The Blogs: Spare Me the Righteous Lament for Dead Jews

I’ve had enough of the righteous lament for dead Jews.
Within hours of the Bondi Beach massacre, two of my non Jewish friends who are both relentless critics of Israel, were quick to send me messages of condolences. “I celebrate with you and your community the Joy of Hannakah (sic), I weep with you and your community over the massacre in Australia,” wrote C.

“I’m thinking of you with deep sadness as you deal with this (yet again) unimaginable, horrific, evil attack, on completely innocent people, peacefully celebrating their Faith, on a beach,” wrote L.

Forgive me if your words, however well intentioned, offer me no comfort. It’s easy for you to utter what I now understand are nothing more than platitudes. When Jews are murdered for no other reason than they are Jews you have no hesitation in weeping with us. Especially when they are murdered in a country in which they are not indigenous, have no sovereignty, and cannot retaliate. That’s when you can sympathize with Jews, when they are helpless and dead. You feel righteous that you are taking a stand against evil.

How your tune changes when Jews fight back.

On Oct. 7 when Hamas crossed the border into Israel and joyfully and proudly raped, dismembered, burned, beheaded over 1200 babies, men, women and the elderly, and abducted over 250 hostages to Gaza, you clucked your tongues at yet another tragedy of the Jewish people. But not for long. As soon as Israel began to retaliate, your tears dried up and your voices of condemnation were loud and clear. Israel is using disproportionate force, you shouted. Israel is killing women and children. Israel is bombing hospitals, schools and mosques in Gaza. Hamas’ attacks are justified because Israel is occupying Gaza.

You weren’t interested to know that Israel dismantled every last Jewish settlement in Gaza in 2005; that in 2007 Gazans elected Hamas to rule over them, that by 2023, after 16 years in power and having received billions of dollars in international aid, Hamas’ crowning achievement was the construction of over 500 kilometers of tunnels, over twice the size of the London Underground. You didn’t pay attention when you learned that these tunnels from which thousands of rockets were launched towards Israel were built expressly under civic institutions and thousands of private homes so that when Israel retaliated in self defense the greatest number of Gazan civilians could be killed. You however saw this as unjustified Israeli cruelty, not realizing or minding that it was Hamas carelessly and with meticulous premeditation sacrificing its own people to gain your sympathy and your ready condemnation of Israel. How quickly and easily you cooperated. They knew you would. You didn’t disappoint.

Did you raise your voices when we learned of the torture, starvation and murder of the 251 hostages dying a slow, painful death in airless tunnels? Did you feel any outrage when pro Palestinian terrorists, usually funded by Iran and Qatar, took over our universities and streets and screamed for the annihilation of Israel and Jews, as in chants “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free?” Or “Jews to the gas”? Or simply “death to the Jews”? Why didn’t I hear you when the UN denied that Hamas committed mass rape and murder on October 7, despite the evidence Hamas proudly collected from their own Pro-cams and shown on social media?

Why didn’t you begin to doubt the veracity of the information you swallowed whole from the New York Times and the BBC? When it was revealed for example that a front page photo showing a mother holding an emaciated child with the intention of illustrating that Israel was starving Gazans was in fact a photo of a child suffering from cerebral palsy and whose plump younger brother was deliberately edited out of the photo, you were speechless, not from shock, but from indifference. When it became known that a BBC documentary showing the death and destruction that Israel had inflicted upon Gaza was narrated by a 12 year old boy whose father was a Hamas leader and who was paid $20,000 for his performance, you looked the other way.

When I asked you why in the face of all of this you were so critical of Israel and not its enemies who had initiated the war, you replied without hesitation,“We hold Israel to a higher standard.” So in its own existential defense, Israel did not meet your standards. This is so egregious on so many levels. Never mind that applying double standards to Israel falls under the widely accepted definition of antisemitism from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). But forgive me, my dear friends. Who are you to sit in judgement of Israel? You have never been there, you have no clue of its geographic size and vulnerability, you don’t know Jewish history, and I’m probably one of the few if not the only Jew you know personally.

So why are you so quick to condemn Israel, and with such authority and conviction, when you know so little? I think this is a question you should ask yourselves. Where does this bias come from? You need to do some serious soul searching. Until then it grieves me to say that I am deaf to your hollow words of comfort.

Brenda Yablon