There Is No Moral Equivalence between the Palestinians and Israel

By Richard Moss

On May 14, 2018, the 70th anniversary of the birth of the state of Israel, a modern-day miracle, the U.S., under President Donald Trump, fulfilled a promise made by Congress in the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act, passed by a 95-3 vote in the Senate to move our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish people.  That bill, unfortunately, came with a presidential waiver, and every president since, including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Hussein Obama, promised to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem but failed to do so.  Only one, Donald Trump, a modern-day Cyrus and eternal friend of Israel and the Jewish people, kept his promise. 

Simultaneously, 45 miles away from the festivities in Jerusalem, at the Gaza border with Israel, the so-called "March of Return," an annual event inaugurated in 1998 by arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat, had been going on for weeks and culminated on May 14.  It commemorated what the Palestinians call the "Nakba" or "Catastrophe," their self-pitying reference to Israel's Independence Day.  Fifty thousand Palestinians, most of them Hamas terrorists, attempted to breach the border with Israel for the purpose of killing or kidnapping Jews in neighboring Israeli villages.  Women and children, the "human shields" Hamas is famous for, accompanied the marchers to maximize civilian casualties for the compliant press.

The peaceful marchers, as instructed, brought guns, knives, pipe bombs, and grenades and hid them under their clothing.  They also brought fire kites to inflict damage on Israeli fields and crops.  More than sixty of the invading Palestinian terrorists were killed at the border, dutifully reported with glaring split-screen images of the chaos in Gaza and the events in Jerusalem, designed to tarnish the embassy event, President Trump, and Israel. 

Israel abandoned Gaza in 2005.  Every Jew dead or alive, including those buried, was evacuated.  Israel left behind elaborate greenhouses and other infrastructure and synagogues, all of which were destroyed in scenes reminiscent of Kristallnacht.  In 2006, Palestinians in Gaza voted in Hamas over the Palestinian Authority.  In June of 2007, Hamas launched its military takeover of Gaza, killing hundreds of its Muslim brothers in the Palestinian Authority by dragging them through the streets chained to cars, throwing them off roofs, and shooting them in the heads in front of their wives and children. 

Hamas is a terrorist organization, recognized as such by the U.S. and the European Union.  They call openly for the destruction of the state of Israel and do not recognize the right of Israel to exist within any borders.  They are the Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and as such seek not the destruction of not only Israel but all of Christendom and Western civilization including the U.S. and the establishment of a global caliphate.  Since taking over Gaza, they have done nothing to help their citizens build the institutions of a civil society, to promote normal democratic discourse, or to develop a free market economy, preferring instead welfare dependency based on international aid.  In the process, they have inflicted great suffering on their citizens, running what is in effect an open-air prison state for 2 million people.  There are high unemployment and poverty, poor sanitation, and inadequate health care.  Gaza, with its proximity to Israel’s high-tech economy, ports, trade, beaches, and tourism, and a willingness by the nations of the world, business interests, and aid organizations to help them develop their private sector, should have been Singapore on the Mediterranean.  Instead, it is Afghanistan.  Israel blockades Gaza because Hamas is an Iranian-backed terrorist organization that engages in acts of terror.  Hamas uses its assets and plentiful aid to build tunnels; fire missiles at Israeli civilians; and breach borders with armies of armed terrorists to kill, main, and kidnap.  Egypt blockades Gaza for the same reason.  

Israel is a first-world nation that provides for its citizens the highest standard of living in the Middle East, equivalent to that of Western Europe.  It is an open democracy governed consensually by the rule of law, with human rights, free speech, religious freedom, a free press, and a world-class free-market economy.  It boasts the best hospitals, universities, museums, and symphonies in the world and leads the planet in any number of cutting-edge technologies.  Its more than one million Israeli-Arab citizens are the freest Muslims in the Middle East.  None is interested in joining his Muslim brethren under the benighted Palestinian Authority or Hamas, preferring instead to keep his citizenship in the Jewish State — for good reason.  

Hamas, on the other hand, like its secular terrorist counterpart in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), the Palestinian Authority: corrupt, kleptocratic, genocidal extremists.  Of all the nationalist movements around the world, the Palestinians, Hamas, or the P.A., are the least deserving of a state — and should not be given one.  The world scarcely needs another dysfunctional terrorist regime.  There is no difference between either of them and ISIS or al-Qaeda except that for "intersectional" and anti-Semitic purposes, they enjoy good press from a left-dominated media — as long as it is Jews engaging them.  

The Assad regime, for example, in the ongoing Syrian Civil War, has killed thousands of Palestinians in the Yarmouk Refugee Camp in Damascus, the largest Palestinian refugee community in Syria, transforming it into a "death camp," engaging in wanton acts of barbarity far worse than anything Israel has ever committed.  But you never hear about this because it involved Arabs killing Arabs — not Jews, and therefore of no interest to the left. 

There is one card the Palestinian jihadists know they can always play.  That is the support and positive spin of their egregious behavior by the international left, including the media, the E.U., the U.N., the U.S. Democrat party, and many liberal-leftist American Jews and their various anti-Zionist organizations (J Street, Jewish Voice for Peace, and many others).  

They will discredit the Israelis, delegitimize them, hold them to an impossible standard, and continually advance the Hamas narrative of brutal IDF soldiers cutting down innocent, defenseless Palestinian Muslims — despite Israel having the most moral and honorable military in the world, one that goes well beyond any other fighting force to protect innocent life, often at huge costs to its own soldiers. 

The media and their political functionaries thus create and perpetuate the crisis.  By supporting the jihadist narrative, they encourage more of the same and avoid putting pressure on Palestinians to create a functioning, viable state.  The media and the rest of the anti-Israel cabal can be relied on to defend genocidal Islamic terrorists.

Hamas sees dead Palestinians as a photo op.  No media, no dead Palestinians.  Yes, our media and their leftist allies have blood on their hands, rivers of blood, most of it Palestinian.  It is they, not Israel, who prolong the agony, suffering, and death.