defensive wars against our enemies.
Those who favor the terrorists often use a lame excuse that the root cause of the Hamas assault was that genocide was being carried out by Israel against the Palestinians of Gaza when precisely the opposite is true.
That Israel had literally dragged every last Jew out of Gaza even to the extent that it exhumed the bodies of every Israeli who had the audacity to die there and brought them into Israel for reburial.
Some genocide was exacerbated by a rapid increase in the number of Arabs living in Gaza. According to inaccurate Palestinian figures, there are two million Arabs living in Gaza.
Zero Jews. Two million Arabs. Some genocide.
Another misconception, whose narrative is repeated ad nauseam throughout the war, is that there is a Hamas fighting against Israeli forces and there are two million Palestinian civilians, as if the two come from different planets.
No journalist worthy of his or her salt has bothered to research the familial, tribal, religious, political, symbiotic, bond between the population and Hamas.
How were hundreds of miles of sophisticated underground terror tunnel systems, with their thousand exits into schools, mosques, hospitals, schools, kindergartens, and homes, built without anyone noticing, approving, or assisting in their execution?
If you believe they didn’t know or objected I have a bridge to sell you, but it’s underground in Gaza,
Who delivered the cement, who mixed it, who poured it, who labored in its construction for decades? Who worked in the weapon factories, and welded the casings for hundreds of thousands of rockets. Who worked in the storage facilities? Who took the material orders? Who supplied and delivered the supplies? Who smuggled or manufactured the weapons, the ammunition, the explosive materials? Who turned them into bullets and bombs?
Did the estimated 40,000 armed and trained terrorist brigades, up and down the Hamas and Islamic Jihad command and control system, have no family or friends supporting them? Who fed them? Who knew exactly what they were doing and why? Try two million people living in Gaza. Each was complicit in the terror aims that they passionately supported.
And when they attacked in their thousands on 7 October were the Gazans ignorant or unaware? No, they were not.
What was it that one Gazan said to his father from somewhere in Israel? This is the transcript translated from Arabic into English and presented to the press.:
“Hi dad! I’m talking to you from Mefalsim. Open your WhatsApp now and you’ll see all those I killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!”
Notice he said Jews -not Israelis.
His father replied, “May Allah protect you!”
Son. “Dad, I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her and I killed her husband. I killed ten with my own hands! Dad! Ten, With my own hands. Ten! Their blood is on my hands. Put Mum on.”
Mother. “Oh, son. May Allah bless you!”
Son. “I swear, Mother, Ten with my own hands.”
Mother. “May Allah bring you home safely.”
Son to father. “Dad, go back onto WhatsApp now. I want to do a live broadcast from Mefalsim.”
Father. “I wish I was with you.”
Son. “Mum. Your son is a hero.”
Mother. “Kill! Kill! Kill them!”
Then his sister comes on the phone. “Alaa,” he tells her, “I’m talking to you from a Jew’s phone.”
Alaa.” You killed ten?”
Son. “Yes. I killed ten. I swear. Open my WhatsApp and see the dead.”
This footage was collected from recordings, security cameras, Hamas terrorists’ body cameras, and victims’ phones, their social media accounts, and cellphone videos taken from terrorists, dead Israelis, or found as the scenes of the 7 October outrage.
It speaks to the knowledge, involvement, and encouragement of Gazans who support Hamas in two million ways.
Once you understand the momentum of the people, you understand that Hamas is the spiritual and political lifeblood of Palestinians. And you are awake to the misconception being fed to you that Hamas is one thing and Palestinians are something different.
As you can understand more clearly, by the choice of words used by them, their cause is not a two-state peace, but a world without Jews.
This murderous Palestinian did not refer to his victims as Israelis. He called them Jews.
This is nothing new. It has been this way for a hundred years, and the evidence of that will be presented in another report but, for now, be aware that the drip, drip, drip of Jewish blood has come from different and competing Palestinian sources for decades, that it is not confined to an individual aberration or one radical sect, but is a collective hatred that has been allowed fester for far too long, ignored by people who should know better.
Barry Shaw,
Senior Associate for Strategic Affairs,
Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.
South Africa’s Case of Genocide Against Israel is Flimsy
In the opening statements of the ICJ Hearing in The Hague in the case brought by South Africa accusing Israel of genocide, the South African Minister of Justice opened their case not in Gaza but in the creation of Israel in 1948.
The South African case, it seems, is predicated on the creation of the State of Israel being a genocide, calling it “colonization since 1948.”
No talk at all of the legitimate establishment of Israel being attacked by combined Arab armies calling and acting for its annihilation, which was an actual call for genocide.
The South African prosecutor opened her case by claiming that Gaza is the most densely populated area in the world. This is incorrect.
She claimed that the Israeli crossings were closed against international conventions. On the contrary, in response to non-stop terror and rocket attacks when both Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade to prevent weapons from entering Gaza it was considered legitimate. Since then, hundreds of trucks entered Gaza daily until Palestinian Hamas initiated an unprovoked attack by land, sea, and air against Israeli civilians.
The South African prosecutor quoted Hamas figures to exaggerate the numbers of Gazan casualties including the unprovable claim that “at least 70% of those killed were women and children” as she accused Israel of “mass killing of people in Gaza.”
Of course, the number of Palestinian terrorists killed by IDF forces was never mentioned in her numbers.
It was as if they didn’t exist. In fact the word, ‘Hamas,” never arose in the opening deliveries of the three South African prosecutors.
A telling omission.
This prosecutor mentioned the number of bombs, even the weight of some of the bombs for effect, but she failed to designate the actual target and actual purpose of these bombs.
The South African prosecutor claimed that “Israel has killed an unprecedented number of casualties.” How about Hiroshima? Dresden? As just two alternatives.
It is clear that the prosecution is attempting to use numbers for effect while ignoring essential facts that point to the purpose of the war. For them, there is no Hamas, For them, there is no legitimate enemy target. It’s all genocide.
The 2nd South African prosecutor claimed that one in four Gazans have been “decimated.” That would mean if one believes that there are two million Gazans that 500,000 have been killed, which conflicts with the figures given by South Africa’s opening prosecutor.
This second legal representative claimed that one in ten Gazans had been injured. According to her theory and numbers, it implies that 200,000 Gazans were injured in what this prosecutor called “Israel’s genocidal intent.”
The prosecution quoted statements of Israeli politicians calling for the eradication of Hamas as if they were calling for an official genocidal policy against Palestinians which they were not, and showed media footage of explosions of underground tunnels with Israeli soldiers cheering a successful campaign against Hamas terrorists, destroying their weapons, explosives, and terror tunnels by interpreting this as celebrating a genocide.
The prosecution is using this as their theme of “the rhetoric of genocide and extermination.”
Wrapping up the South African presentation, South Africa’s Chief Prosecutor, John Dugard, told the International Criminal Court of Justice in the Hague that Israel turned Gaza “into a concentration camp in which genocide is taking place” and that the Court “must consider the facts.”
The facts will prove no such thing occurred.
By the end of the first day’s proceedings, the word “Hamas” was not used once.
Barry Shaw,
Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.
