Free Terror Tunnels The Case for Israel's Just War Against Hamas by Alan Dershowitz Page B

behalf of the Palestinians if they were oppressed by Jordan or Egypt? Oh, wait, the Palestinians were oppressed by Egypt and Jordan. Gaza was an open-air prison between 1948 and 1967 when Egypt was the occupying power. And remember Black September when Jordan killed more Palestinians than Israel did in a century? I don’t remember any demonstration or BDS campaigns—because there weren’t any. When Arabs occupy or kill Arabs, Europeans go ho hum. But when Israel opens a soda factory in Ma’ale Adumim, which even the Palestinian leadership acknowledges will remain part of Israel in any peace deal, Oxfam (which collaborates with anti-Israel terrorist groups) fires Scarlett Johansson for advertising a company that employs hundreds of Palestinians.
    The hypocrisy of so many hard-left Western Europeans would be staggering if it were not so predictable, based on the sordid history of Western Europe’s treatment of the Jews.
    Even England, which was on the right side of the war against Nazism, has a long history of anti-Semitism, beginning with the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 to the notorious White Paper of 1939 which prevented the Jews of Europe from seeking asylum from the Nazis in British-mandated Palestine.
    And Ireland, which vacillated in the war against Hitler, boasts some of the most virulent anti-Israel rhetoric.
    The simple reality is that one cannot understand the current Western European left-wing war against the nation-state of the Jewish people without first acknowledging the long-term European war against the Jewish people themselves.
    Theodor Herzl understood the pervasiveness and irrationality of European anti-Semitism, which led him to the conclusion that the only solution to Europe’s Jewish problem was for European Jews to leave that bastion of Jew hatred and to return to their original homeland, which is now the state of Israel.
    None of this is to deny Israel’s imperfections or the criticism it justly deserves for some of its policies. But these imperfections and deserved criticism cannot even begin to explain, much less justify, the disproportionate hatred directed against the only nation-state of the Jewish people and the disproportionate silence regarding the far greater imperfections and deserved criticism of other nations and groups—including the Palestinians.
    Nor is this to deny that many Western European individuals and some Western European countries have refused to succumb to the hatred against the Jews or their state. The Czech Republic comes to mind. But far too many Western Europeans are as irrational in their hatred toward Israel as their ancestors were in their hatred toward their Jewish neighbors. As Amos Oz once aptly observed: the walls of his grandparents’ Europe were covered with graffiti saying “Jews, go to Palestine.” Now they say, “Jews, get out of Palestine”—by which is meant Israel.
    Who do these Western European bigots think they’re fooling? Only fools who want to be fooled in the interest of denying that they are manifesting new variations on their grandparents’ old biases. Any objective person with an open mind, open eyes, and an open heart must see the double standard being applied to the nation-state of the Jewish people by so many of the grandchildren of those who lethally applied a double standard to the Jews of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. They must be shamed into looking themselves in the mirror of morality and acknowledging their own bigotry.

PART II
    O PERATION P ROTECTIVE E DGE

I NTRODUCTION
    Operation Protective Edge
    On July 8, 2014, Israel launched Operation Protective Edge to suppress Hamas rocket and mortar fire from the Gaza Strip aimed at Israeli cities, towns, and kibbutzim.
    The initial spark behind the escalation in hostilities was the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers, Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaer, and Eyal Yifrah on June 12 by Hamas-affiliated militants. Israel responded with a series of raids in the West Bank to find the