If you found yourself channel surfing in Gaza between 2007 and 2009, you may have happened upon “Tomorrow’s Pioneers.” The children’s show, which aired for four seasons on the Al-Aqsa television network, features a young hijab-adorned Palestinian girl named Saraa accompanied by a costumed animal. Skits are used to educate the audience about the importance of fighting for Palestinian statehood. Season 1 stars Farfour, a mouse with a high-pitched voice and a casual antisemitism that would make Joseph Goebbels blush. In the final episode, after being entrusted with the key to his ancestral lands by his dying grandfather, Farfour laments, “but I don’t know how to liberate this land from the filth of the criminal, plundering Jews.” The show ends with the mouse being beaten to death by IDF soldiers. This crude plot device is recycled in each subsequent season, with viewers being introduced to a new costumed animal whose “death by Jew” in the final episode is a foregone conclusion.
Sixteen years later, on October 7th, 2023, thousands of Hamas fighters and Palestinian civilians, many of whom had sat on their living room floors as children and watched a cartoon mouse get murdered, crossed into Israel seeking vengeance.
What followed was the bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Entire families were slaughtered in their homes. Young people attending a music festival were hunted down, tortured, and executed. Hundreds of innocent civilians, including infants and the elderly, were dragged back into the dungeons of Gaza to be held as hostages.
One might have expected such an atrocity to produce a moment of moral clarity. Instead, many activists, academics, and intellectuals in the West immediately set about the task of whitewashing it. The attack was framed as inevitable blowback from years of occupation. (Overlooking the fact that Gaza had not been occupied since 2005.) The perpetrators were resistance fighters and the victims became disposable pawns in a larger narrative about colonialism.
But to offer up excuses for Hamas is to provide them with a moral justification they never requested. Unlike their apologists in the West, they have never felt the need to cleanse their crimes in the language of social justice. Whether they are free or under occupation, they are proud of October 7th and have vowed to carry it out again and again.
The tendency to portray October 7 as simply a desperate response to occupation ignores another inconvenient reality: the majority of Islamist terrorism has nothing to do with Israel. The men who murdered concertgoers at the Bataclan Theatre in Paris and at the Manchester Arena were not living under occupation. The terrorists who carried out the Bali bombings and the Mumbai attack were never forced to endure the indignities of checkpoints and a naval blockade. The common thread linking these atrocities is not Israeli policy but an ideology that glorifies martyrdom and places little value on non-Muslim lives.