My Word: Unsocial media and the Gaza war

Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists are not only found in Gaza. There’s another terrorist campaign. It’s being carried out in cyberspace, or a parallel universe. Last week, an example landed in my Facebook feed in the form of a sponsored advertisement.

Someone who pays for an advertisement obviously wants publicity, so here goes. To clarify, I reported the ad to Facebook, but the social media giant sent me a standard reply that the ad “doesn’t go against our Advertising Standards.” Readers can judge those standards for themselves.

The ad was from a group called: “The End of Israel.” The name itself should have triggered an alarm. It’s a call for genocide in its own (ungrammatical) way. The only thing missing was an exclamation mark.

Here is the text that Facebook doesn’t consider offensive:

“This is a promise that what happened on October 7 will always be repeated. Get out of Israel before you die. The curse of the eighth decade has fallen upon you. If you are not afraid, go to the hospitals and look with your own eyes at the injured, some of whom have died and some of whom have lost their feet and eyes.”

The opening sentence was definitely more of a threat than a promise. No Israeli or Jew is going to forget “What happened on October 7.” It was the most hideous act of violence against Jews since the end of the Holocaust. When International Holocaust Remembrance Day is commemorated next week, the October atrocity will still be fresh in our minds. It should be no surprise that copies of Mein Kampf were discovered in homes in Gaza.

On October 7, some 1,200 people were slaughtered, the majority of them civilians, many of them raped, tortured, and burned to death; more than 220 were kidnapped; thousands were wounded; and some 200,000 Israelis were displaced – the Middle East’s overlooked refugees – unable to live in their homes close to the southern and northern borders, still under rocket fire from Hamas and Hezbollah.

Promising that this “will be repeated” is not a call for peace and a two-state solution as international diplomats would like us to believe. It’s a call for jihad.

Similarly, “Get out of Israel before you die” is not friendly advice; it’s the voice of an enemy intent on realizing its mantra: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” It’s a call for Israel, the Jewish state, to be Judenrein. It also promulgates the anti-Zionist assumption that Jews have no right to live here, in their own country, and have somewhere else to go.

The End of Israel’s rant continues with the mention of “The curse of the eighth decade.” This is the wishful thinking – jihadist desire – that Israel will self-destruct in its eighth decade of independence. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was among those who latched onto the concept in March, during the social unrest in Israel over the government’s proposed judicial reform pre-October 7. 

A look at translated Arab media shows how the idea gained popularity as the split and division grew more evident, carefully selecting comments by Ehud Barak, Naftali Bennett, and even President Isaac Herzog to back the theory.

The background to the concept is found in the fact that the first Jewish state, founded by King David (c. 1020-930 BCE), remained united for just 80 years and the second Jewish state, the Second Temple-era Hasmonean kingdom (142-63 BCE) was also torn apart by infighting in its eighth decade.

There’s a certain irony in Israel’s enemies simultaneously claiming that Israel and the Jewish people have no links to this land and yet basing their hope for its imminent demise on the disintegration of two sovereign Jewish kingdoms, with Jerusalem as their capital, that existed here two and three millennia ago.

But the sponsored ad – unlike Israel – completely falls to pieces. I am not afraid to go to Israeli hospitals to see what is happening. On the contrary. What I see is an outpouring of love and concern for wounded soldiers and outstanding treatment by medical staff, Jews and Arabs alike.

Three months after the invasion and massacre, the initial shock has worn off, but not the togetherness and spirit of volunteerism. Israelis know exactly what they are fighting for – our very existence. There is no doubt that social media content like this is aimed at trying to break that spirit and widen the social and political divides in any way possible.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators take protests to hospitals and MLK events 

It wasn't the sights to be seen in Israeli hospitals that I found unnerving last week, but a telling incident outside a medical center in New York. Last Monday, pro-Palestinian demonstrators – Hamas supporters – paraded through Manhattan and rallied outside the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Video footage showed children in a window looking out on the crowd that was screaming venomous slogans through megaphones.

The rally, billed as an event for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, was led by an extremist pro-Palestinian group, Within Our Lifetime, headed by Nerdeen Kiswani, whose battle cry includes “Globalize the intifada.” Kiswani wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that the oncological center was targeted because “Sloan Kettering accepted a *400 million dollar donation* from billionaire Zionist Ken Griffin, the largest in their history. This was *after* he threatened pro-Palestine student activists at Harvard with revoked job offers. Our medical institutions are not innocent bystanders.”

If you think targeting hospitals and scaring children undergoing cancer treatment is a legitimate form of protest – anywhere in the world – your moral compass is missing. I’d check it hasn’t been kidnapped by Hamas.

And let’s look at Hamas’s hospitals. Along with schools and mosques, hospitals in Gaza have been specifically exploited by the terrorist organization. IDF forces in Gaza have uncovered a myriad network of terror tunnels, weapons, and rocket launchers at hospitals, meant to be places where lives are saved.

There is also testimony and evidence that many of the abducted, some 135 of whom are still being held hostage, were kept in captivity in hospitals in Gaza, or the terror tunnels underneath them.

Hamas’s use of human shields, and its perverted diversion of international aid to building its extensive terrorist network, should worry not only Israelis, especially amid calls to “globalize the intifada.”

So much of what happened on October 7 remains unfathomable. Just last week, David Tahar, the father of 19-year-old Sgt. Adir Tahar who fell that terrible day, revealed details of how he buried first his son’s body in a military funeral and then, only two months later, buried the soldier’s decapitated head. 

Acting on intelligence gained during the ground operation, IDF soldiers were able to locate the head – or what remained of it after extreme abuse – in a freezer in an ice cream parlor in Gaza. According to an official Israeli report, a terrorist admitted during interrogation that he had tried to sell Adir’s head for $10,000. 

Try to imagine what type of monster decapitates a man and then tries to sell his head as a trophy. These are the forces of evil Israel is facing and fighting. This is what the pro-Palestinian rallies are supporting.

Many of the barbaric acts committed by the terrorists on October 7 were live-streamed by them via Facebook, in some cases directly to their victims’ families. Facebook and other social media platforms play a significant role in psychological warfare. Sponsored posts by groups like Theend Ofisrael and others deliberately foster fear and fuel incitement. It’s a campaign in a non-conventional war and, unlike a conventional attack, it has the potential to reach and influence millions globally.

It’s possible that the page is not the work of an individual or group but a fake group profile generated by an Iranian terrorist-sponsored bot. The Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) warned in September that Iranian elements are deliberately trying to sow the seeds of chaos via fake profiles and fake images.

You can believe in the free market and you can believe in freedom of expression, but Facebook’s refusal to remove the ad belies a very deep problem – one that challenges the entire free world.

The advertisement by The End of Israel might not infringe Facebook’s codes, but it violates every code of moral decency.