A message for Jewish Gen Zers outside of Israel

Particularly those of you who are in universities throughout North America and publicly support Hamas. 

What is wrong with you?

You were born into a world that does not remember a time without Israel and neither do your parents. You were raised by people who did not want to be defined by their religion and desperately wanted to fit in. Since most of you have never experienced an anti-Semetic attack, big or small, you do not know that feeling when a teacher, a stranger, or someone you thought was your friend, said something so outrageous and hurtful about Jews that you were stunned into silence.

You were raised with a sense of tolerance that probably originated with your grandparents or great grandparents who were often newcomers to the US and Canada.  It was never clearly explained to you so you thought you were just a really “woke” person. You probably never came home from your first semester away at university and laughed about the awful eating habits of another minority group only to have your otherwise even-keeled father look at you like you were an alien and say: “I never want to hear something like that from you again. Your grandparents were immigrants with habits that seemed strange to people in their new countries who ostracized them for being different. Don’t you ever forget where you came from.” Yes, that happened. To me. And I have never forgotten that lecture.

However, because you are so “open-minded  and tolerant” you have failed to notice a few very obvious things:

• No matter who you root for, the world will always count you as a Jew. Many Jewish WWI war heroes in Germany died in Auschwitz.
• You would have made great kapos, betraying your people to save yourselves. Trust me, holocaust survivors remembered their kapos and many of them were imprisoned or put to death with the other Nazis after the war.
• You have no integrity. There is nothing moral or principled about betraying your people.
• You are a member of a very small ethno-religious group who do not proselytize and believe that it is their collective goal to leave the world a better place than they found it. Many Jews have made notable progress in that area. There is nothing to be ashamed of. If anything, you should be humbled.

Now to Hamas. They are not the kind of breathing entities anyone with an ounce of common sense would want to be associated with. They kill with indifference – babies, toddlers, the handicapped. They rape, they torture, they behead. They do not value life. Well, their leaders value their own lives but they are living large in Qatar so no need to worry about them.

They may be focused on Israel right now but they have never denied that once they wipe Israel off the map they will be heading out of the region to other places with Jews …. and then Christians. They cannot be reasoned with and the rules of detente and realpolitik do not work on them. They are only interested in world domination and they have never shied away from acknowledging that. If you help them and support them against Israel all you are doing is speeding up your own inevitable demise at their hands. Did you think you would get a pass when they came to your city or university?

The people you are really interested in protecting are the Arab citizens of Gaza. And that is understandable. They have been taken advantage of for many years, not by Israel – but first by Fatah and then later by Hamas. They have been helpless pawns in a game they never wanted to play. Countries send millions and millions of dollars and euros of aid money each year but only a small trickle of that aid money gets to them. First Hamas needs that money to replenish its arsenal and then its leaders in Qatar need to maintain their extravagant lifestyle.  First things first. 

Everyone will not agree that the Arab citizens of Gaza are victims but they surely are not blood-thirsty terrorists hell-bent on world domination. 

If Gen Z Hamas apologists could stop for a minute and try to understand the difference between citizens of Hamas-controlled Gaza and Hamas terrorists, we wouldn’t have to have this conversation. By denying the third-party evidence – news reports, videos, voice recordings – you have set yourselves on a very dangerous path where your pay-off might be the exact opposite of what you expect.