Like the Pharoah of the Exodus, Hamas and the PA refuse to stop the hate and the killing and do what would be best for their own people because killing Jews is always more important to them. Opinion.
The holiday of Passover, commemorating the Jewish people’s exodus from Egypt after hundreds of years of slavery, oppression, and mass murder, is less than two weeks away. The Passover Haggadah and the Hebrew Bible describe the plagues and calamities that were inflicted on Egypt until the people were finally freed and let go to worship their God and live in their own land, all of which could have and would have been avoided had Pharoah been reasonable and done the right thing earlier.
Before and after every plague, Pharoah was given the opportunity to avoid the next plague by simply agreeing to Moses’ demands to let the Israelites go. Egypt could have spared itself the Nile River turning to blood, being swarmed with frogs, its people being covered in lice, the streets filling with wild beasts, the death of their livestock, the boils, the deadly hail, the locust swarms, the darkness, and the death of the firstborn. Each and every one of the ten plagues could have been averted if Pharoah had simply said “yes” and kept his word.
After the seventh plague, Pharaoh’s advisers were begging him to see reason and let the Israelites go, warning that Egypt was on the verge of being destroyed. It took three more plagues for his hardened heart to accept that the continued oppression of the people he enslaved was not worth the destruction it was bringing upon his nation. Even then, he could not stop himself from attempting to slaughter the Israelites after finally letting them go, leading to one more self-inflicted calamity that could have been avoided if Pharoah would simply decided to stop choosing evil – the drowning of the Egyptian army in the Red Sea.
It was so simple: Just stop killing Jews and let them go. But Pharoah could not do the latter until the firstborn were dead, and he could not stop killing until his army was destroyed and the people he wanted to kill were on the other side of the sea and beyond his reach.
History has repeated itself in the form of modern anti-Zionism and its most extreme devotees in Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. None of the death and destruction that has occurred in the Gaza Strip over the last year and a half would have happened had Hamas not brought it upon itself.
The war would not have happened at all had Hamas simply not committed the October 7 massacre, slaughtering 1,200 people, mostly civilians, raping, burning, and butchering with an inhuman sadism, and taking over 250 people hostage. The war could have ended at any time had Hamas surrendered, released the hostages, and its leaders left Gaza.
Like Pharoah, they refuse to stop, they refuse to see reason, and they refuse to let the captive Jews go and to stop killing Jews. They still vow to commit another October 7 and are killing the Gazans who have finally had enough of this war and have begun to protest against them. Killing Jews is more important than the lives of the people in Gaza to Hamas and its supporters.
This is the defining characteristic of Arab Palestinism, its essence. They refuse to stop killing Jews even if it would mean a state of their own, even if it would mean that they would stop dying and have far better lives.
All the Arabs – not just the Palestinian ones – had to do was not massacre Jews in the 1920s, and there would have been no need for a Haganah and no Irgun. All they had to do was not attempt to wipe out the Jews in 1948, and there would have been no “Nakba.” All they had to do was not mass their armies on Israel’s border and vow to wipe out the young nation and there would have been no Six Day War.
And since 1993 and the signing of the Oslo Accords, all the Palestinian Arabs had to do to gain their independence was stop killing Jews. But they never stopped, in fact they never considered stopping. Killing Jews, men and women, babies and the elderly alike, has for decades been the only goal of their entire national movement.
Yasser Arafat never lifted a finger to stop terrorism, to stop the killing and bloodshed. He facilitated it. He cooperated with Hamas rather than do what the leader of a state would do and act to ensure that his forces had a monopoly on power. He taught the people under his rule that the only thing of value in life is killing Jews, never for a second considering the possibility of peace or of any way of life that did not involve slaughtering Jews.
In the moment of truth, Arafat walked away from the offer of a state with a capital in Jerusalem, choosing death over life, murder of statehood, and proving for the thousandth time that killing Jews was more important to him than having his own state. All of the death and destruction of the Second Intifada could have and would have been avoided had Arafat decided to stop killing Jews.
In 2005, Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, not only pulling out all military forces, but expelling every last Jewish person, even the dead who were buried in Gaza. With untold billions in expected international aid and business investments, this was an opportunity for Gaza to thrive, to become a model for the entire world, a new Singapore. And all they had to do was stop killing Jews so they could focus on bettering their own lives.
But instead, Gazans elected Hamas, electing to kill Jews over making a killing, choosing the fantasy of one day committing genocide against the Jews over what would have been a reality of prosperity. Soon rockets were fired with regularity at Sderot and other cities and towns in southern Israel, IDF soldiers were killed and abducted in cross-border raids, and the pattern of Hamas attacks and Israeli reprisals in Gaza began.
The rise to power of Hamas in Gaza ended the possibility of a similar Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria, which would have been likely had Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert’s Kadima party been able to remain in power. But again, the Palestinian Arabs missed an opportunity because they chose to kill Jews instead.
Arafat’s successor Mahmoud Abbas, proved incapable of reversing any of the disastrous decisions made by his predecessor. Abbas walked away from an even more generous statehood offer in 2008, again unable to sign any deal agreeing to stop killing Jews. He has made his highest priority the continuation of the Palestinian Authority’s payments to murderers, again choosing killing Jews over his people’s economic and physical well-being.
In 2015, Abbas again chose killing Jews, launching a campaign of incitement because a small but growing number of Jews were visiting the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism. Instead of acting like a human being and simply letting Jews go to their holy site, he launched a campaign of hatred in which he supported the “knife-intifada” in which Arabs would stab Jews, killing many. Abbas claimed that by visiting the Temple Mount, Jews were desecrating the Al Aqsa Mosque “with their filthy feet” and stated, “We bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem.”
At every step, whenever they could have had a State, the Palestinian Arabs and their leaders have always decided that it was not worth it to have a state in any form as long as Israel still existed and the Jews still lived.
For over three decades, the Palestinian Arabs have suffered not because of Israel, but because they and their leaders refuse to stop killing Jews. That’s all it would have taken to create an Arab Palestinian State. But like Pharoah more than 3,000 years ago, letting go of hate and stopping the killing has been a bridge too far. The killing of Jews must continue, no matter the cost.
Unfortunately, killing Jews makes Hamas and the Palestinian Arab s popular. There are many people around the world who love the sight of dead Jews, of raped Jewish women, of Jewish babies shot, stabbed, strangled, or burned to death. Those people have demonstrated in support of the Hamas butchers in New York, in Sydney, in London, and on college campuses such as Columbia University. They form the governments of countries such as Iran, Turkey, and South Africa, they work at the UN and at so-called human rights organizations like Amnesty International. They range from communists and socialists on the far-left to neo-Nazis on the far-right.
But these people do not have the best interests of anyone in the Middle East in their hearts, least of all the Palestinian Arabs. They do not care how many others have to die as long as Jews continue to be killed.
The solution to the entire conflict is so simple: Do the one thing you have never considered doing and stop killing Jews.
Stop killing Jews and you will stop being killed in response.
Stop killing Jews and you will have time, energy, and the resources to make your lives better and build a bustling economy.
Stop killing Jews and you will have your own state very quickly.
Stop killing Jews and your children will grow up without this pointless conflict that should have ended before you were born had your parents and grandparents stopped the killing.
It’s so simple: Stop killing Jews.
