What creates a Palestinian terrorist and his foreign supporters?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump have a lot to discuss. The prime minister’s trip to Washington is the second since Trump returned to the White House just a few months ago, and he’s hoping that the talks will ensure that the two countries remain on the same page when it comes to how to deal with the war on Hamas in Gaza.

Other issues are on the agenda, like exempting Israel from the tariffs Trump is imposing on trade partners. But Netanyahu’s main objective is to ensure that the president maintains his support for the resumption of Israel’s military campaign. His twin goals of eradicating the terrorists and gaining the release of the remaining living hostages among those who were kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, may or may not ultimately be mutually exclusive.

As long as the Jewish state’s American ally is not seduced into believing that a deal ensures the survival of Hamas, then the prime minister should be satisfied. He could not then just claim an immediate diplomatic success. Netanyahu could also hold onto hope that the war can be won, rather than end in a disastrous reaffirmation of the Palestinian Arab belief that they can never be forced to accept the consequences of their barbaric quest for Israel’s destruction.

Yet that is exactly the one key element of the story that is conspicuously lacking from the mainstream corporate American media’s coverage of Israel and the war on Hamas. Indeed, as Netanyahu arrived in Washington on Sunday, he was greeted by headlines in The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as cable-news channels such as CNN and MSNBC, that focused on alleged Israeli atrocities against innocent Palestinian Arabs.

The current focus of the media demonization of the Jewish state is an incident in Gaza in which, after a gunfight with Hamas operatives, Israel Defense Force soldiers fired on others arriving at the scene that they mistakenly thought were there to attack them. Some of those killed or wounded in the exchange may well have been Hamas members, but firing on what proved to be an ambulance was obviously an error. It was also the sort of blunder that, however regrettable, is inevitable in any wartime combat situation. The responsibility for these casualties, like everyone else killed in Israel or Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, belongs to Hamas. That is the party that started the nearly 18-month-old war with unspeakable atrocities committed against civilians and whose ongoing goal is to exterminate the Jewish presence in their ancient homeland.

A standard narrative

But that wasn’t the way the Times or the Post covered the story. Their stories involved a situation in a Gaza combat zone in territory Hamas claims to govern and which it intends to keep in any ceasefire/hostage deal arrangement that Trump might seek to broker. They depicted the dilemma that Israeli soldiers faced in an ongoing armed conflict as if it were a straightforward case of innocents being targeted by tyrannical and bloodthirsty foreign occupiers.

The encounter can be considered regrettable and even mourned as a tragedy. But as we’ve seen since Oct. 7, the constant drumbeat of demonization of Israel in which every Palestinian death—even though at least half of them are of Hamas combatants and those aiding their cause—are depicted as an atrocity is not without consequences.

It is not merely a narrative about the conflict that has become standard fare in most international outlets for decades. It is the fuel that has fed the fire lit by those who have propagated the myth that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is one between a “white” settler-colonial state and an occupied nation of “people of color” who seek liberation and an end to racist discrimination. In this way, Zionism—the national liberation movement of the Jewish people that has effectively decolonized a country and returned it to its indigenous people, the Jews—is painted as an evil movement no different from “Jim Crow” American racism or even a rerun of Nazi-style genocide in which Palestinian Arabs play the part of the Jews in the Holocaust.

In this way, it erases not merely the truth about the war against Hamas but any agency on the part of Palestinians who supported the atrocities on Oct. 7, precisely because they viewed them as part of a legitimate war against a nation that has no right to exist, let alone defend itself.

Oct. 7 was in this way no different from previous Palestinian terror campaigns, whether continuous rocket attacks launched from Gaza since it became a Hamas state in 2007 or the Second Intifada inside Israel, which took the lives of more than 1,000 Israelis from 2000 to 2005 and literally blew up the Oslo Accords attempting to instill peace.

The sheer brutality of the orgy of mass murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction of Oct. 7 should have made it clear what the Palestinians’ goals are. That terrible day, which took the lives of 1,200 Israeli men, women and children, was a trailer for what they want to do to all of Israel.

A future terrorist?

Still, it has made no impression on the Palestinians’ Western media cheerleaders like Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. His most recent piece was devoted to the familiar argument that Israel is worsening the conflict and creating a new generation of terrorists with its brutality and unwillingness to empower the forces that seek its destruction. Focusing on IDF operations in Judea and Samaria against Hamas’s efforts to create a new front in the war, he portrayed a young Arab who said his ambition was to join Hamas.

As critics of every Israeli measure of self-defense have claimed for the last 80 years, Kristof asserts that the defeat of terrorists isn’t worth the cost in lives and suffering on the part of those who support them. In his words, fighting Hamas just sows “the seeds of violence,” creating new terrorists like the 12-year-old Muhammed Abdul Jalil in Tulkarem, the sympathetic protagonist of the piece.

Jalil is certainly to be pitied. His home and school in a Palestinian refugee camp in Tulkarem were destroyed in an IDF operation.

Kristof, however, doesn’t explain why the descendants of those Arabs who fled their homes during the 1948 Israeli War of Independence have been kept in camps by their leaders, Arab governments, the United Nations and foreign sympathizers with the Palestinian cause as opposed to being resettled elsewhere, like every other refugee population of that era. He takes it as a given that the Palestinians ought to have been kept in place in these camps—now urban neighborhoods—as props to perpetuate the century-old war on Zionism. It is the continuation of that futile war that led to the suffering of Jalil.

Nor does Kristof spare a moment for the way Palestinian schools and media—and the hatred for Israel and Jews—inculcated in young Arabs led to the fighting in Gaza or the “little Gaza” in Tulkarem.

Forcing Israel to turn Tulkarem, and the rest of Judea and Samaria, into the sovereign Palestinian state that Kristof still foolishly believes is the solution to the problem won’t end the conflict. After all, Israel withdrew every soldier, settler and settlement from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005. That didn’t prevent the Palestinians from turning it into a terrorist state from which it could not only launch rockets and arson balloons, but also the genocidal atrocities on Oct. 7.

What motivates terrorists?

Preventing the Palestinians from repeating those bestial crimes won’t make the conflict worse because after Oct. 7, how could it be?

The Hamas operatives and ordinary Palestinians who carried out those murders, rapes and kidnappings were already convinced that Israel was evil and that all Jews in it, including dovish residents of the border area who were dedicated to helping their Arab neighbors, deserved to die.

The problem is not Israel’s reaction to the war being waged against its existence. It’s the belief that this conflict—and any act of “resistance” against the Jews undertaken as part of it, including unspeakable barbarism—is justified. That belief is what set in motion the events that have harmed that 12-year-old boy. It has also inspired so many in the United States to seize on such incidents and every Palestinian death in Gaza to vocally support Hamas and echo their demands for Israel’s destruction.

Netanyahu and most Israelis have long since stopped paying attention to biased media coverage of the war being waged on them. That is understandable since they have more pressing concerns than answering the likes of Kristof. His moral preening about Israel and his commentary about the conflict, as if nothing the Palestinians believe or have ever done matters, can rightly be dismissed as ignorance masquerading as expertise.

An attack on Trump’s policies

This latest surge in prejudicial coverage of the post-Oct. 7 war is key because it provides ammunition for those on the American left who conquered academia and are on the verge of doing the same to the Democratic Party that hopes to return to power in 2028.

The media assault on Israel may seem like a dull repetition of similarly biased coverage that has been a staple of liberal establishment commentary for the last four decades. But as the anti-Trump resistance ramps up efforts to thwart the president’s policies and eventually be in a position to go even further to the left than past Democratic administrations, Jerusalem cannot escape being drawn into this struggle. At this point, it is the pushback against Trump’s support for Israel and efforts to rid the education system of the toxic leftist myths that have fueled antisemitism at issue. That is what is motivating the latest calumnies, distortions and lies about what the Jewish state is doing to defend itself.

Just as Palestinian indoctrination of hatred against the Jews in their schools and media creates terrorists, it is the spread of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonial teachings that turns young Americans into supporters of a terrorist group like Hamas. In this way, Kristof, the Times and the many other news outlets that engage in a similar campaign of misinformation are far more responsible for the continuation of the war and Palestinian suffering than Israelis seeking to stop Hamas terrorism.

© JNS