Arab Mask of Hate Torn Off

On October 7, 2023, Hamas and allied Palestinian militant groups launched a coordinated assault from Gaza into southern Israel. Fighters crossed the border by land, air, and sea, overrunning communities, a music festival, and military positions. Roughly 1,200 people were killed—the large majority civilians—and about 250 were taken hostage. The dead included men, women, children, and infants. The scale of Jewish deaths that day was the largest since the Holocaust.

The methods used were deliberate and public. Attackers burned people alive, raped women, beheaded victims, and murdered families in their homes. Body-camera footage, survivor testimony, forensic evidence, and contemporaneous recordings documented these acts. Hamas did not treat them as aberrations. Its leaders and supporters celebrated the operation, distributed images of the killings, and stated their intent to repeat the attack. Officials affiliated with the organization later said they would carry out many more October 7ths until Israel no longer existed.

That intent is not new. The 1988 Hamas Covenant framed the conflict in religious and eliminationist terms: the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea was to be liberated through jihad, and Jews were cast as enemies to be fought until Islam prevailed. The slogan “from the river to the sea” that accompanied the attack and subsequent protests is the same territorial claim. It does not describe a negotiated two-state arrangement; it describes the absence of Israel and Jews by any means. 

Yasser Arafat, long presented as the political face of Palestinian nationalism, was born in Cairo and was an Arab. Hamas, which rules Gaza, is Arab by language, culture, religious framework, and the birthplaces of many of its members and leaders. Its charter and post-October 7 statements make clear that their hate is not limited to settlements or borders - but to all Jews. 

The Center for Human Equality rejects group judgmentalism as a basis for policy or morality. Collective guilt is illegitimate and immoral. At the same time, organized violence that targets people for membership in a people or religion is never a legitimate form of politics or faith.

No religion or ideology acquires moral standing by endorsing the murder, rape, or incineration of civilians. The Center holds that any just God does not command hatred or the killing of neighbors; claims to the contrary disqualify the religion or ideology. Antisemitism - hostility to Jews as Jews - receives no special exemption from this standard. Mass murder cannot be justified by historical grievance, territorial dispute, or any other claim. It is immoral - always. 

The subsequent war in Gaza is a separate sequence of events. Israel has the moral right of self defense. The Gaza War does not rewrite what occurred on October 7th. The atrocities of that day stand alone as deliberate attacks on civilians chosen for their Jewish identity. Calls for more such attacks confirm that the violence was not an isolated excess but an expression of stated Arab terrorism policy to murder and destroy Jews. 

For decades, significant portions of Palestinian Arab leadership and public discourse presented the conflict as a demand for freedom, self-determination, or an end to occupation. It was all a mask for the rest of the gullible world. 

October 7th and the open celebration of its methods tore that presentation mask away. The priority revealed was not the construction of a viable state alongside Israel but the removal of Israel and the murder of its Jewish inhabitants by the means displayed that day. That is the content of the Hamas program and of their repeated vows to continue it.

All subsequent suffering in Gaza was caused by Arab antisemitism and the desire to destroy Israel. Just as the suffering of Germans at end of WW2 was caused by the government's antisemitism and hate. It was never about a Palestinian Arab state and that mask is completely off now - forever.