Jonathan S. Tobin
Hamas terrorists are counting on Jewish empathy to let them survive to continue pursuing the genocidal war they began on Oct. 7. Anyone who does their bidding is despicable and dangerous.
Comedian Jon Stewart attends Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” FYC Event at Linwood Dunn Theater in Los Angeles on June 7, 2025. Photo by Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Comedy Central.
The avalanche of anti-Israel propaganda as a result of a flurry of reports of alleged starvation in the Gaza Strip is starting to overwhelm even the most stalwart supporters of the Jewish state. The images of suffering, even if some of them are fraudulent, have created a sense among many observers that the international opprobrium directed at the Jewish state is so great that it’s no longer a point that can or even should be disputed. They argue that regardless of who is to blame, it’s incumbent on Jerusalem—as the most powerful actor in the conflict—to put an end to the problem, no matter what that might mean.
Some even argue that this is true even if the food crisis is the result of manipulation by Hamas. A ceasefire and flooding the Strip with aid will give the Islamist terrorist group a lifeline, enabling them to emerge triumphant from the war they started on Oct. 7, 2023, with the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. But Israel’s critics, including some who claim to love the Jewish state, now tell us that’s unimportant.
What’s more, others—whether religious groups like the Reform movement, prestigious liberal journalists like The New Yorker’s David Remnick or secular comics like the Comedy Channel’s Jon Stewart (who used his show to platform the anti-Zionist Jewish journalist Peter Beinart, who believes in Israel’s elimination) or Jewish actor Mandy Patinkin, are loudly asserting that Israel has betrayed Jewish values in fighting its defensive war against Hamas.
An ‘as a Jew’ moment
As such, and perhaps more than in any other moment in the history of the modern state, this is the quintessential “as a Jew” moment, when many of those who are Jewish or who can claim some association with the Jewish people have come out of the woodwork to condemn Israel, alongside others who have been bashing it nonstop for years.
Those engaging in these arguments speak as if they have the moral high ground that Israel has conceded because of its wartime conduct. The emotional appeals about hunger in Gaza, with some Jews arguing that nothing—not the Palestinian crimes committed on Oct. 7, the necessity to ensure that doesn’t happen again or the possibility of Hamas’s revival—can justify the situation are supposedly rooted in the values of Jewish tradition and faith that the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is allegedly betraying.
These claims are false, despicable and dangerous.
To reject this view is not to deny that Palestinians are suffering. They are and have been since civilians began paying the price for tolerating a Hamas government in Gaza and its genocidal fantasy of an endless war to destroy the neighboring Jewish state. And that suffering has only increased as the war has dragged on into its 22nd month, with no end in sight as long as Hamas continues to reject even the generous terms for a ceasefire and hostage release deal sponsored by the United States.
Indeed, once their celebrations of the Oct. 7 atrocities, in which thousands of Palestinian civilians as well as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters took part, the people of Gaza have been the human shields behind which the terrorists hide, allowing them to continue the war and holding onto 50 hostages, both living and dead. That is a tragedy. And even though the Hamas casualty statistics are exaggerated to the point of being largely fictional, there should be no denying that many thousands of Arab civilians have been killed, wounded or endured privations as a result of the war begun by the organization that claims to represent them.
An immoral argument
The notion that Israel’s determination to continue the war until Hamas is eradicated and all hostages are released is not merely wrongheaded. It is itself immoral. Simply put, the responsibility for the suffering of the side that started the war and seeks to continue it in order to kill more Jews and destroy the one Jewish state on the planet belongs to Hamas—and its foreign enablers and fellow travelers—not to Israel.
The century-old conflict between Jews and Arabs over the small country between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, about the size of New Jersey, may be one that is complex, with both sides having historical grievances that are real. But the war that started on Oct. 7 is not morally complex. Any argument that it should be allowed to end with Hamas still standing and in control of any part of Gaza should be labeled for what is—no matter the motivations or the origins of those who make it—an unconscionable surrender to a genocidal organization that means to engage in similar orgies of mass murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction.
Yet that is the argument that much of the world, as well as misguided, faint-hearted Jews, have been echoing for much of the last 22 months.
Logical arguments about the war are deemed irrelevant. Even President Donald Trump, a strong supporter of Israel who only days earlier was calling for Israel to “finish” Hamas in response to the terror group blowing up the negotiations for a ceasefire-hostage release deal that he was pushing for, seemed to have been persuaded by the deluge of images of starving Palestinians on television to change his tune.
Add to that the way France, Britain, and now, Canada are threatening to recognize a Palestinian state at the U.N. General Assembly in September, coupled with the demands of 25 countries and the European Union that Israel end the conflict, and it’s fair to say that the Jewish state’s isolation is increasing.
Instead of pushing back against these stands that are rooted in cynical political motives rather than humanitarian concerns, Jewish critics of Israel are engaged in moral preening, asserting that they are standing up for Jewish values against an immoral Israel.
The hearts of many Jews are always ready to bleed for victims of war, wherever they are to be found, even among those who wage war on Israel. But they ought to understand that granting a reprieve to Hamas because of, and not in spite of, the suffering they have imposed on their own people is neither moral nor a rational response to a difficult problem. And by doubling down on misleading and false media narratives about the conflict or claiming that the accuracy of the Hamas propaganda about casualties or starvation that the mainstream media parrots, they are only encouraging Hamas to continue to hang on rather than to give up.
It is true that Jewish tradition teaches us to pity such victims. But as the Midrash Tanchuma teaches, “Anyone who has pity on the cruel will show cruelty to the merciful.” That is certainly an apt description of policies that extend a lifeline to Hamas.
Losing the information war
The irony is that there is no question that Israel is losing the information war, even as it has achieved real victories on the battlefield. Public relations (hasbara in Hebrew) has never been an Israeli forte as it goes about the business of living. While the conflict in Gaza is dragging on to the point where it has exhausted the Israel Defense Forces and the Israeli people, the idea that defeating Hamas is a fantasy cooked up by Netanyahu and his associates remains profoundly wrong. The terrorists are a shadow of their former strength. The war that they initiated has turned into a decisive victory for Israel, in which Hamas, Hezbollah and their Iranian sponsors have all suffered decisive defeats that have only bolstered the Jewish state’s strategic position.
The reason why Hamas is continuing a bloody guerrilla war in Gaza, even after its military formations and capability of inflicting rocket fire on Israeli civilians have been smashed, is that they are—as they have been long before Oct. 7—counting on public opinion in the West to hand them an undeserved victory. That is why they have done everything they could to maximize civilian deaths by fighting among and underneath them in tunnels, as well as using hospitals and schools as strongholds.
It’s also why they have deliberately created a food crisis by stealing the massive amounts of aid that Israel has allowed into the Strip, and then hoarding most of the food for their cadres and selling some of it to the population at exorbitant prices. They have also used terrorism to make it difficult, if not impossible, for civilians to access food brought in by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, created by Israel and the United States.
This has created great suffering. However, it should be noted that these privations are apparently not enough to create a mass movement among the residents of Gaza to resist Hamas or to demand that it do the one thing that would have ended the war at any point since Oct. 7: release all the remaining hostages and corpses of the murder victims that they continue to hold.
As has been the case for decades, those who criticize or condemn Israel act as if the Palestinians have no moral agency for their conduct or fate.
Instead, Israel-bashers and the “more in sorrow than anger” critics who lament its alleged betrayal of Jewish traditions seem to think that the Palestinians have no responsibility for what has happened and must be saved from the consequences of their actions, no matter how often they reject peace or even just a cessation of hostilities. They don’t care that Israel has fought this war with greater morality and concern for the safety of civilians than in any prior instance of urban combat. Instead, they demand something unique in history: that an aggrieved combatant in a war forced upon them assume complete responsibility for the enemy population even before their opponents surrender.
Israel has gone a long way toward doing just that by allowing aid into Gaza throughout the current conflict. Even that unprecedented gesture has not been enough to silence critics.
Israel isn’t perfect, and neither is Netanyahu. But the prime minister’s resolve in pursuing his country’s war goals in the face of overwhelming American pressure prior to Trump returning to office in January and the drumbeat of unfair international opprobrium since Oct. 8 has enhanced his country’s security immeasurably. Treating the continuation of the war until victory as merely a cynical political ploy on his part or a hateful desire for revenge on the Palestinians is unfair. It also does real damage to Israel’s ability to defend itself against enemies that are still seeking to shed Jewish blood.
That’s why it’s vital to understand that the Jewish virtue-signaling about Gaza is more than just misguided moral posturing.
By taking sides against Israel and joining the chorus of those who seek to delegitimize its self-defense and force an end to the war in a way that clearly grants a triumph to Hamas, these “as a Jew” critics, like Stewart or Patinkin, are giving aid and comfort to genocidal Islamists that is as real as the suffering of the Palestinians. The same is true of many in the Reform movement who have allowed their progressive politics to get in the way of the religious denomination’s moral compass.
It’s also important to point out that those who make these criticisms have no answers as to how Israel can defend itself in a way that will not harm Palestinian civilians, while at the same time, Hamas is determined to maximize their suffering. Anguish about the situation of the Palestinians won’t make things better for them. On the contrary, by lending their voices to the information war against Israel, they ensure that they remain under the thumb of Hamas and others who are similarly committed to the destruction of the Jewish state.
Joining the mob
Though those who speak for Israel and the IDF can always do better, the information war against Israel that is being conducted in bad faith won’t be won by better communication strategies. The only way through is for Jerusalem to stick to its justified demands for an end to Hamas rule in Gaza and for those who care about the Jewish state to give it their backing, despite the temptation to join the mobs smearing it.
Virtue-signaling about Gaza starvation isn’t a reflection of Jewish values. It is a gift to the enemies of the Jewish people, whose goal is the shedding of more Jewish blood.
War remains, as it has always been: sheer hell. The only moral way to end this one is with Hamas’s surrender of control of every inch of Gaza and freedom for all of the hostages. Those who deviate from those demands are doing great harm to both sides in this war to feel good about themselves and to stay in sync with liberal political fashion. And that’s not merely wrong, but deeply, deeply immoral.
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