It Turns Out That ‘White People’ Often Means Jews

[View this email in your browser]( November 9, 2023 • Cheshvan 25, 5784 # [The Dogs of War]( Traveling Route 232 in the days after the Hamas attacks [BY ANTONIO GARCÍA MARTÍNEZ](#) # [The Root Causes of Moral Evil]( No matter how many innocents are murdered, Western intellectuals will never stop making excuses for terrorists. [BY EDWARD ROTHSTEIN](#) [Advertisement](#) [October 7 Happened Before, in Hebron]( A brutal massacre nearly a century ago in Judaism’s second-holiest city makes clear that murderous Palestinian rage against Jews has little to do with Israel or Zionism [BY YARDENA SCHWARTZ](#) [Snowflakes for Hamas]( It turns out that ‘white people’ often means Jews [BY OLIVER TRALDI](#) LISTEN TO TABLET # UNORTHODOX [Words of Wisdom]( Ep. 388: Dan Senor on ‘The Genius of Israel’ and Gila Sacks on the legacy of her father, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, in this moment NOVEMBER 9, 2023 IN THE SCROLL The New York Times published a long article Wednesday morning, based on interviews with Hamas leaders and Arab, Israeli, and Western officials, purporting to explain the intentions behind the group’s Oct. 7 attacks. The article is worth reading in full for the Hamas leaders’ candor about their desire to fight Israel rather than “improve the situation in Gaza,” but the following passage caught The Scroll’s attention as a window into how Hamas launders its talking points into the Western press: In 2021, Hamas launched a war to protest Israeli efforts to evict Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem and Israeli police raids of the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City. That was a turning point, Osama Hamdan, a Hamas leader based in Beirut, Lebanon, told The Times. Instead of firing rockets over issues in Gaza, Hamas was fighting for concerns central to all Palestinians, including those outside the enclave. The events also convinced many in Hamas that Israel sought to push the conflict past a point of no return that would ensure the impossibility of Palestinian statehood. Mythical threats to the Al-Aqsa Mosque have been a standard rationalization for Arab anti-Jewish violence since before Israel was a state. In 1929, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini used false rumors that Jews were planning to desecrate Al-Aqsa to whip up anti-Jewish rioting that left more than 60 dead. In 1996, a false claim that the Israelis were planning to dig a tunnel under Al-Aqsa led to the so-called Tunnel Riots, which killed 59 Palestinians and 16 Israelis. Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount was the pretext for the Second Intifada in 2000, also known as the “Aqsa Intifada.” In this case, however, it seems rather unlikely that a 2021 Israeli police raid of the Aqsa compound represented a “turning point” in Hamas’ thinking. Why not? Well, because the Iranian regime-affiliated news agency Tasnim published a report in October explaining that Hamas had already begun drilling for the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation in December 2020, four months before the raid. [TO GET THE SCROLL, OUR DAILY AFTERNOON NEWS DIGEST, IN YOUR INBOX EVERY WEEKDAY, SIGN UP HERE]( # # This email was sent to you by [Tablet Magazine](#) Tablet Magazine | P.O. Box 20079 | New York, NY 10001 [Remove me from this list]( | [Forward to a Friend]( You are receiving this email because you signed up at our website, www.tabletmag.com. Tablet Magazine P.O. Box 20079 New York, NY 10001 USA Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp [Mailchimp Email Marketing](