Anti-Israel virtue-signaling on Gaza is immoral
Hamas terrorists are counting on Jewish empathy to let them
survive to continue pursuing the genocidal war they began on Oct. 7.
Anyone who does their bidding is despicable and dangerous.
JNS
Jul 30, 2025
Palestinian civilians from Gaza enter the Israeli community of Kibbutz Be'eri where they committed atrocities against innocent men women, children and babies on October 7, 2023.
The avalanche of anti-Israel propaganda as
a result of a flurry of reports of alleged starvation in the Gaza Strip
is starting to overwhelm even the most stalwart supporters of the
Jewish state. The images of suffering, even if some of them are fraudulent,
have created a sense among many observers that the international
opprobrium directed at the Jewish state is so great that it’s no longer a
point that can or even should be disputed. They argue that regardless
of who is to blame, it’s incumbent on Jerusalem—as the most powerful
actor in the conflict—to put an end to the problem, no matter what that
might mean.
Some even argue that this is true even if
the food crisis is the result of manipulation by Hamas. A ceasefire and
flooding the Strip with aid will give the Islamist terrorist group a
lifeline, enabling them to emerge triumphant from the war they started
on Oct. 7, 2023, with the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the
Holocaust. But Israel’s critics, including some who claim to love the
Jewish state, now tell us that’s unimportant.
What’s more, others—whether religious groups like the Reform movement, prestigious liberal journalists like The New Yorker’s David Remnick or secular comics like the Comedy Channel’s Jon Stewart
(who used his show to platform the anti-Zionist Jewish journalist Peter
Beinart, who believes in Israel’s elimination) or Jewish actor Mandy Patinkin, are loudly asserting that Israel has betrayed Jewish values in fighting its defensive war against Hamas.
An ‘as a Jew’ moment
As such, and perhaps more than in any
other moment in the history of the modern state, this is the
quintessential “as a Jew” moment, when many of those who are Jewish or
who can claim some association with the Jewish people have come out of
the woodwork to condemn Israel, alongside others who have been bashing
it nonstop for years.
Those engaging in these arguments speak as
if they have the moral high ground that Israel has conceded because of
its wartime conduct. The emotional appeals about hunger in Gaza, with
some Jews arguing that nothing—not the Palestinian crimes committed on
Oct. 7, the necessity to ensure that doesn’t happen again or the
possibility of Hamas’s revival—can justify the situation are supposedly
rooted in the values of Jewish tradition and faith that the government
of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is allegedly betraying.
These claims are false, despicable and dangerous.
To reject this view is not to deny that
Palestinians are suffering. They are and have been since civilians began
paying the price for tolerating a Hamas government in Gaza and its
genocidal fantasy of an endless war to destroy the neighboring Jewish
state. And that suffering has only increased as the war has dragged on
into its 22nd month, with no end in sight as long as Hamas continues to
reject even the generous terms for a ceasefire and hostage release deal
sponsored by the United States.
Indeed, once their celebrations of the
Oct. 7 atrocities, in which thousands of Palestinian civilians as well
as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters took part, the people of
Gaza have been the human shields behind which the terrorists hide,
allowing them to continue the war and holding onto 50 hostages, both
living and dead. That is a tragedy. And even though the Hamas casualty
statistics are exaggerated to the point of being largely fictional,
there should be no denying that many thousands of Arab civilians have
been killed, wounded or endured privations as a result of the war begun
by the organization that claims to represent them.
An immoral argument
The notion that Israel’s determination to
continue the war until Hamas is eradicated and all hostages are released
is not merely wrongheaded. It is itself immoral. Simply put, the
responsibility for the suffering of the side that started the war and
seeks to continue it in order to kill more Jews and destroy the one
Jewish state on the planet belongs to Hamas—and its foreign enablers and
fellow travelers—not to Israel.
The century-old conflict between Jews and
Arabs over the small country between the Jordan River and the
Mediterranean Sea, about the size of New Jersey, may be one that is
complex, with both sides having historical grievances that are real. But
the war that started on Oct. 7 is not morally complex. Any argument
that it should be allowed to end with Hamas still standing and in
control of any part of Gaza should be labeled for what is—no matter the
motivations or the origins of those who make it—an unconscionable
surrender to a genocidal organization that means to engage in similar
orgies of mass murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction.
Yet that is the argument that much of the
world, as well as misguided, faint-hearted Jews, have been echoing for
much of the last 22 months.
Logical arguments about the war are deemed
irrelevant. Even President Donald Trump, a strong supporter of Israel
who only days earlier was calling for Israel to “finish” Hamas in
response to the terror group blowing up the negotiations for a
ceasefire-hostage release deal that he was pushing for, seemed to have
been persuaded by the deluge of images of starving Palestinians on
television to change his tune.
Add to that the way France, Britain, and now, Canada
are threatening to recognize a Palestinian state at the U.N. General
Assembly in September, coupled with the demands of 25 countries and the
European Union that Israel end the conflict, and it’s fair to say that
the Jewish state’s isolation is increasing.
Instead of pushing back against these
stands that are rooted in cynical political motives rather than
humanitarian concerns, Jewish critics of Israel are engaged in moral
preening, asserting that they are standing up for Jewish values against
an immoral Israel.
The hearts of many Jews are always ready
to bleed for victims of war, wherever they are to be found, even among
those who wage war on Israel. But they ought to understand that granting
a reprieve to Hamas because of, and not in spite of, the suffering they
have imposed on their own people is neither moral nor a rational
response to a difficult problem. And by doubling down on misleading and
false media narratives about the conflict or claiming that the accuracy
of the Hamas propaganda about casualties or starvation that the
mainstream media parrots, they are only encouraging Hamas to continue to
hang on rather than to give up.
It is true that Jewish tradition teaches
us to pity such victims. But as the Midrash Tanchuma teaches, “Anyone
who has pity on the cruel will show cruelty to the merciful.” That is
certainly an apt description of policies that extend a lifeline to
Hamas.
Losing the information war
The irony is that there is no question
that Israel is losing the information war, even as it has achieved real
victories on the battlefield. Public relations (hasbara in
Hebrew) has never been an Israeli forte as it goes about the business of
living. While the conflict in Gaza is dragging on to the point where it
has exhausted the Israel Defense Forces and the Israeli people, the
idea that defeating Hamas is a fantasy cooked up by Netanyahu and his
associates remains profoundly wrong. The terrorists are a shadow of
their former strength. The war that they initiated has turned into a
decisive victory for Israel, in which Hamas, Hezbollah and their Iranian
sponsors have all suffered decisive defeats that have only bolstered
the Jewish state’s strategic position.
The reason why Hamas is continuing a
bloody guerrilla war in Gaza, even after its military formations and
capability of inflicting rocket fire on Israeli civilians have been
smashed, is that they are—as they have been long before Oct. 7—counting
on public opinion in the West to hand them an undeserved victory. That
is why they have done everything they could to maximize civilian deaths
by fighting among and underneath them in tunnels, as well as using
hospitals and schools as strongholds.
It’s also why they have deliberately
created a food crisis by stealing the massive amounts of aid that Israel
has allowed into the Strip, and then hoarding most of the food for
their cadres and selling some of it to the population at exorbitant
prices. They have also used terrorism to make it difficult, if not
impossible, for civilians to access food brought in by the Gaza
Humanitarian Foundation, created by Israel and the United States.
This has created great suffering. However,
it should be noted that these privations are apparently not enough to
create a mass movement among the residents of Gaza to resist Hamas or to
demand that it do the one thing that would have ended the war at any
point since Oct. 7: release all the remaining hostages and corpses of
the murder victims that they continue to hold.
As has been the case for decades, those
who criticize or condemn Israel act as if the Palestinians have no moral
agency for their conduct or fate.
Instead, Israel-bashers and the “more in
sorrow than anger” critics who lament its alleged betrayal of Jewish
traditions seem to think that the Palestinians have no responsibility
for what has happened and must be saved from the consequences of their
actions, no matter how often they reject peace or even just a cessation
of hostilities. They don’t care that Israel has fought
this war with greater morality and concern for the safety of civilians
than in any prior instance of urban combat. Instead, they demand
something unique in history: that an aggrieved combatant in a war forced
upon them assume complete responsibility for the enemy population even
before their opponents surrender.
Israel has gone a long way toward doing
just that by allowing aid into Gaza throughout the current conflict.
Even that unprecedented gesture has not been enough to silence critics.
Israel isn’t perfect, and neither is
Netanyahu. But the prime minister’s resolve in pursuing his country’s
war goals in the face of overwhelming American pressure prior to Trump
returning to office in January and the drumbeat of unfair international
opprobrium since Oct. 8 has enhanced his country’s security
immeasurably. Treating the continuation of the war until victory as
merely a cynical political ploy on his part or a hateful desire for
revenge on the Palestinians is unfair. It also does real damage to
Israel’s ability to defend itself against enemies that are still seeking
to shed Jewish blood.
That’s why it’s vital to understand that the Jewish virtue-signaling about Gaza is more than just misguided moral posturing.
By taking sides against Israel and joining
the chorus of those who seek to delegitimize its self-defense and force
an end to the war in a way that clearly grants a triumph to Hamas,
these “as a Jew” critics, like Stewart or Patinkin, are giving aid and
comfort to genocidal Islamists that is as real as the suffering of the
Palestinians. The same is true of many in the Reform movement who have
allowed their progressive politics to get in the way of the religious
denomination’s moral compass.
It’s also important to point out that
those who make these criticisms have no answers as to how Israel can
defend itself in a way that will not harm Palestinian civilians, while
at the same time, Hamas is determined to maximize their suffering.
Anguish about the situation of the Palestinians won’t make things better
for them. On the contrary, by lending their voices to the information
war against Israel, they ensure that they remain under the thumb of
Hamas and others who are similarly committed to the destruction of the
Jewish state.
Joining the mob
Though those who speak for Israel and the
IDF can always do better, the information war against Israel that is
being conducted in bad faith won’t be won by better communication
strategies. The only way through is for Jerusalem to stick to its
justified demands for an end to Hamas rule in Gaza and for those who
care about the Jewish state to give it their backing, despite the
temptation to join the mobs smearing it.
Virtue-signaling about Gaza starvation
isn’t a reflection of Jewish values. It is a gift to the enemies of the
Jewish people, whose goal is the shedding of more Jewish blood.
War remains, as it has always been: sheer
hell. The only moral way to end this one is with Hamas’s surrender of
control of every inch of Gaza and freedom for all of the hostages. Those
who deviate from those demands are doing great harm to both sides in
this war to feel good about themselves and to stay in sync with liberal
political fashion. And that’s not merely wrong, but deeply, deeply
immoral.
Displaced
Palestinians carry food parcels and supplies from a GHF aid
distribution point at the “Netzarim corridor” in central Gaza, July 31,
2025. 
