Some 20,000 “uninvolved” workers from Gaza used to enter Israel every day until the slaughter. They did so for months and months. They worked in the communities of the Gaza border, in Sderot, and in Ofakim, and some of them took detailed notes about their destinations: how many houses there were, where the living rooms, the bedrooms, and the security rooms were, how many family members lived in each house, whether they had a dog, where their cars were parked. They documented everything. And all of it went to Hamas. It was part of the infrastructure of the pogrom – the contribution of the “uninvolved” to the atrocity.

After the civilians were slaughtered, Salah Arouri of Hamas tried to defend his fighters by claiming that they weren’t the ones who did it. It was the residents of Gaza, he said. “When the Gaza Division fell apart,” Arouri explained, “people from the Strip went in and clashed with the settlers. As a result, people were killed.”

The “uninvolved,” many thousands of them, “demonstrated” at the border fence on the eve of the massacre. They planted explosive charges along the fence and marked off the weak points. They participated in the great deception that Hamas pulled off more successfully than it had ever imagined.
Tens of thousands of “uninvolved people” just like them – hundreds of thousands in the army’s count – took part in “marches of return” along the fence over the years, lobbing charges and firebombs onto our side, launching incendiary balloons and setting our fields afire. Their hearts seethed with hatred and entertained a dream – to return to Ashkelon, Lod, Acre, and Ashdod, and to replace us. Today, one hopes, many more of us believe them. Our true friend in the White House, Joe Biden, still remains unconvinced, but at some point, he’ll figure it out, too. The Palestinians have creative ways of explaining it.

The “uninvolved” danced like dervishes around the trucks that hauled away the abducted children, the old men and women, and the young men and women, crying “death to the Jews” and helping Hamas to place them in hiding. The “uninvolved” helped Hamas to move its rockets to concealment. “Uninvolved” mothers proclaimed that they were proud to send their children into battle in order to turn them into shahids (martyrs). And “uninvolved” teachers taught the children of Gaza that it’s a religious obligation to kill Jews. Hundreds of thousands of “uninvolved” Gazans took part in the funerals of the arch-murderers whom Israel eliminated over the years. For those who really want to go back there – Google and watchdogs like MEMRI and Palestinian Media Watch will provide the terrifying texts that were read out at those funerals, the masses roaring their agreement.

In 2006, hundreds of thousands of Gazans who had the right to vote cast their ballots for the Hamas terror organization, whose charter calls for the annihilation of the Jews and the State of Israel, and gave it eighteen of the twenty-four seats that were up for direct election in the Strip. When it was done, Hamas won 43% of the votes as against 33% for Fatah. Hamas also won in eastern Jerusalem and performed handsomely in Nablus, Hebron, and elsewhere. In a departure from the norm, these were sound democratic elections. Some 250 European Union observers confirmed it. They accurately reflected the preferences of the residents of Gaza and Judea-Samaria. Admittedly, seventeen years have passed since then but Hamas’ strength in Gaza, and in Judea-Samaria as well, has not only held up but has grown.

Hamas and the Gazans are one and the same – in elections, in their hearts, in their actions, and in their assistance. Many of them knew about the war preparations, furthered them, and kept them secret. The IDF is a moral army. It will not line up a civilian population in the crosshairs of its rifles, tanks, artillery, and aircraft, but if this population unintentionally comes to harm, heaven forbid, it’s worth our while to know exactly whom we’re dealing with.

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