Kindness Kills

This time around, we are going to take a break from defending Israel. It is an endless, unrewarding task. Even at a global scale, every year, the UN comes out with another list of accusations, and another collection of resolutions or advisories against Israel, and defending against this barrage of hate posing as kindness and impartial law is a Sisyphean task. It has long been known that, historically, the UN spends almost half of its time condemning Israel, all in the name of kind humanitarian causes, and the other half dealing with the other 99% of the world. In recent years, this number can get close to triple the number of resolutions for 1% of the world, despite the egregious crimes taking place within the other 99%. The UN should be renamed the UNAI (United Nations Against Israel). The International Court is a committee, not a court.

No sir; that's quite enough of that futile quest. In this article we will skip over that unpleasant morass, and discuss how best to help Palestinians instead. We will dive into refreshingly satisfying humanitarian concerns and talk about kindness. What kind of kindness do Palestinians need? The world's heart bleeds for the suffering of Palestinians, but how many have actually thought through how best to help them? One must be careful here because if anyone expresses concern for Palestinians but has not actually thought about this question, then it is quite likely that they are all about hating Israel rather than about humanitarian concerns.

I can hear one response to this question already: "How about Israel stop occupying and killing Palestinians; how's that for kindness?" Or, a more moderate and political response would be the following chanted mantra: "A two-state solution is the only way to solve the problem".

To the first response, I'll say, provocatively, that saving an innocent life is not always kindness. For example, if a SWAT team refuses to engage in a hostage situation because they may cause deaths of innocents, they are not doing the hostages any favors by abandoning them to a life-threatening situation. Similarly, a UK soldier in WWII who refuses to fight Germans due to German civilian casualties is being cruel, not kind. Calling for a ceasefire in 1944 would have been cruel to humanity, not kind. It all depends on the context. Only a simple-minded person could conclude that any killing equates with evil.

Many a killing soldier has been kind, and many a humanitarian crusader has been cruel. This makes the crucial difference between a cruel act in the hands of a kind man, and a kind act in the hands of a cruel man.

As to the occupation: I have already shown that occupation can sometimes not only be necessary, but moral. So you are going to have to do better than that. You are going to have to make use of actual history and facts rather than lazy emotional arguments.

I have also argued in the past that, sometimes, crueler wars can be more humane than slow, careful wars. This is a difficult point, but may be a valid one when it concerns specific kinds of wars. As a provocative and very debatable question: Was the bombing in Hiroshima kind or cruel? Did it save more lives in the long run than it destroyed? I don't have the definitive answer to that one, but I do know that without understanding history and the Japanese, there is definitely no chance to answer it.

As to the second type of response, this requires some thinking: How do you know that a two-state solution would solve the problem? Is it some kind of magic wand, where a state is declared and one hundred years of hate goes away in a puff of smoke? Will the extremists magically be subdued? How many extremists are there anyway? Are you sure that Palestinians in general would be happy with having Israel as neighbors? 100 years of Palestinian opinions and polls show otherwise. And if you didn't think about all this, then why are you suggesting solutions that may make things worse? What if the new Palestinian state brings about even more brutal wars than before? Giving Gaza independence resulted in greatly increased terrorism, so we have actual experience and historical facts to counter this suggested naive solution.

You see, in order to find a solution, first we have to define the problem. If a person is not working because he has a health problem, then sending him to a job interview is not the right solution. An act of kindness may be an act of cruelty if one doesn't invest at least some research and thought regarding the person one is trying to help.

Which leads us to the key question about our kindness project: Exactly what kind of trouble plagues the Palestinians from which they need to be saved?

In order to answer this, first we have to define the exact nature of the relationship between Hamas and an average Palestinian. Why this is important will soon become clear.

Some protesters today would say that Hamas are merely resistance fighters and there is no problem with Hamas. To these people I only wish a pleasant vacation in Gaza where they can play very physically-committed medieval role-plays, or, alternatively, they can engage in spiritually uplifting brief parties on rooftops.

As opposed to this magnificently ignorant viewpoint, the vast majority of the world sees Hamas as an extremist minority from which Palestinians need to be saved. The narrative goes something like this: Palestinians are peace-loving people just like us. The extremist Hamas group has taken over, repressed and brainwashed some Palestinians, and brought wars to the Palestinian people which they didn't want, causing much suffering and death. If some Palestinians hate Israel, it's either because they just want a state they can call home and Israel has gotten in the way of this, or because Hamas has brainwashed them. Once they get their state, Hamas will be sidelined and will no longer receive support as they will no longer be needed. Hate will be sidelined to the fringe of society, and peace shall descend onto the world.

As demonstrated in this documentary, as well as in this great article about a Gazan protester, here is a partial list of some of the hardships that Hamas has inflicted on its people:

• Endless wars with Israel every year or two, causing much death and destruction. While they used millions in aid to build themselves tunnels to protect Hamas fighters, not a single shelter has been built for citizens. In the above documentary, Hamas is shown explicitly declaring that Palestinian civilians are the problem of the international community, and not the responsibility of Hamas.
  

• Building weapon storage and military infrastructure in and under civilian buildings, ensuring that civilians get killed. They do this because, in their own words, this is the only way Hamas fighters won't get killed. They admit to using human shields (see above documentary) but justify it because this saves Hamas lives. Their moral logic is unbelievable.

• Blocking civilians from leaving war zones, at gunpoint.

• Heavy taxation on the citizens to the point that merchants go bankrupt. And these taxes are used for war, not for improving lives.

• Not only did Hamas not build water desalination plants and sources of electricity for the civilians and spent most of the millions in aid on terror weapons and tunnels instead, they even took existing infrastructure such as water pipes and converted them to missiles, proudly filming themselves doing so. (Note that this is then used to criticize Israel as if it is they that keep Gazans dependent on Israel for electricity and water).

• The training of young children in ways of murder, as well as war, hate and terrorism.

• As Mosab Hassan Yousef the 'Son of Hamas' also vividly describes based on his own life in Gaza, Hamas inflicts repressive religious laws, violent beatings, torture in prisons, brutal treatment of children, repression of journalists, beatings and killings of people with opposing viewpoints, and even murdering of their rivals in the PLO by throwing them off rooftops.

• All of this while Hamas leaders put financial aid in their own pockets and lead a life of billionaires in Qatar.

All of this heavily supports the notion that, at the very least, Palestinians need to be saved from Hamas.

Even I held this viewpoint at some point in the past. After all, it is all too easy to assume that other people are just like us, and think like us. It is comfortable and reasonable to assume that their society, like other societies, is merely plagued by minority extremists, only in their case, this is a minority that has taken control. Oslo brought a ray of hope for people who thought this way.

Unfortunately, this narrative, while evoking warm and fuzzy feelings, is wrong. I have proven that this is wrong based on words, actions and polls from the Palestinians themselves. Around 75% of Palestinians consistently choose the option of "from the river to the sea..." when given the alternatives of a one-state or two-state solution. 90% support terrorists. Palestinians have initiated massacres of Jews decades before Israel has even come to existence and before Israel even formed a defense army. The PLO had vowed to destroy Israel before the 1967 occupation. The PLO has repeatedly said behind closed doors that Oslo was a springboard for war. And so on...

Reality, as declared by Palestinians themselves, tells us that the only difference between the average Palestinian and Hamas, is that Hamas has picked up a gun. Hamas didn't emerge from outside of Palestine to inflict its ideology on Palestinians; Hamas members are average Palestinians that decided to actually ignite missiles and aim them at Israel.

The fact that 20-45% of Palestinians no longer support Hamas in polls is only due to their repressive governance, not because of their political ideology or their views on war. Otherwise, why would 90% of the same Palestinians support other terrorists that want to wage war and destroy Israel?

While international law differentiates between a civilian that supports terrorists and a civilian that picks up a gun, ideologically speaking, there is no difference. Only one of them is a valid military target, but both are despicable.

Despite this reality, this does not mean that our kindness project and warm, fuzzy feelings must be abandoned. There is still a potential 10% of Palestinians that may want peace. Young children are definitely innocent, and must be saved from terrorists, and from their own parents. There are many, many Palestinian children. And some of the rest of the average Palestinians that have not yet crossed a threshold, may potentially be saved from themselves and from the radicalizing brainwashing regime with a de-radicalization project.

Note that either way, whether you hold the popular viewpoint that the majority of Palestinians want peace, or even if you are in touch with reality where only a minority of Palestinians want peace, at the very least, some of them need to be saved from Hamas.

Which brings us to the next, even more important question. How do you propose this may be achieved? Take your time...

Should we distribute leaflets telling them to protest against Hamas? Gaza has had protesters in the past and it was beaten out of them. Unfortunately, in conformity with the reality I described above, they are also in the minority, which is why they didn't get anywhere and were easily beaten.

Should we build grassroots campaigns to build peaceful initiatives between Israelis and Gaza, cooperate with work and communities, just like many of the people in the southern communities in Israel did up until October 6th 2023 with their Gazan neighbors? We saw the response to that project.

Should we wait for things to change on their own? Things have changed in the 18 years since Gaza became independent: More wars, more weapons, more poverty, more brutality, more suffering. Should we wait some more?

Perhaps we should give Hamas a state and more resources so that they can do what they have promised they would do unrelentingly and explicitly since 1987. Perhaps Hamas will magically transform into good neighbors and convert missiles back into water pipes.

Note that I don't even have to refer to the effects on Israel in order to dissuade you from a Palestinian state. Giving Gaza to Palestinians caused suffering to Palestinians because it gave Palestinian extremists (Hamas, if you prefer) a tool with which to wage wars that repeatedly destroyed Gaza, and, in addition, with which to inflict repression and suffering on Palestinian civilians. As we saw in the documentary, some Palestinians in Gaza complain that life was much better while being occupied by Israel. Of course, they are most probably a minority, but we can see why this is so given what Hamas did to Gaza. Even if you hate Israel, creating a Palestinian state under current circumstances would be cruel to Palestinians. You see, once you do your research and observe history, kindness is not what it seems.

(Just to clarify: I am not against a Palestinian state, merely against one under current circumstances. The ground has to be prepared for it, people need to change, and then it could actually be a good thing for both sides.)

Perhaps we should create more humanitarian international laws protecting civilians? Unfortunately, this would be placing more weapons in the hands of Hamas, because they know they can trample all over these laws while Israel has to abide by them, and then both Hamas and the UN use these laws against Israel. If you look at it this way, humanitarian laws have actually caused more Gazan civilians to be killed. To prove my painfully ironic point: You don't see inter-Arab wars where they use civilians as shields, because they know the other side doesn't care about civilians. It's only when they fight Israel that they use civilians. Think about that one. 

Of course this doesn't mean that humanitarian laws are bad, but it does mean, in this case, due to a lack of practical fine-tuning as well as a lack of impartiality in the UN, that they caused more Palestinian deaths.

Kind acts in the hands of cruel people are cruel acts.

As I argued earlier, this also works vice versa: A cruel act in kind hands may become a kind act. Case in point, consider that perhaps the only way to be kind to Gazans is via war in order to remove Hamas from the equation by force, and thus reduce Palestinian suffering. Perhaps, and I know this may sound insane to some people that have forgotten the nature of war, but perhaps, we may have to kill some Palestinians in order to be kind to them.

Don't tell this to the UN, however, as they may pass yet another resolution. The poor things; they have to use kindness to wage war. It must grate against their nature.