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Each year, Oxford Dictionaries selects its International Word of the Year. In 2016, it was “post-truth”.
Oxford Dictionaries defined it as an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”.
Although the editors were presumably not thinking about Gaza – much less the barbaric attack, seven years later, launched from the coastal strip against Israel – when selecting the winning word, they might well have been.
In the daily news cycle and at the heart of mass movements across the West, Gaza has become the subject of a tug-of-war between facts and appeals to emotion and personal belief. Alas, the latter seem to be prevailing. But that must not overshadow stark realities, however much they may challenge the ideological armour of those who have constructed a hermetically sealed narrative about Gaza.
First, there never was a sovereign, independent Gaza in recorded history. Ottoman Turkey, for instance, ruled Gaza for four centuries. No effort was made to establish a state. Later, Egypt governed Gaza for 19 years. Again, there was no move towards Palestinian independence. To the contrary, Cairo imposed harsh military rule.
Ironically, the first country to offer Gaza the opportunity to chart its own destiny was Israel. Yes, Israel. In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew every last soldier and settler. It also left behind scores of greenhouses intended to help kick-start Gaza’s economy. Within days, however, those greenhouses were looted and destroyed.
Second, over the strong objections of Egypt, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority, the United States pressed for Hamas to participate in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. That legitimised a terrorist group which, predictably, took full advantage of the opportunity. Within a year, Hamas had violently seized total control of Gaza, killing or expelling Palestinian Authority officials. No election has been held in the ensuing two decades.
Third, while some in the West romanticise, if not fetishise, Hamas as an “anti-colonial liberation” group, the truth is quite different. It is an outgrowth of the extremist, transnational Muslim Brotherhood, whose stated objective is to replace existing nation-states in the Middle East with a Sharia-based caliphate, while extending the reach of political Islam to the four corners of the world. At its core, it is virulently anti-Semitic, misogynistic, homophobic, authoritarian, and intolerant of “infidels”. The murderous Iranian regime has been its principal supplier of weapons and funding.
Fourth, when Israel gained control of Gaza in the 1967 war of self-defence, by all accounts, the strip’s population was under 400,000. When Israel withdrew unilaterally in 2005, the population had more than tripled to 1.3 million. Thirty-eight years of Israeli control clearly did not prevent rapid population growth.
Fifth, in the past two decades, Gaza has been the recipient of billions of dollars from governments and nongovernmental organisations earmarked to develop its economy and address humanitarian and social needs. Instead, the funds were largely syphoned off to build a vast terrorist infrastructure, including a tunnel system reported to exceed the length of London’s Underground. In other words, instead of seeking to emulate Dubai or Singapore, Hamas’s leaders opted to weaponise Gaza as a launching pad for Israel’s destruction. Meanwhile, some of those same leaders managed to become billionaires in the process, with homes in hospitable Qatar.
Sixth, pro-Hamas voices frequently refer to Gaza as an “open-air prison”. That choice of words resonates with Hamas’s ideological sympathisers, but fails to note Israel’s withdrawal in 2005 and its long-standing interest in a peaceful and prosperous neighbour.
It also conveniently ignores that Gaza has two borders, not one. The other is with Egypt, an Arab and Muslim-majority nation. Why is so little attention paid to Cairo’s opposition to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, its sealed border with Gaza, and its refusal to offer help to Gazans in need, either before or after October 7, 2023?
Seventh, what happened on October 7, 2023 cannot simply be forgotten, dismissed, or minimised. It was the deadliest single day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. In proportional terms, it would have been the equivalent of more than 8,000 British women, men, and children slaughtered in 24 hours, plus more than 1,750 people, including the elderly and babies, kidnapped. What would the British government’s response have been?
No, this was not an initiative from Gaza to advance a two-state solution, send a message of coexistence, or launch an interfaith, intercultural dialogue. It was a genocidal effort to kill as many people as possible simply because they lived in Israel and were presumed to be Jews.
Eighth, the immense challenge any Israeli government would have faced was how to cripple Hamas, rescue the hostages, ensure this could never happen again, and minimise harm to civilians.
Not easy tasks when the enemy deliberately weaponises civilians by placing them in harm’s way, stores weapons and command centres in schools, mosques, and hospitals, cynically manipulates media images, and cares not a whit for notions of international humanitarian law, proportionality, de-escalation, Red Cross access to the hostages, and the like.
Ninth, in the fog of any war, innocent people are tragically killed and wounded. That is unspeakably heartbreaking. But one side, Hamas, cannot launch a war of aggression and then thunder to the world about its consequences. Despite all the freewheeling accusations launched against Israel, few armies in history have ever gone to its lengths to grapple with the moral dilemmas of war, even as its foes have no such scruples. Apropos, exactly how many humanitarian corridors were created by Allied nations to provide aid to German or Japanese civilians during the Second World War? None.
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Finally, the long-term goal must be to de-radicalise Gaza. Not an easy, overnight job, but a vital one. Is the American-created Gaza Peace Board, established in 2025, up to the challenge? Only time will tell.
Radicalism and rejectionism run deep throughout the coastal strip. And they are abetted, wittingly or unwittingly, by an extensive network of governments, United Nations officials, and nongovernmental organisations. Unless and until that changes, the prospects for peace and stability are, alas, dim.
Even in our post-truth world, some truths are simply too important – and the stakes too high – to ignore or dismiss.
David Harris is executive vice chair of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), and author of Antisemitism: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2025)
