Will I turn my back on Israel? Never! The news from Rafah is bad, but the truth is worse. Immediate Past Editor-in-Chief of The Jerusalem Post, Avi Mayer, posted on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) what we are learning now to be true:

“The Israeli airstrike that targeted senior Hamas commanders in Rafah was more than a mile away from the safe zone for Palestinian civilians and more than 550 feet away from shelters Hamas had falsely claimed were targeted in the incident.”

“The munitions could not themselves have ignited a fire of the size that resulted in the deaths of Palestinian civilians, indicating that Hamas weapons stored in or near the targeted structure—of which the IDF was unaware—may have exploded and caused the fire.”

“A phone call within Gaza intercepted by Israeli intelligence contained the admission that the structure targeted by the airstrike served as an ammunition warehouse, that secondary explosions took place, and that the Israeli airstrike wasn’t powerful enough to have ignited the fire.”

Avi Mayer commented, “While none of this makes the heartbreaking results of the fire any less dreadful, it does call into question a lot of the reporting surrounding this tragic incident, which appears to have been based on false information put out by Hamas, rather than the facts on the ground. You’d think news organizations would learn. You’d be wrong.”

The legitimate news and the incendiary news, including social media, have held Israel to a standard that no other country has ever been held to, including the U.S. after 9/11, when it entered Iraq and Afghanistan.

No one wants the war between Israel and Hamas terrorists to continue, but a ceasefire has already demonstrated that nothing comes of it except power to Hamas. It accomplishes nothing for Israel. It also accomplishes nothing for the Palestinian people.

Is there anything worse than this? Yes. What’s worse is that the truth doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Even when the truth is verified, proven, and demonstrated, like Avi Mayer posted and HonestReporting.com publishes daily, it fails to take hold or turn public opinion against real terrorists. When “alternative facts” become normative, it’s an easy jump to transform social media, memes, and viral videos into anything the truth needs to be for the moment. Truth has become a cheap commodity that’s morphed, bought, sold, and traded for trendy goals to win friends and causes. And the world falls for it.

For those who remember the late 1900’s, as young people refer to it, the Cold War between the east and west was the first “binary” world we knew. It didn’t contain “alternative facts,” because so much was at stake, namely, our democratic principles and institutions that American soldiers fought to defend and whose lives we memorialized this past weekend. The Cold War began to thaw when then President Reagan told a truth that no one denied. Without equivocation, he called the Soviet Union an “Evil Empire!” That’s all we needed to know from the leader of the Free World. There was good and there was evil, and we stood on the side of good. That’s where we found democracy, freedom, liberty, and happiness—our Constitutional rights. Calling out the Evil Empire put into motion domestic, foreign, and political policies that led to victory over that evil.

If we had the same commitment to truth that we did in the past, and the same dedication to democracy that we did in the past, then we would all honor our democratic ally in the Middle East, in Israel. We would readily identify the difference between good in Israel and evil in Hamas (not Palestinians; Hamas!). There would be no alternative fact about it, even if you sometimes disagreed with Israel’s “good.” Former head of ADL, Abe Foxman, used to say (and he said it on Beth Israel’s bimah years ago), “You’re not an antisemite if you criticize Israel, but if all you do is criticize Israel, then you’re an antisemite.”

As Americans, Jews, and defenders of democracy, we have no choice but to live in a binary world. Yes, there are shades of gray between good and evil, but a terrorist doesn’t care about our shades of good. And in that case, I’ll recall Golda Meir who said, “I can’t make peace with someone who’s coming to kill me.” After 9/11, no American president could take that chance, either; and Israel, in its wars against Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihadis, Houthis, and Iran, can’t take that chance, today.

Will I turn my back on democracy? Never!
Will I turn my back on truth? Never!
Will I turn my back on Israel? Never!
And neither should you.

L’Shalom,