The Big Story
On Tuesday evening, news spread rapidly in English-language media of a fresh Israeli “massacre,” this time at the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza. As with the earlier, fabricated story of the Israeli bombing of the Al-Ahli hospital, unverified and seemingly inflated casualty figures, sourced to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, circulated widely across social media in the immediate aftermath of the explosion. Nearly as soon as the news broke, Al Jazeera’s AJ+ shared a video on X, retweeted more than 27,000 times, claiming that “more than 100 people were killed in the attack”—a number repeated by many of the same pundits and journalists who fell for the Al-Ahli hoax. The text accompanying the AJ+ post put the number of dead at 50, which was more in line with the estimate of “dozens” killed attributed to both the IDF and the nearby Indonesian Hospital in the New York Times’ Wednesday morning writeup.
Much remains unknown about the explosion, including the casualties and how many of those were civilians rather than militants from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). But a bit of context is in order. The IDF says that it struck an underground Hamas command center, killing Ibrahim Bihari, a senior leader in charge of Hamas’ military operations in northern Gaza, as well as several other militants. Hamas has denied that any of its commanders were in the area, which means that it could easily expose an Israeli lie by proving that Bihari is still alive. The IDF says that the damage from the strikes was compounded by the collapse of Hamas tunnels beneath the streets—an explanation that appears consistent with the deep cratering visible in photographs of the aftermath, but for which The Scroll has, as yet, seen no additional independent corroboration. And Tuesday evening, the IDF posted satellite imagery showing what it described as Hamas military infrastructure in the area, including tunnel entrances, rocket launch sites, and a battalion command center.
Also relevant is the fact that the Jabalia’s neighborhood is known for Hamas activity. The IDF has previously published satellite images of Hamas military facilities in the camp, but don’t take the military’s word for it. Ynet News reported in 2014 that Hamas staged public executions of alleged collaborators in Jabalia. A 2015 U.N. report confirmed that militants from Hamas and PIJ fired rockets from U.N. schools in Jabalia during the 2014 war. A 2022 State Department human-rights report condemned PIJ for launching rockets from a cemetery near a children’s playground in the camp. And a 2018 interview with a Palestinian activist in the left-wing webzine The Funambulist contained the following nugget: “Hamas considers Gaza’s refugee camps as their stronghold (Jabalia in particular).”
Finally, it is worth noting that Jabalia is part of the area of northern Gaza that Israel repeatedly urged civilians to evacuate from, against Hamas’ orders to the contrary. A little less than four miles from the Erez border crossing, Jabalia is practically on the front lines of Israel’s current ground operation. And indications are that many civilians in the area heeded Israeli warnings: An Oct. 26 article in +972, a left-wing Israeli magazine critical of the Israeli government’s treatment of the Palestinians, repeatedly referred to Jabalia as a “ghost town” and said that most of its residents had already fled south.
The IDF confirmed today that it struck Jabalia a second time Wednesday morning.
IN THE BACK PAGES: Tablet’s Ani Wilcenski asks Ivy Leaguers to find their spines
The Rest
→One more thing on the “refugee camp” story: Jabalia is repeatedly referred to in the press as a “refugee camp,” which is helpful if your goal is to suggest genocidal Jews bombing civilians in U.N. tents for no reason other than sheer bloodlust. For instance, here’s Washington Post columnist and former Global Opinions editor Karen Attiah:
Skeptics might note that Jabalia does not look much like a “camp” in publicly available images, but rather like a typical area of Gaza City, complete with permanent structures such as mosques, hospitals, and multistory concrete apartment buildings. Which makes sense, given that the “camp” has been there since 1948. For anyone wondering how a Palestinian living in Gaza under the authority of a Palestinian government can count as a refugee, well, the short version is that there was an entirely new definition of refugee invented that only applies to Palestinians and not to any other group on the planet.
For the longer version, see this thread from former Israeli Knesset member Einat Wilf: https://twitter.com/EinatWilf/status/1719719168172237295
→Related, here are some highlights from Hamas’ 2014 guidelines for Gazans posting on social media:
“Anyone killed or martyred is to be called a civilian from Gaza or Palestine, before we talk about his status in jihad or his military rank. Don’t forget to always add ‘innocent civilian’ or ‘innocent citizen’ in your description of those killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza.”
“Avoid publishing pictures of rockets fired into Israel from [Gaza] city centers. This [would] provide a pretext for attacking residential areas in the Gaza Strip. Do not publish or share photos or video clips showing rocket launching sites or the movement of resistance [forces] in Gaza.”
“Avoid entering into a political argument with a Westerner aimed at convincing him that the Holocaust is a lie and deceit; instead, equate it with Israel’s crimes against Palestinian civilians.”
“The narrative of life vs. the narrative of blood: [When speaking] to an Arab friend, start with the number of martyrs. [But when speaking] to a Western friend, start with the number of wounded and dead.”
“Do not publish photos of military commanders. Do not mention their names in public, and do not praise their achievements in conversations with foreign friends!”
Read the rest here: https://www.memri.org/reports/hamas-interior-ministry-social-media-activists-always-call-dead-innocent-civilians-dont-post
→For a sense of what happens when private psychosis meets fashionable radicalism, look no further than the case of Patrick Dai, the 21-year-old Cornell engineering student who was arrested Tuesday for making online threats against Jewish students. Dai posted a series of violent antisemitic messages—including threats to rape Jewish women, slit the throats of Jews, and shoot up a Cornell dining hall catering to Jewish students—on a university discussion forum over the weekend. A computer science major, Dai was a National Merit Scholar and 12-time AP scholar in high school who, according to his LinkedIn, served as an orientation leader for new Cornell students and as a safety officer for the university’s Science Olympiad. Dai’s parents said he fell into a deep depression in 2021 and struggled to regain his motivation, despite taking two semesters off from his studies, and that they were worried he might be suicidal.
→The Scroll has documented several cases of left-wing college students, Hamas sympathizers, and generic psychopaths tearing down Israeli hostage rescue posters in New York, London, and other Western cities—though not nearly as many as we could have. Today, The New York Times ran an article on the phenomenon, which it framed as a “release valve” and “provocation” from those “anguished” by Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Here’s Israeli journalist Shany Mor to help you make sense of the bullshit (click the image to view the thread on X):
→Hamas’ apologists are fond of translating the group’s aims from their original language of rejectionism and Islamist antisemitism into a softer voice designed to appeal to the sensibilities of Western liberals. Thanks to the tireless work of the Middle East Media Research Institute, readers of The Scroll can get the dope straight from Hamas itself. Here are some highlights from an Oct. 24 Lebanese TV interview with Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas’ politburo:
“Israel is a country that has no place on our land. We must remove that country, because it constitutes a security, military, and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation and must be finished. We are not ashamed to say this, with full force.”
“We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do this again and again. The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth, because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight. Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”
And here’s an exchange between Hamad and the anchor, which helps illuminate what calls to “end the occupation” really mean:
Hamad: The occupation must come to an end.
Anchor: Occupation where? In the Gaza Strip?
Hamad: No, I am talking about all the Palestinian lands.
Anchor: Does that mean the annihilation of Israel?
Hamad: Yes, of course … The existence of Israel is illogical. The existence of Israel is what causes all that pain, blood, and tears. It is Israel, not us. We are the victims of the occupation. Period. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October 1,000,000—everything we do is justified.
Watch the video here: https://www.memri.org/reports/hamas-official-ghazi-hamad-we-will-repeat-october-7-attack-time-and-again-until-israel
→Dual nationals and some injured Palestinians began evacuating into Egypt Wednesday via the Rafah border crossing, in a deal negotiated among Israel, Egypt, the United States, Hamas, and Qatar. Seventy-six critically injured evacuees entered Egypt on Wednesday, while buses carrying more than 330 people arrived at the border crossing. Under the terms of the deal, beginning Thursday, 1,000 foreign nationals and Palestinians working for international organizations will be allowed to leave through the Rafah crossing every day. A State Department spokesman said that there were about 400 U.S. nationals in Gaza “who have expressed a desire to leave” and that they would begin evacuating in the coming days.
→Saudi Arabia is still interested in a normalization deal with Israel, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Tuesday after conversations between the White House and Saudi officials. Saudi Arabia has been publicly critical of Israel’s war effort, but this news suggests that it still views tighter relations with Jerusalem as core to its long-term interests. The news represents a major diplomatic victory for Israel, especially in light of reports that Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks were in part an attempt by Iran to derail Israeli-Arab normalization. In other news, Bolivia severed its diplomatic ties with Israel yesterday (which it last did in 2009), while Chile, Colombia, and Jordan recalled their ambassadors.
Read more here: https://www.axios.com/2023/10/31/saudi-megadeal-normalization-israel-biden
TODAY IN TABLET:
Never Again Is Now, by Natan Sharansky
A call for a mass rally in Washington in support of Jewish students and Israel
Jewish Writing During Wartime, by Edward Serotta
A continuing journey through Ukraine takes us to the literary capital of the bloodlands
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Ivy Leaguers, Find Your Spines
I spent my years at Columbia ignoring my common sense in the face of a glaring double standard. Now my classmates cheer on murder and I’m sitting with my shame.
By Ani Wilcenski
A picture of a killing, shared proudly with a "heart eyes" caption. Who posted this on Facebook to revel in mass rape and torture, four days after Hamas slaughtered 1,400 people? A devoted member of Islamic Jihad? A commander of Hamas? Nope, this is a girl who graduated alongside me from Columbia University, a girl who was a regular guest in the house where I lived, a girl with whom I had several mutual friends.
She wasn’t an actual antisemite, these friends said. Scribbling Israel off any map she saw and vandalizing Jewish event posters with “fuck Israel” graffiti? No, she was simply voicing her legitimate objections to the Jewish state. The incident in sophomore year, when she crashed Holocaust Remembrance Day to chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” over the names of the murdered being read aloud? That’s normal, they said, in the arithmetic of decolonial theory and the higher math of relative oppression.
We don’t want to take sides, they said. Forget the screed she just posted on Twitter about annihilating the Jews—she might feel left out if we don’t invite her to come to our house party to glare at me over a Solo cup. Oh, and would I mind bringing her to my room so she could cool off from the sweaty dance floor in front of my AC unit?
I should stress here that these friends were not coming from some sort of radical activist Columbia scene. I was in arguably the most vanilla squad on campus. My friends were all in fraternities or sororities, the Moncler-wearing offspring of lawyers and bankers who financed their six-figure private high school educations. Nearly all of them moved along to work as investment associates or junior consultants (my favorite example is the wealthy, half-Lebanese girl from Greenwich, Connecticut, who constantly railed against Israel’s geopolitical evils before moving to Qatar to work for McKinsey Doha, presumably to participate in the firm’s renowned activism on behalf of the oppressed).
My experience was just “the vibe,” as they say, everywhere at Columbia, all the way from the zealous radicals to the normies like me and my friends. Simply being physically present on campus, let alone actively participating in any element of campus life, meant being surrounded by people with a zero-tolerance policy for any sort of oppression, who would distance themselves from anyone and loudly condemn the first sign of racism … except, of course, if that person seemed not to love the Jews. In that case, they’d make a bunch of excuses for his or her bigotry and invite them around anyway.
Out of concern for my blood pressure, I have generally tried to avoid thinking about this particular girl. But recently, I’ve had no choice but to think of her, because she’s been plastered across my Twitter timeline and Instagram feed, in a Canary Mission video from a pro-Hamas rally in Times Square held 24 hours after the terror group slaughtered, raped, and butchered over 1,000 Jews. In the video, my former houseguest is yelling into a megaphone:
“Our resistance stormed illegal settlements and paraglided across colonial borders … The resistance fired more than 5,000 rockets and shells, reaching Tel Aviv … Our heroic resistance … There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!”
She looks downright gleeful. At a few points she needs to pause reading because she’s so animated by the cheers of the crowd that she can’t stop smiling.
I would like to return now to the Facebook photo at the beginning of this article, which careful observers will note is a still from official Hamas footage. Putting aside the idea that the jack-booted terrorist putting his foot on the neck of a corpse is justified in his behavior because this soldier is a settler colonialist, or any other excuse-for-murder-masked-as-moralism, the picture has a direct comparison which should be immediately apparent to any of my Ivy League peers: It looks very similar to the photo of George Floyd lying lifeless with a knee on his neck, the horrifying footage which sparked a seismic global movement against racism. Here are some of the things my Columbia classmates did in response to that image during the spring of 2020:
Made a game of “Class Privilege at Columbia” bingo, with squares like “Traveled abroad for fun: $20” and “Own Stock: $40,” which you were meant to tally up and donate the subsequent total to a bail fund or BLM.
Went through our 2,000-person class of 2020 Facebook group and publicly tagged people, asking them if they’d donated yet and forcing them to post the receipts as proof.
Encouraged people to join accountability groups where they could confess, or people of color would directly tell them, the myriad ways they’d committed microaggressions (I was invited into Artists for Anti-Racist Accountability, where we were instructed not to use phrases appropriated from Black culture, including “That’s how I roll”).
Personally reached out to suspected wealthy white people and advertised who they’d contacted, so everyone else could hold them accountable for “doing the work,” to ask if they’d donated, protested, initiated conversations about whiteness, questioned their inner biases, sought out unfamiliar reading materials, and made space for Black people.
I could go on and on about the bizarre climate that took hold on our campus in 2020. But for now, I am raising these examples to illustrate only one thing: the flagrant disparity between the way my learned classmates treat injustice, suffering, and pain when it belongs to any other marginalized group, and the way they treat injustice, suffering, and pain when the victims are Jews.
Just the other day, my brother, a senior at Cornell, was sitting on his couch with a friend, who made exactly this point about a swastika-emblazoned car that was terrorizing people in his hometown (an incident which barely cracked the non-New York Post news). But my brother and his friend, like most people, are making such points in private, grousing among confidantes and then going back to their campuses or workplaces or friend groups like all is well. The unfairness is so endemic that to even point it out is to launch headlong into a brick wall of condescending and moralizing dismissal.
That was me at Columbia, swallowing my frustration and hurt at how unfair it felt that I was stuck chilling with a girl who shouted over Holocaust commemorations, while everyone else got to receive the balm of immediate social action at the slightest whisper of feeling unsafe. Now, I see that same girl grinning with bloodlust at rallies in the city where we both live, as the campus we once shared erupts into unrest and my brother informs our family chat that Cornell’s Jewish Center for Jewish Living is under lockdown while the FBI investigates online threats to “follow Jewish people home and slit their throats.”
As it turns out, the double standard I tolerated, to my shame, was not just a pesky social inconvenience: It was a sign of the deep, insidious rot within institutions from which I was supposed to derive a sense of self, as well as a sense of belonging to something higher and better. As Natan Sharansky, the human rights activist and former Soviet refusenik noted, the double standard is a defining feature of antisemitism. It applies to the Jewish state—when Israel is singled out for harsh criticism while glaring human rights abuses in other nations are flatly ignored (did you know that, since April of this year, over 1 million refugees have fled an ongoing mass genocide in Sudan, which is fueled by weapons shipments from Arab countries?) It also applies to the Jewish people, to whom my peers either apply their moral principles more harshly or abandon them entirely when they are confronted with Jewish victims. Today’s double standard comes from elite universities, which found immediate moral clarity in their statements about every other tragedy on Earth yet couldn’t conjure up a few sentences to condemn the horrific terror of Hamas, and their superstar professors, who etch their syllabi with “intersectionality” and “equity” yet cheer on Jew-murdering terrorists as “exhilarating” and pen open letters “recontextualizing” Jewish rape and torture as “exercising a right.”
What’s most disturbing, for me, is that this double standard is also coming from my peers, my friends, my former housemates, who find the time to unlearn every bias and atone for every sin—except for their biases and sins leveled against Jews, who are apparently the world’s only deserving victims. If Jewish babies are slaughtered, then the sickening photographs of their corpses are obviously propaganda. If a missile hits a hospital in Gaza, then it must have been fired by Israel—regardless of what any intelligence service or geolocation data says. How can anyone believe the forensic evidence of Israeli women, including young teenagers, being raped before they were executed, when Hamas denies it?
Over the past few weeks, I have thought about my tolerance of this double standard until my rage made me sick—the number of times I, and Jews across Columbia’s campus, had to grin and bear the reality that our social worlds were governed by an entirely different set of permissions and sensitivities than everyone else’s. I want so badly to travel back in time, whip out a bullhorn at those parties, and scream in everyone’s faces that three years later, this girl who “just really didn’t like Israel” would go on to call the monsters who put babies in ovens and raped teenage girls the “heroic resistance.”
But I can’t. All I can do is promise myself that this will never happen again, at least not in my own life. I would also encourage everyone—and I know there are many of you—who has felt this unfairness gnawing away at your bones to make the same promise. We are not the ones ripping down missing posters or celebrating deranged murderers, but our uneasy silence has allowed those people to monopolize our public squares until we no longer have space to mourn our dead. The past three weeks are what happens when we stay quiet and let others set the alarming temperature of the air in the elite institutions we inhabit. Because to take a stand would make it harder to enter certain rooms. It would interfere with the work—the increasingly difficult, uncomfortable, queasy-making, indeed disfiguring work—of belonging.
I see clearly now who occupies those rooms—the moral arbiters of our generation, with their "pristine" ethical codes riddled with hypocrisy, their jargon-bloated excuses for antisemitic hate, their hollow pontification about empathy and justice delivered in the same breath with which they rationalize the murder and torture of people who might be my brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents, cousins, or friends. I don’t want to contort myself to be in those rooms anymore. Do you?
The American Jewish community as emphasized by Sharansky and others needs to get out in the street and stop cowering in the face of massive left wing Anti Semitism.A massive rally would go a long way to showing that the American Jewish community has some backbone supports Israel and is willing to fight the real venues of anti Semitism in the intersectional left