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Arabs Massacred Jews in the Holy Land Before Israel Existed — and the Media Has No Clue
October 7, 2023, was the largest massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. Hamas and other Iranian-backed proxies invaded Israel, murdering 1,200 people and taking hundreds of hostages. Many of the victims were killed in the most gruesome fashion imaginable: parents were tortured in front of their children, the elderly were slaughtered at bus stops, families were burned alive in their own homes, babies murdered in cribs, all while gleeful terrorists proudly filmed their handiwork.
October 7 was also the largest invasion and attack by Islamist terrorists in modern history. It was part of an attempted genocide by a group that calls for Israel’s destruction.
The Washington Post, however, calls it “armed resistance.”
This was the phrase used in the Post’s Aug. 28, 2024, dispatch, “What to know about Palestinian militant groups operating in the West Bank.”
Ostensibly a primer about terrorist groups operating in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), the article misinformed more than it informed.
The Post’s Claire Parker claimed that “Palestinians have engaged in armed resistance since the state’s founding in 1948, when an estimated 750,000 Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes.”
Notably “armed resistance” is a euphemism used by US-designated terrorist groups like Hamas to refer to terrorism. Parker is literally echoing terrorist rhetoric. She’s also dead wrong.
In fact, Arab terrorist groups were targeting, attacking, and murdering Jews decades before Israel was recreated.
Indeed, there are entire books on the subject (Yeshoua Porath’s two volume, The Emergence of the Palestinian Arab National Movement, while 50 years old, is perhaps the most comprehensive). Evidence on the score is both abundant and part of the historical record; it is highlighted in numerous histories, newspaper accounts of the day, and memoirs.
Hamas even names its “Qassam rockets” after Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, an Islamist cleric born in what is today Syria, and who perpetrated terrorist attacks until he was killed by British policemen in November 1935. Hamas also has the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, which perpetrate terrorist attacks.
And Qassam was not alone in his efforts to murder Jews.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Palestinian terrorist groups like the Green Hand, the Black Hand, and others, murdered Jews, officials from the British Mandatory government that controlled the area after World War I, and Arab critics.
CAMERA has highlighted this important history in numerous op-eds throughout the years, including in National Review, Mosaic magazine, and, most recently The Washington Times. As CAMERA noted in an April 14, 2020, essay for Mosaic, “Century-Old Lessons from a Jerusalem Pogrom,” these terrorist groups resented any social and political equality with Jews and perpetrated organized mass violence as early as 1920. In the nearly three decades before Israel was recreated, hundreds of attacks occurred, with hundreds of victims.
As CAMERA detailed in an Oct. 17, 2023 Washington Times Op-Ed, entitled “Palestinian terrorists have been murdering babies for a century,” and the terrorists often murdered their victims in the most depraved manner possible.
In 1929 in Hebron, for example, one British policeman, RJ Cafferata, later testified that he discovered “an Arab cutting off a child’s head with a sword.” Cafferata shot him dead before seeing another terrorist armed with a dagger and “standing over a woman covered with blood.” The policemen killed him. Women were raped en masse. Many were tortured.
A Dutch-Canadian journalist, Pierre Van Paassen, detailed the aftermath at one rabbi’s house: “the rooms looked like a slaughterhouse…Not a single item had been left intact except a large black-and-white photograph of Dr. Theodore Herzl.”
The murderers, he noted, had “draped the blood-drenched underwear of a woman” around the picture frame. Van Paassen later described how he wanted to “gather up the severed sexual organs and the cut-off sexual organs and the cut-off breasts we had seen lying over the floor and in the beds.” A Jewish baker, Noah Imerman, was burned to death in a kerosene stove.
A week after the massacre in Hebron, another unfolded in Safed. One eyewitness, David Hacohen, later testified that he saw “homes set on fire” and victims “stabbed to pieces,” their bodies “mutilated and burned.” The terrorists even targeted an orphanage, where they “smashed the children’s heads and cut off their hands” before burning the building.
These events are thoroughly documented. The British government held hearings on them, and Western newspapers reported on them at the time. The Middle East analyst Oren Kessler highlighted them in his 2023 bestseller Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict, which detailed, at length, the various terror groups operating in British-ruled Mandate Palestine in the 1930s. It is utterly disqualifying for someone to be writing about the Israel-Islamist conflict today not to be aware of this relevant history.
Indeed, many of the details — homes being incinerated, mass rape, and sexual violence, children being murdered, the elderly tortured — keenly illustrate that the Palestinian terrorists who perpetrated the October 7 massacre have much in common with their forebearers who murdered Jews one hundred years ago.
To acknowledge this, however, is tantamount to admitting that Arab terrorists aren’t murdering Jews because of the creation of Israel, or the existence of “settlements,” or “1967 lines.” Rather they resent any political or social equality with Jews. As terrorists screamed during the 1920 massacre in Jerusalem: “the Jews are our dogs.”
This sentiment was highlighted in a May 13, 2011, Hamas Al-Aqsa TV interview with Sara Jaber, a 92-year-old woman who looked back at the Hebron massacre with fondness. “We, the people of Hebron, massacred the Jews. My father massacred them and brought back some stuff,” according to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute. “Massacred the Jews.”
Or as the Washington Post’s Claire Parker, would call it “armed resistance.”
Notably, Parker’s claim about terrorism beginning in 1948 omits other relevant details, not least of which is that Zionists accepted, and Arab leaders rejected, numerous offers for a “two-state solution.”
Indeed, the 1948 war — which became Israel’s War of Independence — erupted when the Arab League and Palestinian Arab leaders rejected a UN partition plan that would’ve created something that hadn’t ever existed: a Palestinian Arab state.
Yet Arab leaders were unwilling to accept such a state if it meant living peacefully next to a Jewish one. Accordingly, they sought to “annihilate” the Jewish state, openly seeking to commit another genocide a mere three years after World War II and the Holocaust.
Arab nations, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood and the so-called Army of the Holy War, attacked the fledgling nation. Estimates of Arab refugees vary, with the “750,000” figure cited by Parker being on the high end. Notably, Parker omits the more than 800,000 Jewish refugees from Muslim lands who were exiled because of that conflict. Omitting rejected offers for Palestinian statehood and peace and Jewish refugees, while claiming that terrorism was due to Israel’s creation is, as they say, “a tell” — it reveals Parker’s bias. So too is referring to terrorism as “armed resistance.”
Yet, this isn’t the first time that Parker has regurgitated language used by terror groups like Hamas.
Hours after the October 7 attack, Parker filed a dispatch claiming that an Israeli counterterrorist raid on Al-Aqsa mosque “stoked tensions,” leading to the attack by the terror group. But as CAMERA has highlighted, Palestinian terrorist groups have long used the false claim that Jews seek to damage or destroy the mosque to incite anti-Jewish violence.
The founding father of Palestinian nationalism, Amin al-Husseini, did precisely that leading up to the 1929 massacres detailed above — massacres in which more than 133 Jewish men, women, and children were murdered, and 339 were injured. There are even entire reports highlighting how Palestinian leaders employ what the scholar Nadav Shragai has called the “Al-Aqsa is in danger” libel prior to attacks.
More to the point, evidence indicates that the October 7 massacre — called “Al-Aqsa Flood” by Hamas — took years to plan and was massive in both scope and ambition. This was obvious within hours of the attack itself. Parker’s decision to parrot Hamas claims that the attack was the result of a recent counterterrorist raid indicates more than just ignorance about the history of the “Al Aqsa” libel and terrorist rhetoric — it shows a remarkable lack of common sense or, less diplomatically, intelligence.
As The Washington Post unintentionally proves, there is a great deal of difference between being a reporter with deep historical understanding and being a stenographer for terrorist groups.
The writer is a Senior Research Analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.
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Why Erdogan’s Turkish Empire Is an Emerging Threat
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a joint statement to the media in Baghdad, Iraq, April 22, 2024. Photo: AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/Pool via REUTERS
The world was once a series of empires. The British Empire, at its peak in 1922, covered about a quarter of the Earth’s land and ruled over 458 million people. The Russian Empire once covered about 8,800,000 sq/mi, roughly one-sixth of the world’s landmass, making it the third-largest empire in history, behind only the British and Mongols. An 1897 census recorded 125.6 million people under Russian control. Genghis Khan’s Mongol Empire, while short, was the largest contiguous empire in history.
The Ottoman Empire lasted from 1301 to 1922, and at one point, included parts of Turkey, Egypt, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia, Hungary, Palestine, Jordan, and Lebanon. It was, in some ways and at some times, a relatively benign occupation of other people, though decidedly not for Greeks, Armenians, or Kurds.
Why does it matter? We don’t do empires anymore. Do we?
That depends. Turkey now, under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is projecting its next empire — a scary combination of ISIS-related religious extremism, nationalist prejudice, and Western weaponry.
Erdogan gave a speech last week. The key paragraph is this:
Turkey is much bigger than Turkey as a nation. We cannot limit our horizon to 782,000 sq/km, Just as a person cannot escape from his destiny by fleeing it, Turkey as a nation cannot flee or hide from its destiny. We must see, accept and act according to the mission that history has given us as a nation. Those who ask, “What is Turkey doing in Libya, Syria, and Somalia?” may not be able to conceive the mission and the vision.
And, if you couldn’t “conceive the mission,” Bilal Erdogan, his son, clarified for you. At a massive rally, he exhorted the crowd: “Yesterday Hagia Sophia (once a Church in Istanbul), today the Umayyad Mosque (Damascus), tomorrow Al-Aqsa (the site of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem).”
Today, Turkey illegally occupies a large swath of northern Syria, claiming only to have in interest in defeating the PKK –– considered by Ankara to be a Kurdish terror organization. [For the US, the Kurds were an essential partner in defeating ISIS in Syria and northern Iraq, and remain an ally.]
Between October 2019 and January 2024, the Turkish military carried out more than 100 attacks on oil fields, gas facilities, and power stations in Kurdish-held areas. According to the BBC in October 2024, Ankara cut off access to electricity and water for more than a million people.
Turkey has operated in northern Syria in conjunction with HTS, the ISIS-adjacent group that has been on the US terror list, but now appears to be seeking legitimacy as the ruler of Syria. According to a Turkish news source, as a new Syrian military establishment begins to take shape, “Turkey will actively provide consultant-expert support to the restructuring process of Syria’s sea, air, and land forces. In addition … Turkish military presence will be included in five different points of Syria.”
The new force will number 300,000, according to the Turkish report, including 40,000 fighters from HTS, and 50,000 from the Syrian National Army (SNA). The latter is actually an auxiliary of the Turkish Armed Forces. SNA forces have been deployed by Turkey as a proxy in Libya and elsewhere.
Ankara also hosts leadership of Hamas, earning a rare rebuke from the US State Department in November 2024, and Hezbollah. It should be noted that the dismemberment of Hezbollah by Israel was understood as a defeat for Iran, Turkey’s regional rival.
Turkey’s relations with Hamas, Hezbollah and the emerging Syrian military all threaten Israel. Turkey’s direct attacks on Israel — both rhetorical and military, going back to Turkish sponsorship of the Mavi Marmara flotilla in 2016 but increased after October 7 — also pose threats.
Turkey operates across Africa, as Erdogan noted in his speech. In January 2020, Turkey sent military forces to Libya in support of the Government of National Accord, the Tripoli government, followed by as many as 18,000 soldiers of the Syrian National Army (SNA — see above), which included child soldiers. Turkey has defense agreements with Somalia, Kenya, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Ghana. Turkish drones have been recently delivered to Chad, Togo, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger.
Like many empire-driven military adventures, this one appears to have two purposes: first, to secure access to natural resources, and then to serve as a launching point for Turkish social and religious interests. Turkey has built 140 schools for 17,000 students, while 60,000 Africans are studying in Turkey.
Turkey has made clear its intention to play as a world power. It is coming up against Russia and China in Africa, and Iran in the Middle East (Iran is injured, but not defeated). While there is no mechanism for the Western countries to remove Turkey from NATO (that requires a unanimous vote, and Turkey won’t vote itself out), the United States and its allies in Europe and the Middle East should be very skeptical of Turkey’s intentions and leery of its capabilities.
Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly magazine.
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Joseph Massad, Columbia, and the War Against Israel in Academia
The “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” at Columbia University, located in the Manhattan borough of New York City, on April 25, 2024. Photo: Reuters Connect
When I was studying International Affairs and Middle East Studies at an American university, I took many courses on the conflict and the history of the Middle East. These courses inevitably involved extensive discussions of Israel, which often led to debates surrounding its right to exist.
I sat in classrooms and learned from scholars who, perhaps unknowingly, infused their teachings with fundamental biases against Israel — and, at times, against Jews and their right to a homeland.
While they may not have been as ruthlessly vocal as Joseph Massad, their anti-Israel agenda was present nonetheless, and they were educating a large, international group of students with it. Many of these students knew nothing about the conflict, and took what the teachers said (teachers the university told them to trust) at face value.
I sat alongside peers from around the world, and witnessed how this bias led them to learn fundamentally incorrect facts about the complex history, territory, and conflict in the Middle East. This further entrenched a bias that some had against Israel, and contributed to their outspoken hatred of the country.
When the October 7th attack occurred, and our peers and co-workers began to side with the terrorist group committing mass atrocities, I was not surprised. It was the result of these teachings, which gave them the belief that Israel is the oppressor (and always will be), and that anything it does to defend itself is wrong — a crime against humanity.
Joseph Massad called the October 7 attacks “awesome” and “astounding” — and now Columbia is letting him teach a course on Zionism. Joseph Stalin would be proud. It actively enables and supports the creation of more antisemitic and anti-Zionist attitudes and mindsets.
Massad is just another university professor using his position in a prestigious academic institution to instill this one-sided way of thinking in his students — a mentality that discourages discourse, critical examination, and promotes hatred.
The response we have seen in the West since the war began is the direct result of these teachings.
In the past, we often slept through this. We disagreed, but we did not challenge. We did not fight back. This cannot — and will not be the case — if Israel (and American Jewry) are going to survive.
Alma Bengio is a Northeastern University graduate with a Bachelor’s in International Relations, and a Master’s in Project Management from Harrisburg University. Follow @lets.talk.conflict on Instagram.
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How DEI Is Helping Fuel a Huge Rise of Antisemitism in Health Care and Hospitals
November 2023: An Israeli soldier helps to provide incubators to Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza. Photo: Screenshot
More than a year has passed since the hate-fueled encampments and rallies targeting Jews became fixtures on college campuses and in cities across America. Over time, the emerging narrative centered on the assumption that those participating in sowing the antisemitic chaos were confined to specific industries, such as Hollywood and academia, or were among an ignorant cast of undergrads steeped in an ecosystem of radical progressivism.
Unfortunately, in a disturbing phenomenon plucked directly from a Nazi-era playbook, a troubling rise of antisemitism in the medical community is now manifesting as an alternative and potentially deadly avenue through which Jew hatred is spreading across the US.
In its first published study of “Antisemitism in American Healthcare: A Survey Study of Reported Experiences,” the Data and Analytics Department of StandWithUS, a Jewish civil rights group, surveyed 645 self-identifying Jewish healthcare professionals, 74 percent of whom are physicians. The study found that nearly 40 percent of respondents recounted direct exposure to antisemitism within their professional or academic environments.
The results of the survey confirm an underacknowledged reality — that the healthcare arena is emerging as a new and dangerous stronghold for antisemites to exert their influence. If left unchecked, this movement will rupture the integrity of America’s medical professionals.
The rise of anti-Jewish attitudes in healthcare stems from several factors, including the decision made by some medical schools to supplant critical instructional time with toxic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs that supposedly focus on cultural inclusion and social inequities.
Unsurprisingly, when combined with a deterioration of academic standards, medical students educated in this pedagogy prove prone to gravitating towards a framework that designates Israel, and by extension, all Jews, as privileged colonialists.
It is a paradigm that advances Nazi-like boycotts of Jewish medical professionals, which is precisely what happened this year when “anti-racist” therapists in Chicago attempted to organize against Jews working in the mental health field.
It bears mentioning that tactics deployed by antisemites in medical circles to intimidate and ostracize Jews echo strategies planted by the Nazis in the 1930s. One of the first industries the Nazi party took over was medicine.
Research published in The Israel Journal of Health Policy Research details how Jewish healthcare professionals were often the first to lose their jobs, with “forty-five percent of German physicians” choosing to join the Nazi party compared to “seven percent of teachers in Germany.”
The American Jewish Medical Association (AJMA), a non-profit organization of “Jewish physicians, fellows, residents, medical students, public health, and healthcare professionals,” was formed in the wake of the October 7 massacre in Israel to address the issue of the growing systemic bias against Jews in healthcare.
Dr. Steven Roth, who practices anesthesiology at the University of Illinois Chicago and co-authored a study on antisemitism in the medical community, revealed that “it has been suggested that DEI, and ‘anti-racist’ curricula in particular, present in some medical schools, is related to the antisemitism that flared after October 7.”
Roth maintains that “nearly all universities today have DEI frameworks, and all medical schools do as well.”
Efforts by the AJMA to lobby members of Congress and urge them to insist that medical schools and journals adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism remains crucial to the institution’s platform of encouraging lawmakers and colleagues to confront antisemitism in the healthcare space with the level of urgency that the current moment demands.
Apart from pushing for medical institutions to abide by the IHRA definition of antisemitism, AJMA’s Founder and President, NYC-based plastic surgeon Dr. Yael Halaas, also notes that the meetings they are doing with lawmakers include discussing AJMA’s project to create a “new antisemitism curriculum,” which the organization is developing and plans to pilot at certain medical schools.
Unsurprisingly, medical workers launching a campaign of intimidation against Jews masquerade as opponents of Israel.
According to Congressman Ritchie Torres (D-NY), former University of California San Francisco (UCSF) professor of internal medicine Dr. Rupa Marya suggested earlier this year that students in her class had the right to be concerned about sitting in the same classroom with Israeli classmates. Marya’s growing list of outlandish assertions concerning Jews ultimately led to her suspension, and she is one of several seasoned antisemitic medical workers curating a path forward for younger cohorts that polling shows is drifting against Israel.
Once counted as responsible stewards of America’s healthcare system, a youthful cadre of aspiring healers are revealing themselves as unprofessional disruptors who don keffiyehs and promote antisemitic screeds at medical school commencement ceremonies. Just this week, the group StopAntisemitism said it had identified a nursing graduate, who was exposed for tearing down hostage posters in New York City.
A few hours south in Washington D.C., The Times of Israel unveiled several physicians in training at Georgetown University Medical School and the George Washington University School of Medicine who were posting vile antisemitic content on social media in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre.
Today’s unserious era is enveloped with students marinating in a political and educational climate under which false claims made by progressives and leftist radicals accusing Israel of practicing medical apartheid are legitimized by a host of medical journals publishing distorted accounts of Israeli actions in Gaza.
It’s not unreasonable to assume that episodes such as the one that occurred in London, where a student nurse allegedly refused care to a Jewish patient, could one day soon appear in America. Healthcare professionals who find it acceptable to unleash their antisemitism with a stroke of the keyboard may one day justify withholding critical medical information or tampering with a treatment plan for a Jewish patient.
Sadly, recent developments involving the growth of antisemitic incidents in medicine reinforce the fact that no industry is safe from the scourge of antisemitism and that perhaps, for the time being, Jewish Americans should navigate their healthcare needs with an extra dose of caution.
Irit Tratt is an American and pro-Israel advocate residing in New York.
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