Consider first the blood libel that Israel was responsible for the bombing of a Gaza hospital in which 700 civilians were murdered. That narrative is believed throughout the Arab and Muslim world, and in many parts of the rest of the world, especially among student radicals. The evidence to the contrary is overwhelming: virtually every intelligence agency has concluded that Israel did not fire the deadly rocket and it almost certainly came from Islamic Jihad, and that the number of dead is between 100 and 300, not the inflated figures put out by Hamas.
A related lie is that Israel deliberately targets civilian areas in what is the densest part of the world. The truth, of course, is that Gaza is relatively dense in population, but nowhere close to other major cities such as Tel Aviv, Manhattan, Manilla and other Asian metropolises. According to one study, it ranks 63rd in density. I have been in Gaza and have seen the open fields from which Hamas could easily fire its rockets if it didn’t want to endanger its own civilians, but as leaders of Hamas have publicly admitted, they deliberately fire from schools, mosques, hospitals, and other areas where they know civilians will be when Israel justifiably seeks to destroy the rocket launches.
This is part of their game plan: to attack Israeli civilians, requiring Israel to respond, and expecting that Israel will cause collateral damage to the Palestinian human shields, whose bodies can then be paraded in front of willing media cameras. This has been the pattern for more than a quarter of a century.
The other myth is that Hamas is an open-air prison and that its prison guards are Israelis. The truth is that Israel removed every single civilian and soldier (including bodies of their dead that had been buried for years) when Israel ended its occupation in 2005. Israel left behind farm implements, hot houses and other facilities that could have been used to help the people of Gaza. European countries donated money in the effort to turn the Gaza Strip into Singapore on the Mediterranean. But after Hamas defeated the Palestinian Authority in the legislative elections, Hamas terrorists conducted a coup and killed and exiled members of the Palestinian executive, who had also been duly elected. As soon as Hamas took total control of the Gaza Strip, it turned Gaza into a hell hole of poverty and lack of freedoms, including religion, speech, and education. Gaza is not an open-air prison, but what it is resulted exclusively from the actions of Hamas.
As soon as Hamas was able to, it began to use Gaza city as a launching pad for thousands of rockets endangering the lives of Israeli citizens. It was as a response to these attacks that Israel imposed limits on Palestinian exists and entries to the Gaza Strip.
Notwithstanding these limits, thousands of Palestinians were permitted to come into Israel on a daily basis to work and earn much higher salaries than they could have gotten in Gaza. It now turns out that some of these guest-workers were Hamas spies who provided the terrorists with information that was used to slaughter 1400 Israelis and others on October 7th.
The other current myth is that it is Israel that is causing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza by denying it fuel and other necessities. The truth is that Hamas has stores of fuel, water, medicine, and food in the tunnels to which ordinary Palestinians are denied entry. These protective tunnels and humanitarian items are reserved exclusively for Hamas fighters. Hamas can help prevent the humanitarian crisis by giving its supply of fuel to hospitals, instead of using them for the rockets they fire into Israel.
The greatest enemy of the Palestinian people is not Israel, it is Hamas. Israel would be doing the Palestinian people a great favor if it can eliminate Hamas, just as it would be doing a great favor to the Lebanese people if it could eliminate Hezbollah. Iran is the puppet master behind both of these terrorist groups and supports their war against the Palestinian and Lebanese people who want to live in peace with Israel.
Recently, the Secretary General of the United Nations, who has generally been less anti-Israel than some of his predecessors, made an outrageous statement seeking to put into “context“ the beheadings, rapes, murders and kidnappings of 1400 innocent people. Putting such barbarity in context can only be seen as an attempt to justify it, or at least excuse it. Making such a statement disqualifies the head of the United Nations from playing any constructive role in the current crisis. He has become part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. There is no excuse for justification for what Hamas did, or for what so many student and other groups around the world have sought to justify.
Hamas’ barbarity has put Israel into a difficult situation: it must respond by destroying Hamas, but it cannot destroy Hamas without endangering the lives of the human shields that have become Hamas’ primary defense against Israeli counter attacks. Striking the appropriate balance is always difficult— especially with kidnapped Israelis also being used as shields—but the world must understand that every Palestinian or Israeli civilian who dies as the result of the Hamas attacks and its use of civilians as human shields is entirely the fault of Hamas – legally, politically, and morally.
Unless and until the world recognizes and acts on this reality, the Hamas tactic will continue ,and more and more civilians – both Israelis and Palestinians — will die.
Alan M. Dershowitz is one of the best-known criminal defense attorneys and Constitutional scholars in the United States. He taught at Harvard Law School and he has published a series of boos on the Middle East conflict, among them The Case for Israel (2003); The Case for Peace (2005) and Terror Tunnels: The Case for Israel's Just War Against Hamas (2014)
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