In Lebanon, Hamas' youth movement, "Pioneers of the Al-Aqsa Flood," is currently being established. Since it was founded last month, children and youth have been part of the ethos shaped around the October 7 massacre (which Hamas calls the "Al-Aqsa Flood"). Jihadist youth movements are nothing new in the Middle East – Hezbollah and ISIS have been doing so for years.
Nonetheless, Hamas is renewing and exploiting Palestinian national sentiment and its election to national leadership in order to create a complete identification between resistance to the occupation and a war of jihad to destroy the Jewish people. In so doing, he removed the boundaries between nationalist and jihadist. This is the context in light of which the case against Israel should be examined at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. International institutions adjust their lenses as needed. They narrowly see Israel as a strong, occupying colonialist state. It only takes a slight extension of perspective to the Middle East to discern the religious element as the driving factor and to recognize that Jews are a minority in need of protection. To get an idea, it's worth taking a look at the dwindling numbers of Christians in the Middle East. Expanding our view of the global sphere reveals an even more ominous picture: Jews are now being persecuted in Western countries as well, anti-Semitism is rising, and declarations of intentions to destroy the Jewish people are routinely heard from Iran and the leaders of terrorist organizations. All this after threats were actually carried out not only in the extermination of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, but also in massacres that took place in Jewish communities in Muslim areas.
Ever since Israel signed the Convention Against Genocide in 48, it seems to have forgotten that it was founded as a haven for the Jewish people. As the discourse on human rights intensified in the West and in international law, so did the legitimacy of the existence of a Jewish state. In Israel, the judicial system sought to position the state as a liberal democracy and made sure to embody values such as universal equality in its rulings, while feeding the doubt that gnawed at the right of Jews to a state. The many copies of Mein Kampf, now in Gaza homes, correspond with the recent history of the Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini. Much water has flowed since then in the sea and in the Jordan, but over the past decade we can clearly identify processes of nazification among the Palestinian public. On 7 October, it was civilians, women and children who participated in murder, rape, looting and beheadings. Palestinian intellectuals backed the massacre in a startling manner in his imagination to the justifications of Nazi ideology. Thus, sterilely, through progressive discourse in the corridors of prestigious universities, the intellectual stratum in the West supports crimes against humanity.
The internal struggle between us is meaningless – in the eyes of the world, we are all occupiers and settlers. The moral impotence displayed by international institutions should not deter Israel. Vice versa
The limitations of international institutions were exposed after failing to provide a moral statement regarding the unprecedented violence directed against Israelis. This is because the massacre on October 7 violated the familiar occupier-occupier equation. The Jewish state also violates this equation by its very existence. It is clear that the complexity of Jewish life in a Muslim space is incomprehensible to Europeans or Americans, but even Israeli jurists have not succeeded in translating this complexity into the legal sphere. In the Jewish story, phrases such as "rise up to kill you, kill him first" or "Amalek" are evidence of how a religious minority in the Middle East copes. But to Western ears they sound bad.
So much so, that they are cited in the indictment against Israel as proof of an intention to commit genocide. The words of President Isaac Herzog appear in the lawsuit alongside those of Eliyahu Yossian; Quotes from Netanyahu's speeches appear alongside former Major General Giora Eiland's remarks, which occupy ten times more space than Ben-Gvir's. All this shows that the internal struggle between us is meaningless – in the eyes of the world, we are all occupiers and settlers. The moral impotence displayed by international institutions should not deter Israel. Vice versa.
At this point in time, international recognition of the right of the Jews to the state and the right of the Jewish state to defend itself must be reaffirmed.
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