A few days after the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack when some 1,200 people were brutally murdered and more than 240 were taken hostage, a local county commissioner voted against lighting Portland, Oregon’s, Morrison Bridge in the blue and white colors of the Israeli flag. Explaining her decision, the commissioner stated that such a move – which took place the next day, despite her opposition – would be “tone deaf” to the sensibilities of the local Palestinian community, given their history of “colonization and displacement of indigenous people.”
Around the same time, an op-ed in The Oregonian newspaper justified the Hamas massacre by claiming, “For 16 years, Palestinians in Gaza have been trapped by the Israeli government in what is effectively an open-air prison.” In the ensuing weeks, local pro-Palestinian groups, including anti-Zionist Jews, organized multiple protests against Israeli military operations in Gaza, which, predictably, they portrayed as a “genocide.”
Israel is waging war on two fronts: the ground war in Gaza, and the court of public opinion. The first requires defeating a vast terrorist infrastructure deliberately embedded within a civilian population. The second necessitates not only refuting perpetual Hamas disinformation (such as the Al-Ahli Hospital bombing) but also refuting false narratives long peddled by anti-Israel groups and now cited as the gospel truth in news accounts, op-eds, university student statements, and social media posts.
Israel's fight against Hamas in the court of public opinion
Anyone watching CNN’s coverage of the war will hear its reporters consistently refer to Hamas terrorists as “militants” or “fighters.” In a similar vein, John Simpson, the BBC News world affairs editor, gave this explanation for the BBC’s refusal to label as terrorism the heinous October 7 attack: “‘Terrorism’ is a loaded word…. We don’t take sides. We don’t talk about ‘terrorists.’”
This isn’t about taking sides, however – it’s about reporting the facts. If slaughtering entire families, beheading babies, burning young people alive, and kidnapping infants, women, and Holocaust survivors isn’t terrorism, what is?
Equally egregious is the media describing the Hamas terrorist attack as part of the “cycle of violence” between Israelis and Palestinians. Lost on the purveyors of this misconception is the fact that it’s the Jewish state’s existence, not its actions, which provokes Hamas violence. If the terrorism had ceased, there would have been no need for Israeli military actions in Gaza.
The longer Israel’s ground offensive takes, the more we will see the casualty “scoreboard” with the Palestinian death toll inevitably rising and the narrative shifting away from Israeli trauma. What is hard to comprehend is why the media merely parrot – rather than question the statistics they receive from a health ministry run by a terrorist group.
After all, Hamas has a well-documented record of inflating casualty numbers and claiming that nearly all of those killed by Israeli forces are “civilians.” How, for example, could Hamas have reported an accurate death toll within minutes after the Al-Ahli Hospital parking lot was hit by what they falsely claimed was an Israeli bomb?
These false narratives fuel the lie that Israel is – and has been – committing a genocide of the Palestinians. Unlike Hamas, which uses their own people as human shields to drive up the civilian casualty toll and thus inflame public opinion against Israel, the IDF goes to great lengths to avoid harming civilians. The only party to this conflict with genocidal intent is Hamas, whose charter calls for Israel’s destruction and the murder of every Jew on the planet.
The absurd accusation that Israel is perpetrating genocide transcends the current war. Sadly, we Jews know what genocide looks like. During the Holocaust, two out of every three Jews in Europe were murdered. By contrast, the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza has increased more than fivefold since Israel’s establishment in 1948. If the Israelis were truly trying to commit genocide, they must be incredibly inept.
Those who condone the worst terror attack in Israel’s history while seeking to undermine Israel’s efforts to protect its people have also been propagating the fiction of Gaza as an “open-air prison.” Does anyone still have to question why Israel (as well as Egypt) had to secure its border with the terrorist enclave next door?
And yet, despite Hamas’ takeover following the total Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, Israel allowed daily hundreds of trucks carrying food, medicine, and other goods through the Kerem Shalom border crossing. Before the attack, moreover, Israel had issued 20,000 permits for Gazans to enter and work inside Israel.
Facts matter. Context matters. But even if one believes the false narratives (such as the misguided belief that Jews are “foreign interlopers” who aren’t indigenous to the Land of Israel), rationalizing or excusing the appalling atrocities committed by Hamas is, at best, to lack moral clarity. Or at worst, to be altogether without moral values. ■
The writer is director of Community Relations and Public Affairs at the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland.