Rabbi Yaakov Mencken is the Managing Director of the Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV), the largest rabbinic public policy organization in America
Three years ago on October 7, Hamas terrorists crossed into Israel and murdered some 1,200 people, most of them civilians: in their homes, on their kibbutzim, and at a music festival. They raped, they burned, and they dragged 251 hostages back into Gaza. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, and it was documented in more detail than any massacre in history, by the perpetrators themselves: they live streamed every atrocity they could.
Yet here is how Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that "anyone can edit," chooses to introduce this macabre topic: "On October 7, 2023, a series of coordinated armed incursions from the blockaded Gaza Strip into the Gaza envelope of southern Israel were carried out by Hamas and several other Palestinian militant groups."
"Armed incursions." "Militant groups." Not a word about murder, rape, or kidnapping until later. But the word that does the heaviest lifting is "blockaded" - because it supplies, in the very first line, the excuse. The reader learns that the people of Gaza were besieged before he learns what they did.
It's worth pausing to admire this blockade. This was a "blockade" through which Hamas imported enough cement and steel to build hundreds of miles of tunnels, the largest underground military network in the world. This blockade somehow let in the pickup trucks, the motorcycles, the paragliders and the thousands of rockets that were fired at Israel that morning. Note, also, that Gaza remains the only "besieged" territory in history whose besiegers supply it with electricity, water and fuel, while sending in hundreds of trucks of goods every day. Prior to that day, roughly 18,000 of its residents were issued work permits to cross into Israel and earn Israeli wages.
Ordinary Israelis, meanwhile, volunteered with groups like Road to Recovery, driving Gazan patients - children among them - from the border crossing to Israeli hospitals for treatment. One of those volunteers, Vivian Silver, a lifelong peace activist, was murdered in her home at Kibbutz Be'eri on October 7. That is what the "blockade" looked like from the Israeli side of the fence.
What Israel actually restricted was weapons. The reason was not theoretical. In 2002, the Israeli Navy seized the Karine A, a ship carrying some 50 tons of Iranian arms bound for Palestinian Arab terrorists. After Hamas seized Gaza in a bloody coup in 2007, Israel - and Egypt, which also borders Gaza, and whose role Wikipedia's first sentence somehow neglects - limited what could come in. Calling that a "blockade" in the opening line of an article about a massacre is like opening the entry on a bank robbery by noting that the bank had locked its vault.
But "blockaded" is not a stray adjective. It is one brick in a wall of falsehoods that has been under construction for decades, and every brick rests on the one beneath it.
At the foundation of this wall is the name itself. After the Romans crushed the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE, they declared that Judea would henceforth be called "Syria Palaestina," after the Philistines, the Jews' ancient enemies. Palestine, in other words, exists as a deliberate attempt to erase the Jewish connection to the land.
Nearly two thousand years later, under the British Mandate, the "Palestinians" were the Jews. The Jerusalem Post was the Palestine Post. The Israel Philharmonic was the Palestine Symphony Orchestra. Bank Leumi was the Anglo-Palestine Bank. The Arabs of the region rejected the label; they considered themselves Arabs, part of the greater Arab nation.
It was only in the 1960s that the Arab League, with backing from the KGB, founded the PLO and repurposed "Palestinian" as the name of a newly-invented Arab people with an "ancient" claim to the land. PLO executive committee member Zuheir Mohsen explained the purpose candidly to the Dutch newspaper Trouw in 1977: "The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel." Only "for political and tactical reasons," he added, "do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people."
Once one accepts the nonsensical idea that the land is "Palestine" and the Jews are foreigners upon it, everything else follows.
-Jews living in Judea, the place from which the word "Jew" derives, become "occupiers."
-The Arabs who left in 1948 and every one of their descendants, four generations later, become "refugees" - the only refugee population on earth whose status is inherited forever, with its own UN agency to make sure it never ends.
-Gaza, from which Israel withdrew every soldier and every Jewish family in 2005, becomes "occupied" anyway, and then "an open-air prison," and then "blockaded."
-Murderers become "militants," and then "the resistance."
And at the top of the stack sits the biggest lie of all: "genocide."
That charge was hurled at Israel to cover for Hamas since 2007, and accelerated while hostages were still in Hamas dungeons - and it should be judged on that basis alone.
While Evyatar David was being tortured, starved, and forced to dig his own grave, someone slandering his rescuers as "genocidal" is a barbarian, at least indifferent to torture and starvation if not wanting it to continue.
While Arbel Yahoud was being sexually assaulted daily, someone slandering her rescuers as "genocidal" is a deviant.
And if a months-old baby is murdered with bare hands by his captors, as Kfir Bibas was, someone slandering his rescuers is simply a monster.
These labels apply, with neither exaggeration nor apology, to each and every miscreant who has called Israel's rescue efforts a "genocide."
The Torah commands, "Distance yourself from a false matter" (Exodus 23:7) - not merely "do not lie," but keep away from falsehood, because one lie draws in the next. Our Sages also taught that "falsehood has no legs" (Shabbos 104a): a lie cannot stand on its own. That is exactly why these lies are stacked. Each one is propped up by the one beneath it, and none of them could survive alone.
The Torah also commands us to remember - "Zachor." Remember what Amalek did to you, and remember it accurately. On this third anniversary, the most important thing we can do is refuse to let history be rewritten while the survivors are still alive to correct it.
Pull out the bottom brick, call the land and its people by their true names, and the whole tower falls.