Guardian promotes Oct. 7th Massacre erasure

12 year old Noya Dan, from Kibbutz Kissufim, murdered by Hamas on Oct. 7

Days after Oct. 7th, 2023, the Guardian began centering the story on the putatively ‘disproportionate’ Israeli military response to the Hamas massacre, rather than on the genocidal terror group’s mass murder, sexual violence, torture and mutilation itself.

Within a week of the barbaric attacks which killed 1,200, they had already begun damage-control for the Palestinian cause by promoting the charge that Israel was engaged in “ethnic cleansing” or “genocide” – a charge leveled 11 times in 13 days, beginning on Oct. 14th.

In fact, as we’ve documented over the last two years, the outlet has consistently published reports and op-eds relegating the antisemitic atrocity, as well the subsequent seven front war, as dry facts within the more important story of Israeli villainy – propaganda, including the genocide libel, which has helped fuel the tsunami of antisemitism in Britain since Oct. 7.

Sometimes, the abuse of Oct. 7th memory on their pages has included erasure – that is, columns or articles about Oct. 7th and its aftermath which seem to go out of their way to omit the sadistic attacks in southern Israel on men, women and children from the story altogether.

One example of this revisionist history of the massacre recently appeared in a op-ed at the outlet (“Israel needs to face accountability for our genocide. And so does the US“, Nov. 18th), written by Yuli Novak, executive director of B’tselem. Novak, though an Israeli, opposes Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state, and once wrote a column appearing to justify Palestinian terror.

Though the headline of her column, as well as the thrust of the text, promotes the genocide libel, what most stands out is her decision throughout the piece to intentionally erase Hamas, and their mass slaughter of Jews in Oct. 2023, from the equation.

Indeed, the word “Hamas” doesn’t appear at all on Novak’s nearly 900 word piece – consistent with the outlet’s broader coverage of the war, in which readers would be forgiven for believing that the terror group disappeared after Oct. 7th. In contrast, the word “genocide” is used 15 times in the op-ed.

One of the only sentences even alluding to the terror group’s savage attack is here, early in her piece:

A strange kind of calm has settled over Israel in the weeks since the Gaza ceasefire was declared. The sirens stopped. The hostages who survived the 7 October attack and nearly two years in captivity came home.

Novak’s piece, in its desire to push the antizionist narrative regardless of the facts, completely erases the 1,200, mostly Jewish civilians, who were murdered during the ”attack”, the terror group’s widespread use of sadistic torture of, and sexual violence against, women, girls and men, both on Oct. 7th, and in the tunnels where they held hundreds of hostages.

Hamas’s Oct. 7th massacre, their subsequent widespread use of human shields, which has included the use of hospitals and other civilian structures to store weapons and launch attacks, their 350 miles of terror tunnels (often under civilian buildings), as well as their nihilistic decision not to surrender, despite the Gaza civilian casualty count, is similarly erased when, in an attempt to sell her libel, Novak writes:

Hospitals and journalists were systematically targeted…Infrastructure demolished. Israeli officials openly stated the goal: to destroy Gaza and make it uninhabitable. By textbook definition, this is genocide: the deliberate targeting of people not for who they are as individuals, but because they are members of a group marked for destruction.

The IDF’s goal, of course, was, and is, to destroy Hamas, a military objective that any nation would pursue when faced with a terror attack that’s the equivalent, in terms of deaths per population, of thirteen 9/11s.

Novak’s inversion, and Oct. 7th massacre erasure, includes a lot of obfuscatory rhetoric. For instance, she writes that “the origin of this genocide didn’t begin on 7 October 2023, nor did it end with the ceasefire deal”, not only wiping the Hamas massacre that occurred on that day from history, but suggesting that the only mistake pro-Palestinian activists make is when they mark the beginning of the genocide on Oct. 7.

It actually began, she avers, “in decades of Israeli military rule over Palestinians, apartheid, impunity and dehumanization, driven by a system built to ensure Jewish supremacy over the entire land“. As you can see, the antisemitic “Jewish supremacy” trope, once the province of the extremist right, is increasingly the go-to libel by Jew haters to describe both the Jewish state and Jews who support its existence.

Further into her op-ed, Novak begins a sentence that, at first, appears to acknowledge the profound Israeli trauma from Oct. 7th, but then turns out it’s just a rhetorical trick to repeat her erasure of Hamas and their barbarous, evil massacre:

The 7 October attack was horrifying for every Israeli, including me. It allowed the Israeli system to begin a large-scale, coordinated destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza, under the banner of self-defense.

So, Oct. 7th was evidently only “horrifying” in the sense that it unleashed the “destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza“, all “under the banner of self-defense“.

Finally, many may recall that, in 2016, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the former leader of France’s far-right Front National, was convicted – for the second time – of contesting crimes against humanity for saying the gas chambers used to murder millions of Jews during the Holocaust were only a “detail” of history.

Yet, the Guardian published a piece about the worst antisemitic attack since the Holocaust that went even further than the late French extremist, rendering the sadistic mass slaughter of Jews, perpetrated by the racist heirs to Nazi Jew-hatred, as an almost complete non-event – a morally reprehensible, ideologically-inspired erasure of the most well-documented pogrom in Jewish history.