‘Rally for Palestine’ zealots embracing Hamas killers and ignoring the real injustice in Gaza
Today, so-called Palestinian solidarity activists are going to stand outside my embassy and “Rally for Palestine”. Their demonstration will ring hollow in both Israel and Gaza, for it coincides with the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s latest campaign of terror and violence on our border and takes place as authentic popular protest inside the Strip is crushed by the Islamist regime.
At dawn on Monday, Hamas launched a rocket. Some 75 miles away, Israeli-british joint nationals Robert and Susan Wolf, together with their children and grandchildren, were awoken by sirens and rushed to a protective shelter.
Seconds later, the missile flattened their house. Had they remained, they would have been killed.
Though an aberration for Robert and Susan Wolf ’s community in central Israel, for those living in the south near Gaza, 15-second warning sirens and frantic dashes to the bomb shelters have unfortunately become all too routine. In the last 12 months alone, almost 1,200 rockets and mortar bombs were fired from the Strip, over 2,000 arson attacks took place and some 100 explosives were detonated at the fence.
Hamas’s jihad is frequently dismissed by the well-meaning as part of a “cycle of violence”, accompanied by an oftrepeated urge for “restraint on both sides”. These calls do nothing to stop the shells, rockets and bullets fired at Israeli communities, abate the incendiaries incinerating vast areas of Israeli farmland and natural habitat, or prevent terrorists breaking through the border to murder and maim.
Such moral equivalence is also grotesquely inaccurate, for it puts Israel’s democracy on par with a militant Islamist autocracy. While the terrorists bombarded Israeli communities with rockets on Monday, they unapologetically broadcast footage of their atrocities, accompanied with calls to “blow up the Zionists”.
By comparison, and without any Gazan deaths, Israel proportionately struck back at the office of Hamas’s leader and surgically demolished a building housing the internal security service charged with the regime’s ruthless oppression.
Given Hamas’s latest crackdown against popular unrest, maybe some in Gaza are grateful to see the damage inflicted upon the hated internal security apparatus. Indeed, only last week did the regime’s thugs shoot at protesters, torture
‘Only last week did regime thugs shoot at protesters and torture dissidents’
dissidents, beat up journalists and impose curfews on neighbourhoods in response to the thousands demonstrating against corruption and rampant misappropriation of international humanitarian aid to support terrorism. Hamas’s intolerance of real demonstrations is more proof that the violent mobs sent to the border fence over the past year have been meticulously planned and orchestrated as part of their terror campaign against Israel. This week’s rocket attacks are an apparent attempt by the Islamist autocrats to distract world attention from their brutal crackdown on popular dissatisfaction with their failing regime.
It is only a pity for those Gazans protesting against Hamas that the zealots behind today’s rally prefer to shake hands with the terrorists and embrace their extremist narrative instead of shunning them.
Perhaps more people ought to question if these activists really do care about the Palestinians, or just hate the Jewish state.
Mark Regev is Israel’s Ambassador to the UK