(JNS) Invoking past disasters to promote Jewish guilt about Gaza disgracefully manipulates history and the truth about the war as well as bolsters those who wish to destroy Israel.

One old joke claims that all Jewish holidays can be summed up in the following way: They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.

But while that works to explain Passover, Chanukah and Purim, it is also the product of a superficial understanding of the Jewish calendar and the way it reflects Jewish history. The sad truth is that while the Jewish people have survived countless disasters and, unlike just about every other ancient civilization, still worship the same God in the same ancient homeland in the same language as they did two millennia ago, they have experienced many crushing and unspeakable losses and travails over the centuries.

And for that, there is Tisha B’Av. Minus the eating.

The ninth day of the month of Av is the day set aside chiefly for remembering the destruction of the two holy temples in Jerusalem on that date, as well as many other cruelties inflicted on the Jews, including the expulsions from England and Spain. Indeed, this day was so closely identified with Jewish persecution that enemies such as the Nazis amused themselves by choosing it for their own horrors, such as the beginning of the mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka death camp in 1942.

But though observant Jews still mark Tisha B’Av with fasting and the reading of Eicha, today, it has other uses.

Helping Hamas win

This year, in particular, it is being employed by those who think that Israel ought to be pressured into allowing Hamas to win the war it began on Oct. 7, 2023.

That is the practical impact of the writings of those Jewish leftists who have predictably taken to the pages of publications like Haaretz, The Forward and JTA to advocate for using Tisha B’Av as a day to claim that Israelis are now behaving in much the same way as those who sacked biblical Jerusalem. Even more to the point, they seem to be saying that the Palestinian Arabs of Gaza, who are now feeling the terrible impact of the war they started and celebrated as long as it was only Israelis who were suffering, are the contemporary equivalent of the Jews of besieged Jerusalem whose travails are so vividly described in the book of Lamentations.

This can be rationalized by some as an understandable reaction to a brutal war and the way Jews have always regarded themselves as held to a higher standard or morality than their antisemitic opponents. It is also justified as a necessary critique of an Israeli government whose policies Jewish liberals and leftists oppose.

In part, this is a manifestation of the enormous propaganda success that the Hamas terrorists have achieved in manufacturing a famine in Gaza. All civilian casualties in any war are deplorable, but what we have witnessed in the last 22 months since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab assault on southern Israeli communities that took place on Oct. 7 is a massive inversion of the truth.

Succumbing to a false narrative

The Palestinians have, with the willing assistance of a biased international media, been able to persuade much of the world to see them as the innocent victims of the post-Oct. 7 war they launched and to think of the Israelis as their cruel oppressors. The casualties and privations that are being experienced by the people of Gaza are real. They could have been quickly ended by Hamas laying down their arms and freeing the hostages they took. But since this terrorist group’s sole aims are the destruction of Israel and the slaughter of its people, they are prepared to sacrifice as many of their people as needed in order to continue their genocidal jihad against the Jews.

That so many people in the West have succumbed to these falsehoods is partly explained by the influence of contemporary leftist ideologies like critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism. That has led some to accept the fictional narrative in which Israel is an illegitimate “white” oppressor state that is always in the wrong, no matter what it does, and the Palestinians as “people of color” who are invariably in the right, no matter what they do.

Still, there is no underestimating the impact of the images of starvation in Gaza, even if some of them are fraudulent, and the way the media has deluged Western audiences with a storyline about genocide based on misleading Palestinian casualty statistics handed to them by Hamas. Under those circumstances, the testimony of experts about Israel taking more care to avoid civilian deaths than any other army engaged in urban warfare in modern history is ignored, while newspapers like The Washington Post publish lists of the names of dead Palestinian children that are likely to be wildly inaccurate and also include armed teenage terrorists among the supposedly innocent victims.

That such outlets never did the same for the victims in any other recent war or were as willing to mischaracterize the nature of the conflict as they do about Gaza is a reminder of the undying vitality of the virus of antisemitism that continues to make itself felt.

The willingness of people on the left to buy into these lies is evidenced by the way a majority of the Democrats in the Senate—27 out of the 44 who voted—backed resolutions to block arms sales to Israel because of the situation in Gaza. And there should also be no ignoring the way some figures on the right are doing the same, as evidenced by political commentator and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson devoting two episodes of his popular podcast to spreading lies about genocide in Gaza and the Jewish state manipulating American foreign policy in the last week, after also recently platforming Holocaust denial.

We have become used to those with some ties to the Jewish people speaking out against Israel in “as a Jew” moments in which they virtue signal their antipathy for Israel so as to stay in sync with liberal political and intellectual fashion. Yet it is particularly egregious when traditional days of Jewish mourning are used to weaponize the effort to delegitimize Israel and give aid and comfort to its opponents.

A distorted analogy

It is possible to read the opening lines of Lamentations, which speak of a ruined city, and think of Gaza in 2025 rather than the Jerusalem of 586 BCE that was beset by the Babylonians. Or to reference the passages in it which speak of the horrific impact of starvation inside the besieged capital of ancient Judea before it fell in an orgy of mass murder, rape and destruction, and believe that this speaks to the current suffering of Palestinians.

To do so is to invert the roles of the protagonists in these two conflicts in such a way as to render the comparisons not merely inaccurate. The effort to demonize Israeli actions in this manner by invoking the tragedies of Jewish history is nothing less than a despicable blood libel against the people of Israel. What’s more, it is a whitewash of a Palestinian national movement whose goal—embraced by both the genocidal Islamists of Hamas and so-called “moderates” of Fatah who run the Palestinian Authority—is to inflict another Holocaust on the Jews to rival the fall of the biblical temples and the many calamities that followed during the next 2,000 years.

For Hamas and its foreign enablers who chant “From the river to the sea” and “Globalize the intifada,” Lamentations is not so much a biblical analogy for contemporary Gaza as it is a playbook for their fantasy of destroying Israel.

The Babylonians were, after all, like any other army of antiquity or the modern era, deliberately using starvation as a weapon in the siege they were conducting. And, like most armies of any time up until the last century, they viewed the aftermath of a successful assault on a besieged city as a license for looting, rapine, murder and destruction, with any survivors among the inhabitants to be enslaved and carried off to captivity.

That bears no resemblance to the actions of Israel, which could have devastated Gaza by indiscriminate bombing without risking a single soldier. Instead, the Israeli military limits strikes to identifiable military targets. The Israel Defense Forces have endured terrible losses simply because they have sought to avoid killing civilians. Non-combatant Palestinian casualties often are due to Hamas deliberately positioning their forces around civilians used as human shields, as well as storing weapons in hospitals and schools.

Far from seeking to cause famine, Israel has let aid into Gaza throughout the war and, with the United States, set up the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to facilitate the delivery of food to Palestinians, even as the fighting against them continues. That happened because Hamas stole food and supplies, hoarded most of these goods and then sold some to its own people at exorbitant prices, thus deliberately creating a shortage. The terrorists have responded to the effort to thwart their diabolical efforts by doing their best to disrupt the foundation’s operations and make it dangerous for civilians to avail themselves of its work.

The suffering of the Palestinians in these circumstances is real. But it is, like the war itself, solely the fault of Hamas and its supporters. If those who are denouncing Israel right now were truly interested in helping the Palestinians, then they would be supporting the Jewish state’s campaign to eradicate the terrorists and free the Palestinians from their rule. Instead, by demonizing the Israelis, they are playing right into the hands of these Islamist murderers.

A Jewish anti-Zionist psychosis

Once when discards the bizarro lens through which Israel’s critics view the ongoing war against Hamas and other Iranian-backed proxies, it’s clear that the better analogy for the depressing lines of Lamentations would be the aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacres committed by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the thousands of Palestinian civilians who participated in their unspeakable crimes.

We have become used to the spectacle of Jews who seek to treat victimhood as the only way to define Judaism and abhor the notion of Jews obtaining or using power to defend themselves, as the people of Israel do. The Zionist movement has liberated the Jewish people from dependence on the kindness of strangers, which was so often lacking throughout history. In doing so, it has restored Jewish sovereignty to the ancient homeland of the Jews. Israel is, as is true of all countries, imperfect, as are its leaders.

But the psychosis of Jewish anti-Zionism is such that any use of power, even in defense against the most despicable of enemies and even in the most ethical manner possible, is immoral and somehow un-Jewish.

Only by viewing the contemporary world through such a distorted mindset can one justify invoking the tragedies of the Jewish past to delegitimize the Jewish present and future—Israel—and to give such assistance to Hamas.

On Tisha B’Av, we remember the fall of Jerusalem and can empathize with all victims of war. But rather than tragic Jewish collective memories spurring a campaign to undermine the defense of modern-day Jerusalem, it ought to inspire all Jews—no matter where they stand on the religious or political spectrums or what they think of its current government—to rally to its defense. Those who would invert this day of mourning to justify an effort to give the terrorists an undeserved victory aren’t honoring Jewish traditions. They are engaging in a vile denial of Jewish history, values and faith.

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