It was on October 7, 2023, that Hamas launched its sneak attack on Israel, killing more than a thousand people and starting a war that not only has has no end in sight, but has now expanded into Lebanon. Where do we go from here?

Last month I thought we might dive into the topic in depth in a series of posts, to see if together we could find a path to peace. To me the solution is simple – cut out the politicians and let the people on all sides come together to work out a compromise.

The average person wants to live a peaceful life. I suspect that ordinary Israelis and ordinary Palestinians would be willing to make concessions their leaders aren’t, if those concessions would guarantee a lasting peace. I don’t see that happening soon though.

That series is still in my head – time to write has been scarce lately. Today instead, some random observations of a year of war in which the amount of misinformation and disinformation is staggering.

The first thing that has struck me is something that I already knew, but has been magnified in the past 365 days: there is an incredible lack of awareness of history. Those pro-Israel and pro-Palestine seem to me to have a collective amnesia of the history of the region. When the United Nations created the State of Israel it also created the State of Palestine, a country that had never existed before. What happened to Palestine that it never, like Israel, became an independent nation? Do you know? It may have been almost 80 years ago, but it is part of the framework of today’s conflicts.

The second thing is that the word genocide has become so overused as to render it meaningless. A genocide used to mean an organized attempt at eradicating a people or ethnic group. The classic example might be the deaths of European Jews during the Holocaust – six million people, two thirds of European Jews were killed by the Nazis – and only the Allied victory in World War II saved the other three million. I have read in so many places claims that the Israelis are committing a genocide against the Palestinian people – but the numbers don’t bear that out, with deaths after a year of fighting in Gaza being about one-twenty-fifth of the population. That is still a lot of deaths, far too many of them civilian, but I don’t think it meets the dictionary definition of genocide – especially given the stated desire of the Israeli government to limit civilian deaths.

There are probably half a dozen conflicts around the world at the moment where one side or another is claiming that a genocide is in progress. It is a great propaganda word to garner support from other countries, but too often it sounds to me like a boy crying “wolf.” The deaths in Gaza have been tragic, and perhaps more could have been done to avoid them, but, objectively, does this look like a genocide to you?

And let’s talk numbers for a moment. The Hamas Health Ministry, who are the keepers of official statistics, tell us that approximately 41,000 people have died in the Gaza in the fighting of the past year. I’m willing to accept those numbers for today’s purposes, even as I acknowledge there is a huge propaganda value in fudging the statistics. (There is no doubt that Hamas has won the public relations war, at least in Canada.)

I do find it surprising though that the Israel Defense Forces, one of the best trained armies in the world, have been so inept in their attempts to wipe out Hamas. Apparently they are killing mostly women and children – in a year Hamas supposedly hasn’t lost any combatants.

Yes, there have been many civilian deaths. That isn’t surprising, given that Hamas uses hospitals, mosques and schools as staging grounds and command centers, in violation of international law, thus turning them into legitimate military targets. Maybe we should be impressed at how few civilian deaths there have been. But that doesn’t fit in with the public relations war.

This has already gone on longer than I intended, and each of these points was supposed to be a separate post, with far more detail. I leave you with something that didn’t make the news.

On Friday I saw video footage of a young woman hostage released last week in Gaza. Ten years ago the then 11-year-old Yazidi girl was taken hostage by ISIS. The ISIS fighter who had taken her kept her as his slave for a few years, then sold her to a Hamas fighter, which is how she wound up in Gaza.

Somehow in Canada though, Hamas has captured the moral high ground. Maybe we need to do some serious rethinking.