A Brief Statement on Gaza
C. Gourgey, Ph.D.
Imagine that your neighbor living in the house next to yours hated you and made no secret of it. That he proclaimed your property should rightfully belong to him. That he taught his children you are Godless and a liar and a cheat and worse than scum. That he spent years stockpiling weapons, rockets and rocket launchers and all manner of explosives, for the express purpose of using them against you. That he fired those rockets frequently, doing damage to your house and injuring your family members. And finally, when he could no longer restrain himself, that he invaded your house, raped your wife, and kidnapped your child.
Would you sit back and do nothing?
There were four major Gaza wars preceding the present one, every one of them ignited by Palestinian violence. The Jews whom Hamas and its supporters (and there were many) attacked on 10/7/2025 were mostly peace activists, Israelis who wanted to make life better for their Gaza neighbors, even taking many of them for hospital care when they were sick. It didn’t matter. They were Jews. And the religion the attackers professed taught them that Jews are less than human. They even quote the Qur’an to prove it.
In fact, Gaza itself was constructed very deliberately as a war machine for the express purpose of attacking Israeli Jews. Virtually all of Gaza’s imports were diverted into war preparations, including rockets and rocket launchers, explosives, and five hundred miles of tunnels for hiding terrorists and weapons and infiltrating into Israel. Some of the worst victims of this war, the children of Gaza, have from their earliest years had their minds poisoned by their educational and religious systems not only against coexistence with Israel but against Jews as people. They have been trained early on to hate Jews and reject compromise. This has been documented. (See for example the research conducted by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education [IMPACT-SE]).
The news media today are reporting none of this. Instead, all we see are scenes of devastation in Gaza, and Palestinians suffering the effects of the war. It is no wonder that Israel is now demonized, both in the press and popular opinion. The suffering of the Palestinians is real. I have no wish to minimize it. I want to see it alleviated. I want this war to end. Now. But my concern in this short article is not how to end the war, but how it is reported. One-sided condemnation of Israel will not end this war. It will only prolong it. Because Israel, rightly, found this war a fight for its survival. You don’t give in to external pressure when your very existence is at stake.
A word should be said about the use of the term “genocide.” Genocide means (or should mean) the deliberate extinction of an entire race of people. This is what Hamas attempted on October 7: to kill everyone in sight, old and young, male and female, except for the ones taken hostage. The campaign affected Israel’s southern region, but the intent was not to stop there. Coordinating with Hezbollah in the north and Iran in the east, the plan was to extend the carnage to the entire country, infiltrating from north and south, then meeting in the middle. Fortunately Hamas acted impulsively, not coordinating efficiently with its partners, or the destruction might have been unimaginably worse.
The popular press is not reporting this. It’s the part of the story people don’t think about. But Hamas truly did pose a genocidal threat, right on Israel’s border. How do you respond to a genocidal threat? Is there a clean way to do it? Not in the real world. Mistakes will be made. Excesses will be committed. And these should be criticized, and in extreme cases even condemned. But with balance. With full awareness of the context. We should remember that not only did Hamas start this war, it threatened even worse to come as soon as the opportunity should arise. And we should ask what would happen to Israel had it remained passive and accepted the aggression.
In light of this, accusing Israel of “genocide” is a misuse of language. A genocidal campaign does not warn in advance which areas will be attacked, does not try to create safe passages for civilians, and does not displace people away from the zones of highest danger. One may disagree with these measures Israel has taken to minimize civilian casualties; one may even vociferously object to them, but they do not constitute genocide. Accusing Israel of genocide is dangerous. It puts Israel on an even lower moral level than Hamas, which is clearly unacceptable. Whatever one may think of the IDF, it does not do to Palestinian civilians what Hamas and its allies do to Jewish ones. Not even close. The genocide label applied to Israel is a blood libel used for antisemitic purposes: Jews, it is felt, want sympathy for the Holocaust, for the genocide perpetrated against them, but now those genocidal Jews are no better than the Nazis who persecuted them. This completely distorts the nature of the present conflict.
Accusing Israel of genocide carries a rhetorical weight perhaps not understood by many who use the term. It comes with the association (not uncommon in the Muslim world) that Jews are as bad as Nazis and deserve the fate Hitler planned for them. This only contributes to the dehumanization of Jews that has fueled this conflict ever since its inception. Much greater care is needed in the use of words. But something even greater is needed.
We must learn to affirm each other’s humanity. This applies to both sides. The Palestinian educational system must be reformed and completely overhauled, or it will continue to provide fuel for future conflict. Israelis must also recognize that Palestinians are a real people with legitimate national aspirations. It may not be possible to satisfy those aspirations now, not as long as Palestinian society continues to pose a lethal threat to Israel, which it still does despite popular impressions. That is the great tragedy of this conflict: it will have no solution until its spiritual roots are addressed and healed, and trying to impose a solution (such as unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state) will only make things worse. A Palestinian state at this point in history will surely become another front in the quest to destroy Israel, like Gaza but much bigger and closer to Israel’s heartland. Those aspects of Palestinian culture contributing to this impasse must be recognized and confronted; pressuring only Israel will not be enough.
In this article I have emphasized the Palestinian contribution to the conflict because that is the side people are not hearing, while Israel is cast in the role of villain. Israel has made mistakes, and serious ones. Blocking the flow of humanitarian aid for eleven weeks was unconscionable. Unacceptable actions should not be excused, and the extreme right-wing government now controlling Israel is a serious problem. Nevertheless, I still maintain that the root of this conflict is Islamic antisemitism, the motivation for the Palestinian rejection of peaceful coexistence several times, including the UN partition that would have given Palestinians a bigger state of their own than they can now hope to achieve. Blaming Israel exclusively or even primarily for this fiasco is a gross miscarriage of justice, and in my experience, those who do so are unaware of much of this conflict’s history.
With God’s help true peace activists will arise, people on both sides reaching out to each other with respect for the other’s humanity and legitimate aspirations. There are actually groups of people doing exactly this. Unfortunately, you are unlikely to hear of them in campus demonstrations or on the evening news. Perhaps we can lend them our support, in spite of the human tendency to prefer dwelling on blame and resentment rather than constructive cooperation. Are any reporters listening?