Letter to a young person living in Germany: Israel, Gaza and the lies they tell you

Pro-Palestinian propaganda in the streets of Berlin (Photo: Isaac Nahon-Serfaty)

(I submitted this article to the platform Latinoamérica 21, where I have published several texts in the past. The editor rejected the article without giving a clear reason. He told me (I quote): "It's not necessary. Sorry." This is the kind of censorship other views about the Israeli-Hamas conflict in the media are facing. If your view does not fit the propaganda narrative, you are excluded).

I know the "conversation" we had the other day was harsh, at least on my part. It wasn't really a conversation, but my reaction to your insistence that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, and that Israel's own prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was the main promoter of Hamas, to whom, according to your version of things, he would have even given weapons. I tried to explain to you (but I know it was not possible) that Netanyahu has been heavily criticized for having let Hamas receive money from Qatar and dominate Gaza. It was, according to Netanyahu, a way of dividing the Palestinian political-military movements, especially accentuating the division between Hamas and Fatah, the party that governs the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank (or Judea and Samaria as it has been known historically). It was a serious political and strategic mistake by Netanyahu that Israel has paid dearly for and that must be investigated in due course, as millions of Israelis demand in their massive protests. 

You also said that Israel has always been governed by a reactionary right. It is clear you do not know the history of Israel, which from its founding until the late seventies was governed by socialists. You claimed that from 1948 onwards the Jewish state had committed all kinds of atrocities against the Palestinians. You are convinced that the Palestinians are victims of the Zionist Jews who are now committing the ultimate crime of genocide. This must cause you great mental dissonance, as you were educated in Germany, where in school you were taught about the Holocaust and the role of Nazi Germany and its allies in the extermination of the Jews. How can it be that the descendants of the Jews, who were massacred by the Nazis and their allies, are now committing the same crime against the Palestinians? Moreover, it is not only repeated ad nauseam in the propaganda of Hamas and its acolytes on the radical left, Islamists, and anyone who wants to denigrate Israel, Zionism, and of course, the Jews (although they sometimes deny it). Even such renowned Israelis as the writer David Grossman have affirmed it with the supposed moral authority of a militant for peace and the two-state solution would have: one Jewish and one Arab Palestinian. How can I, a nobody, tell you that Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza? 

Hamas values martyrdom 

 Here are some important considerations to clarify your confused ideas. Israel has not proposed to eliminate the Palestinians living in Gaza. It is fighting a very complicated war for several reasons. Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, as the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, who is not very fond of Israel, has said. Hamas has built an immense network of tunnels to shelter its militiamen, store weapons, hold kidnapped hostages, and launch attacks, but it has never allowed Palestinian civilians to protect themselves in those tunnels from Israeli attacks. Hamas is an Islamist organization that values the martyrdom of Muslims and considers the murder of Jews a religious obligation. This is part of its ideology that you can read in its founding charter and in the statements of its political and military leaders. Furthermore, Israel has been waging a war in a small territory with a large population in which it is very difficult to distinguish civilians from terrorists. And it is documented that some people from the civilian population have collaborated with Hamas and other terrorist groups holding Israeli hostages. It is true that there are elements in the current Israeli government that have spoken of ethnic cleansing in Gaza. That is morally and politically unacceptable, and it is a strategic and geopolitical mistake. I do not see the Israel Defence Forces (Tzahal in Hebrew) implementing such a policy of expelling Palestinians from Gaza. Nor do I believe that a large majority of Israeli citizens would accept such a policy. Israel, despite its internal problems and what its staunchest critics abroad claim, is a democracy in which civil society demonstrates daily against government policies and calls for a ceasefire and the return of the Israeli hostages, who remain kidnapped by Hamas and its partners in terror. 

The propaganda 

You told me that my arguments come from Israeli propaganda. You claimed that there are no independent journalists inside Gaza who can corroborate what I have told you. You are right about that. Israel has limited journalists' access to the strip. Only a few journalists, accompanied by the Israeli army, have been able to do so. It is true that propaganda comes from all sides in a conflict. But you cannot deny that Hamas has waged a masterful propaganda campaign that many young people like you around the world have accepted as the absolute truth of this war. We must recognize that Israel lost the propaganda war. A new generation with no knowledge of the history of the conflict in the Middle East or the history of the Palestinian national movement has ended up demonizing Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement in its ancestral land (yes, the land of Israel, Judea, whatever you want to call it). The war of images, sometimes staged to produce an emotional effect on people, is what generates the impression that Israel is a criminal state fighting Palestinians who have no role in this tragedy, at least they would only have the role of victims. 

The massacres committed by Hamas and other Islamist groups on October 7, 2023, have already been forgotten. The same for the hundreds of people kidnapped by Hamas, some murdered by them in captivity, like the two Bibas children and their mother. It has already been forgotten that Palestinian terrorists in Gaza maintained a campaign of systematic rocket bombardment against Israel. People like you forget that Israel is fighting not only against Hamas, but against an Islamist axis, now weakened, which includes the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah militias in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen. 

Nazis and Palestinians 

And of course, you have no reason to know, but the Palestinian national movement has a rather problematic past. Its leader in the 30s and 40s of the 20th century, Amin Al-Husseini (or al-Husainy), known as the Mufti of Jerusalem, was an enthusiastic collaborator of the Nazis. He lived in Berlin during the Second World War, broadcasting radio propaganda in Arabic in favour of the Nazis. The ideology of Hamas and other Palestinian factions is nourished by the same ideas of Al-Husseini. A large part of the Palestinian population has been educated in this anti-Jewish, maximalist ideology, which is not open to a compromise for a Jewish state to exist alongside a Palestinian Arab state. Every time the Palestinian Arabs had the possibility of accepting the two-state solution, they always rejected it. That is the historical truth. Do some research, get the facts. Don't get carried away by the "fashionable sentiment." It is true that the youngest today tend to be "anti-Zionist" (never anti-Jewish!, as you told me). The line between anti-Zionism and anti-Judaism is very thin. After all, Israel is the only Jewish state in the world. And if people deny the right of self-determination to Jews in the land that saw them born as a nation, well, there is something of anti-Judaism in anti-Zionism. I ask you to reflect, although I know it will not be easy. You have seen too many harsh images of emaciated Palestinian children, clearly well manipulated and disseminated by media outlets that do not verify the information they publish. I know it sounds paradoxical and morally repugnant that the Jews, those of whom you were told in your school were the victims of the Nazis, are now supposedly behaving like their former executioners. 

This war is a tragedy for Israelis, for Palestinians, and for Jews who live outside of Israel. It is a tragedy well conceived by Hamas and the radicals who support it. The calculation of the Palestinian terrorists was precisely to produce a reaction from Israel that would turn the tables: the country that suffered the massacre of twelve hundred of its inhabitants and the kidnapping of 251 citizens would now become a “genocidal" entity in the eyes of the world. In that sense, Hamas has achieved its objective of persuading many people that they are now the victims, including young people like you. 

Of course, this objective has been achieved at the cost of the suffering of Israelis and their own Palestinian compatriots in Gaza. But that is the price that the Islamists are willing to pay to destroy Israel and install their caliphate throughout Palestine, from the river (the Jordan) to the sea (the Mediterranean). You should be more skeptical and practise methodical doubt. 

Do not get carried away by first impressions. I understand it will not be easy. Try it. Perhaps one day we can finally have a conversation about this thorny issue.