Hamas wants the world of Safiyyah back

We are told that histories are separate when they are not: the transatlantic slave trade was about race; the expulsion of Jews from Iberia was about religion; the conquest of Indigenous Americans was about empire.

But look closer.

The birth of the modern world was not just about new empires rising — it was about who was moved, who was erased, and who was turned into property. African people were packed into slave forts. Jews were expelled, expropriated, or confined to ghettos. Indigenous civilizations were shattered. In each case, the same blueprint was repeated: restructure society, rigidify hierarchy, and commodify people.

Jewish history is part of the global struggle for freedom.

In 1482, the Portuguese established Elmina Castle, the first European slave fort on the West African coast. Just ten years later, Spain expelled its Jews under the Alhambra Decree, seizing property and creating an international refugee crisis. When Portugal followed suit five years later, it added further humiliation by removing all children between four and fourteen years old from Jewish families. At the same time, Christopher Columbus had arrived in the Caribbean, initiating the systematic destruction of Indigenous societies.

These were not isolated events. They were part of the same shift: the ideological convergence of powerful Christian and Islamic empires.

In 1517, the Ottoman Empire conquered the Mamluk Sultanate, expanding its reach over trade routes and solidifying its role in the African and Mediterranean slave trades. The treatment of Jews, Africans, and Indigenous Americans was officially bound together in a Christo-Islamic system of imperial power that decided who could be owned, who could be displaced, and who could be massacred.

October 7th was about reliving a “glorious” past when Jews and others lived or died at Arab whims — that is why so many families gladly participated in keeping Jewish hostages, and tolerating Ezidi sex slavery as an open secret.

Hamas is not a resistance movement. It is a restorationist movement. It seeks to go back in time to a specific point in time: the world of Safiyyah.

Safiyyah was a Jewish woman from the seventh century, who was taken as a sex slave by Mohamed mere hours after her family was murdered at the Battle of Khaybar. He waited only for her period to finish before raping her. She is honored with the title “Mother of Believers” in Islam.

That story is why Hamas chants “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya Yahud” at its rallies. This is what Hamas yearns for.

The war that Hamas fights is not for justice or progress. It is for a lost empire, a broken order that we as Jews have already shattered.

We know how this war with a modern-day Haman will end. Not only our oppression, but our victories, too, are part of our Jewishness.

And Safiyyah? She left as much wealth as she could to her surviving Jewish relatives. Khaybar never broke her.