Why I’m Not Writing about Gaza

Over the past 24 hours the world’s attention has been focused on the Israeli-Gazan border. As Gazans try to infiltrate our border, Israeli soldiers have been taking necessary and at times, even lethal action to stop them. The scenes on television screens across the world are horrific and the narrative attached to it lay full blame on Israel. When Israel is falsely accused “Social Media Warriors” like me usually kick into high gear. We post, tweet and blog about all the reasons the media’s story is wrong, the Palestinians are terrorists not protestors, and the IDF are using justifiable force to neutralize a serious threat. This time around I’m not writing or posting about the violence at the Gaza border.

I usually write detailed explanations of events so that people who don’t understand current events can put them into context and understand what is actually happening. In the case of Hamas controlled Gaza’s current riots, only someone completely ignorant of Hamas’s and the Palestinian’s compulsive terrorism could mistake the current violence for a peaceful protest. Only a Middle East novice would say that Israel could manage the situation “better” than shooting Palestinian terrorists cutting through an Israeli border fence.

The people who require explanations aren’t stupid, they are willfully ignorant. Over the past fifteen years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Gaza has been a central location of Palestinian terror. Anyone confused today about Gaza never took the time to learn about the past fifteen years of Hamas controlled Gaza. The violence over the past six weeks is nothing new. This violence is just a new variation of the same Palestinian terror Israel has been confronted with the past decade and a half.

The only reason people are paying attention to Gaza today is because it’s in the headlines. They aren’t actually alarmed by Palestinian suffering and Hamas’s role in it. They are merely superficially concerned. If they were actually concerned about what is happening in Gaza, they would’ve paid attention over the past fifteen years. They would’ve noticed the 20,000 Hamas rockets fired at Israel, the foreign aid Hamas embezzled on private planes and wasted on terror tunnels, and luxury resorts and villas throughout “the humanitarian crises” that people use to describe today’s Gaza. They know nothing of this because until a news producer created a sensational “news” clip, they couldn’t have cared less.

Next week this iteration of violence will end (it always does). The news stories will shift to some other issue across the globe, maybe North Korea, a President Trump statement or Hawaii’s explosive volcano. These superficially concerned citizens will go back to whatever it was interested them before Gaza appeared on their screens. Only a few diehards will continue to focus on Gaza, and the rest will leave us alone. They’ll never look at Gaza again – just ask the 500,000 dead Syrians whose 15 minutes of headline attention ended 8 1/2 years ago or the hundreds of Palestinians slaughtered by the Syrian army this past month.

I’m not wasting my breath explaining the obvious to superficially concerned citizens whose attention spans don’t last past the next news cycle. Even the few members of Congress like Congressman Hank Johnson (he of the Guam might tip over and Jews are termites fame) who penned a letter of worry about Gaza are only superficially concerned. Thy sign a letter put in front of them by a die hard anti-Zionist, not bothering to examine if the narrative presented to them is factual or the pictures shown aren’t some Pallywood deception. I don’t have to worry about you becoming an unjustified crusader against Israel; you don’t care enough to take meaningful action anyway. You’ll retweet some deceptive meme or post a doctored video clip of a Palestinian faking injury and bemoan Israel’s use of force, but that’ll be all. So, no, I won’t explain what’s happening in Gaza. If you flaunt your ignorance by buying into the narrative presented to you in a flashy new clip, you don’t deserve my wisdom and time.