People attend the ‘Light Over Darkness’ vigil honoring victims and survivors of a deadly mass shooting during a Jewish Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach on Dec. 14, in Sydney, Australia, Dec. 21, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hollie Adams

The deadly pogrom that took place in Australia at a Hanukkah event on Bondi Beach was the culmination of more than two years of hate and violence directed at Jews following the October 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel.

Australian Jews have learned that what they once considered to be one of the safest and most comfortable places in the world to be a Jew, is anything but. Yet the Jewish experience in Australia might have been very different.

The idea of a Jewish refuge somewhere other than Israel predates the modern Zionist movement.  In the 20th century, two possible havens for Jewish refugees were considered during the lead up to World War II; both were rejected.

The more widely known effort involved a proposal for a refuge in Alaska. It was the initiative of Harold Ickes, US Secretary of the Interior, who was concerned that Alaska’s sparse population (only 70,000) would make it a tempting target for attack. (This story is the historical basis for Michael Chabon’s 2007 novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.) The proposal received only lukewarm support from President Roosevelt and after three days of presentations to the US Senate Committee on Territories and Insular Affairs in May 1940, it died.

The second effort, less widely known, involved a proposed Jewish sanctuary in Australia, a possibility I learned about only recently when I was going through some Yiddish literature left by my parents.

I grew up in Montreal, the son of Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

For the first half of the 20th century, Montreal, the home of writers such as the poet J. I. Segal, was a major center of North American Yiddish culture. My parents would often mention Melech Ravitch, pen name for Zecharia-Chune Bergner, a well- known Yiddish poet and essayist, who was a leading figure in Montreal Yiddish circles.

I discovered that Ravitch, originally from Poland, spent several years during the 1930s in Australia, before ending up in Montreal. While there, he investigated the feasibility of establishing a haven for Jewish refugees in a sparsely inhabited region of northwestern Australia known as the Kimberley.

The proposal, backed by a European group, the Freeland League, would involve the purchase of land (a little over 10,000 square miles) in Western and Northern Australia. An advance contingent of 500 Jewish refugees from Europe would begin the process of creating a settlement, followed by 75,000 to 100,000 people to follow. Ravich envisioned an eventual population of one million, this at a time when the population of Australia as a whole was less than seven million.

The company that owned the land agreed to sell the desired tract, and leading religious and public figures, including the Premier of Western Australia, were in favor. But opposition at the federal level prevented the plan from moving forward. The League was informed that the Australian Government, led by Prime Minister John Curtin, was not in favor of “alien settlement in Australia.”

The Australian government was consistent. The Évian Conference, held in July 1938 at the French resort city of Évian les Bains, was initiated by President Roosevelt to find a solution to the plight of hundreds of thousands of stateless European Jews. Thirty-two nations, including Australia, participated. The conference achieved very little. The Australian chief delegate, Colonel T. W. White, declared “as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign migration.”

The Jews murdered in the Holocaust were doomed by worldwide indifference to their fate, but also by the fact that there was no independent Jewish state that could have served as a refuge when they needed one. That’s why Israel is needed now — and why an Australian refuge would have made such a huge difference nearly 100 years ago.

Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.

Palestinian gunmen stand guard on the day that hostages held in Gaza since the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack, are handed over to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), as part of a ceasefire and hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Oct. 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed

Since October 7, 2023, Hamas has shaped global public opinion through its propaganda warfare. The terrorist organization excitedly recorded and uploaded the atrocities committed against Israelis that day to social media platforms, and those who saw any trace of it were rightfully horrified.

But shortly after, when the images weren’t as fresh and no longer front-page news, Hamas turned to a new strategy — playing victim to the Israeli army. And since then, the media has run with it.

For instance, on October 17, 2023, reports claimed an explosion occurred inside the Al-Ahli Hospital. The media rushed to re-print Hamas’ claim that more than 500 people had been killed.

Evidence then came out that displayed it was a parking lot adjacent to the hospital that had been hit by a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket, and the casualties were fewer than reported.

The media has continued this pattern since. Any death toll that the Hamas-run Ministry of Health (MoH) publishes is immediately reported on by Western media, oftentimes without any attribution to Hamas.

This has resulted in blood libels being printed on the front pages of newspapers, blaming Israel for targeting non-combatants, including women and children.

But the vast majority of the casualty numbers that have been used throughout the war have been purposefully misrepresented by Hamas.

As of December 2025, the Hamas-run MoH has claimed that over 70,000 people have died in Gaza since the start of the war.

But further analysis done by Salo Aizenberg, a board member of HonestReporting, displays that this includes the casualties of Hamas fighters, natural deaths, and internal fighting amongst Gazans.

While the analysis is based on informed estimates, and the precise toll may take years to verify, it nonetheless highlights the extent to which Gaza casualty figures have been misrepresented in media coverage over the past two years.

Although it is difficult to determine the exact number of terrorists killed by the IDF since the beginning of the war, estimates suggest the number to be more than 22,000 as of October 2025, not including those who were killed during the terrorist attacks on October 7. President Donald Trump has confirmed the number to be greater than 25,000, the number used in Aizenberg’s analysis.

Beyond combatants, throughout the war, there were likely to be around 11,000 natural deaths, based on pre-war patterns. Another 4,000 deaths were caused by internal fighting within Gaza from different factions, including firing on civilians at aid sites or executions of individuals Hamas  deemed to be collaborating with Israel. An additional 1,000 estimated deaths can be attributed to errors in reporting.

After removing these casualty numbers from the total of 70,000, there are a remaining 54,000 deaths. Of the 54,000, one can reasonably assume that around 25,000 were terrorists, leaving 36,000 civilian casualties. While every innocent civilian casualty is a tragedy, this is nonetheless a remarkably low civilian-to-combatant ratio of 1.45:1, especially given the circumstances of urban warfare.

Visualization based on data by Salo Aizenberg.

These numbers entirely dispute the claims that the majority of deaths are civilians — a claim the media has previously made. One “investigative” piece done by The Guardian and +972 Magazine, published in the summer of 2025, claimed that 83% of casualties were civilians.

What the outlets willfully omitted, however, was that this figure counted only terrorists whom the IDF had identified before the war and could conclusively confirm as eliminated, excluding thousands of combatants who could not be identified during the fighting. By presenting this partial dataset as comprehensive, the article created a misleading impression that was then cited as authoritative.

This information is not necessarily new either.

A December 2024 report by the Henry Jackson Society found that 84% of the publications analyzed failed to make the critical distinction in total numbers between combatant deaths and civilian deaths, further illustrating the extent to which misleading casualty narratives have been allowed to take hold. The report also found that men of combat age were disproportionally represented, and natural deaths were included in casualty statistics.

Perhaps even more telling is the ratio between male and female casualties. Males of combat age (18-59) died at 3x the rate of women the same age, resulting in a 3:1 ratio. The 32,690 deaths of men of combat age account for 46.7% of total casualties.

Visualization based on data by Salo Aizenberg.

Yet, over the course of the war, the opposite claim has been made in major newspapers.

Outlets, including the Associated Press, BBC, and Washington Post, have all previously parroted the claim that 70% of the casualties in the war were women and children. Naturally, it was based on falsified data, and the new casualty analysis once again disproves this claim.

Even after the UN walked back this percentage due to incomplete information, news outlets have continued to print that more than half of the casualties are women and children.

Throughout the two years of war, the media have repeatedly reprinted Hamas’ libels and casualty figures with little skepticism, allowing a terrorist organization to shape the narrative without rigorous analysis or verification.

Inflated civilian casualty claims will continue to distort public understanding of the war by obscuring the true civilian-to-combatant and male-to-female casualty ratios.

It is therefore only responsible journalism for every outlet that published Hamas’ casualty figures without questioning them to issue corrections and acknowledge that not every casualty during the war has been the result of IDF action.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

Palestinian demonstrators display a poster showing terrorist Dalal Mughrabi alongside the late PLO leader Yasser Arafat. Photo: File.

In two recent videos, Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah Movement highlights its message to youth: Female terrorist murderers are heroes, and should be emulated.

Fatah’s university student group for women, “Sisters of Dalal,” is named after terrorist Dalal Mughrabi, who led the murder of 37 people, 12 of them children.

Introducing one of the videos, Fatah presented “Sisters of Dalal” as a continuation of terrorist murderer Dalal Mughrabi:

Posted text: “The Sisters of Dalal Mughrabi

Not only yesterday, but today on every front; symbols of sacrifice and creators of pride and self-sacrifice.“

Fatah’s video showed various images of Mughrabi. At the end of the video, young female students are seen standing in formation while wearing vests with the text: “Al-Asifa Forces (i.e., Fatah terror unit) — Sisters of Dalal.” The video included a song with the following lyrics:

Lyrics of song: “O lady of the girls, O noble and brave one, O women wrapped in keffiyehs

O lady of the girls, O daughter of the Shabiba. Pride and firmness. She is equal to a brigade”

[Fatah Commission of Information and Culture, Facebook page, Nov. 26, 2025]

In a second video, a Fatah official praised murderer Mughrabi as the woman “who led a group of men” to carry out “a self-sacrificing operation” — i.e., the hijacking of a bus and taking Israeli passengers hostage, eventually murdering 37 of them, 12 of them children.

The Fatah official presented as an achievement that women have always been “partners in the struggle,” and that the student group for women is named after a murderer:

Fatah intellectual academy leadership council member Ala’ Mleitat: “Since the start of Fatah, women have been partners in the struggle.

‘The Sisters of Dalal’ in the Fatah Shabiba [Student Movement] are named after our sister Dalal Mughrabi, the great Martyr who led a group of men to the Palestinian [i.e., Israeli] coast to carry out a self-sacrificing operation.” [emphasis added]

[Fatah-run Awdah TV Live, Facebook page, Nov. 25, 2025]

Palestinian Media Watch has previously documented the status of role model given to Dalal Mughrabi by the PA.

The author is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this story first appeared.