Beginning Oct. 7, more than 1,200 Israelis were brutally massacred by hundreds of Hamas fighters pouring over the border from Gaza towards the Israeli communities in southwest Israel. They went house to house, shooting and stabbing all in their path. One hundred and fifty hostages were taken as thousands of missiles rained down.

For decades, we have seen people suffer from the Israeli-Arab conflict. There was a very different level of dehumanization earlier this month. This was not people caught in the crossfire. It was hundreds of individual murders, families slaughtered in their homes while sleeping, bodies mutilated, mothers raped next to their families, kidnapping of children, of the disabled, and of the elderly, to torture and execute in public, babies decapitated with knives, and videos made of murders and then sent to relatives of the dead, hundreds of times.

Even after this barbaric savagery perpetrated against Jewish bodies, people are justifying it, of course, and saying Israel caused it. Israel’s war for self -preservation is equated with crimes of Hamas. “It’s because of occupation!” you hear. Israel unoccupied Gaza in 2007 in hopes of peace. Hamas targeted civilians, soldiers, because the Hamas charter calls for the death of all Jews and exists solely to wipe out Israel.

As expected, sympathy for Israel after the horrific pogrom turns to hatred for them when they defend themselves. There is a double standard due to decades of the news media demonizing Israel and centuries of antisemitism.

Saying “I weep for ‘Gazans and Israelis’ is gas lighting, and dismisses the extent of the brutality. The lack of empathy for Jews, the refusal to condemn Hamas and those who elected them, even after this atrocity, is unjust and adds to our despair. It's wrenching to be faced with the lack of consideration of this war’s trauma on Israelis by the non-Jewish world and hear their justification of what’s occurred.

Rhonda Wainshilbaum

Leyden