By Jonathan S. Tobin

(JNS) Avoiding generalizations about groups of people is almost always wise. In doing so, we avoid the snares that can lead to prejudicial conclusions that cause us to forget that even those who differ from us in many ways have a common humanity. When people refer to opponents of any kind by saying that “they” (whoever the “they” might be) ”are all alike” and therefore bad, we know they are usually telling us far more about themselves than anything else.

And yet, as much as we might wish it not to be so, there are occasions when groups do exhibit loathsome behavior that are a clear illustration of their beliefs and values.

Over the last month, the Palestinian Arabs have done just that during ceremonies as part of the release of hostages they took on Oct. 7, 2023. Their celebrations of that orgy of mass murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction reached a new low this week when they turned over the remains of four murdered hostages: Oded Lifshitz, 83 when he was taken; Shiri Bibas, 32; and her little sons, Ariel, age 4; and Kfir, only 9 months old when kidnapped. However, testing later showed that the body that was supposed to be Shiri was, in fact, not her. That was just one more act of cruelty to add to so many others committed by the Palestinians.

The handover of their coffins, which reportedly stated the time of their “arrest” by Hamas terrorists and civilians who followed them into the Israeli communities that were devastated by their attack, was a wild celebration, complete with loud happy music and cheering throngs of Palestinians.

A deranged show of bloodlust

It was a bizarre, deranged show of bloodlust and hatred that ought to strain the ability of even the most dedicated apologists for the Palestinians to rationalize their behavior. But I doubt it will move them to change their minds.

The same is true for fringe elements of the Jewish community and other leftists who have taken sides against Israel. They have largely been indoctrinated by woke, leftist ideologies like critical race theory and intersectionality, and believe that the Jews alone are undeserving of rights. Having bought into the myth that the war being waged by the Palestinians to destroy the one Jewish state on the planet is somehow analogous to the historic struggle for civil rights in the United States, they believe that there is nothing its foes can do that cannot be justified.

For those not blinded by ideology, the question is what should we make of these exhibitions put on by the Palestinians. Much of the corporate mainstream media, which have often acted as Hamas’s stenographers since the atrocities on Oct. 7, continue to downplay or ignore it. These latest instances of Palestinian Arab barbarism, however, are not one-offs or outliers. When put in the context of what happened on that Black Shabbat in southern Israel, as well as the suicide bombings of the Second intifada, the celebration of baby kidnapping and killing can’t be excused as merely a reaction to Israel’s counter-offensive aimed at destroying Hamas.

Moreover, during the past few decades, the Palestinian education system, media and popular culture have been drenched in intransigent and virulent hatred for Jews and Israel. It has valorized brutal terrorism and a cult of death.

All of this should lead rational observers to stop pretending that there isn’t something fundamentally wrong with the Palestinians, which must also be taken into account when discussing how to solve the conflict with them.

As much as decent people will always reflexively seek to project their own beliefs and values onto others, even those with whom they are locked into disputes, there are times when evidence demands that we stop pretending that there aren’t some clear differences between national cultures.

Hateful collective behavior in which large numbers of people participate and are sanctioned by their leaders and institutions is the sort of thing that cannot be ignored. In such cases, it is impossible not to draw conclusions about the society that produced them.

A look back at some historical examples

Examples of this abound in history.

In the ancient world, Romans cheered the humiliation of their defeated foes in wild collective celebrations that culminated in blood-choked displays and mass executions that were intended and appreciated as a form of popular entertainment.

The same can be said of the theatrical processions and celebrations of the Nazi Party in Germany—some of which were captured for posterity in artistic films by party sympathizer Leni Riefenstahl. On display were hatred for Jews and veneration of their Fuhrer, which demonstrated how out-of-control nationalism can degenerate into mass hysteria. At the time, much of the world either turned a blind eye to these carnivals of hate or thought them to be a good show.

Tragically, those displays turned out to be a collective seal of approval for wars of conquest and genocide. That not only produced the bloodiest war in history and a Holocaust but also brought down a catastrophe upon the German people in which as many as 9 million of them were killed and approximately 12 million forced from their homes when the borders of Europe were redrawn after World War II.

While that caused great suffering for the Germans, most of the civilized world unsympathetically viewed this retribution as their just desserts. They remembered the way the Germans had embraced Nazism and had participated in the mass atrocities visited upon the Jews, as well as on European countries they had conquered.

Like the Palestinians who cling to their nakba or “disaster” narrative of woe at the hands of the Jews in 1948, the Germans, too, had their own story of being unfairly treated by the victors of World War I and used it to justify victimizing others. Mixed in with the sick racial theories and antisemitism of the Nazis, it created a fatal brew of hate that led them and the world to disaster.

It’s long past time to evaluate the Palestinians in a similar fashion.

Constructing a national identity

There’s no denying that they have suffered over the course of the last century. Rather than work with the returning Jews to share the country in a way that would have benefited both peoples, they preferred to reject compromise. From the 1920s on, they stuck to demands that the clock be turned back to a mythical past in which the local Arabs would rule the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea by themselves with the Jews being, at best, a tolerated and discriminated against minority. They constructed their national identity around that myth, even though there had never been such a state in the history of that country dating back to antiquity.

Betrayed by their leaders and treated with contempt by other Arab states that refused to absorb or resettle the 1948 refugees, they doubled down on their legacy of defeat and dispossession. Rather than accepting the reality of the Jewish state and its legitimacy, they have found it impossible to move beyond their futile quest to destroy Israel. Instead, they have rejected numerous offers of peace and statehood as well as supported increasingly extremist groups like the Islamists of Hamas. Even worse, they created a culture in which spilling Jewish blood has been the only way for political organizations to gain credibility.

All of this is tragic. The Palestinians have hurt themselves in this manner far more than they have injured Israelis.

But after the last 16 months, sympathy for their victimhood narrative should be discarded. Instead, it’s time for them to be held accountable not just for their horrific deeds but for a collective mindset that has normalized barbarism.

If international opinion wasn’t so tainted by traditional antisemitic attitudes and the modern woke variant that has falsely labeled a “settler-colonial” and “apartheid” state, no one would tolerate the Palestinians’ embrace of terror or their hate-filled celebrations of their evil deeds. The world wouldn’t be clamoring to reward them for Oct. 7 and their treatment of their victims with aid, let alone a state.

Holding them accountable

But recent events should reinforce the willingness of the administration of President Donald Trump to envision a future for Gaza in which the Palestinians—like the Germans of 80 years ago—are forced to pay a price for their crimes. As historian Andrew Roberts wrote recently in The Free Press, rather than damning Trump’s plan as “ethnic cleansing,” there are clear precedents for this sort of accountability that have been accepted by an international consensus.

More than that, the latest Palestinian celebration of terror and hate should force those members of the civilized world to stop giving them a pass for their behavior.

There may well be many Palestinian individuals who are appalled by what their society is doing. That’s true—not only in terms of the unwillingness to give up “resistance” that amounts to a justification of genocide of the Jews but also what it’s done to their own people. But they have failed to make themselves known or to push back against the culture of terror.

It’s also true that resisting Hamas and the other terror organizations, including the supposedly “moderate” Fatah that controls the Palestinian Authority, would be difficult and extremely dangerous. But in the past, the world has shown no reluctance to judge nations and peoples by their willingness to do just that.

Even in Nazi Germany, where a totalitarian government controlled every aspect of society and fear of the Hitlerian regime was justified, some resisted. And, of course, there were instances of “righteous gentiles” who sought to save Jews from death, even though they were rare in Germany and most proved unsuccessful.

Despite the nearby presence of Israeli forces and even financial rewards offered for anyone who would help one of the hostages escape, there appears not to have been one taker among the Palestinians in Gaza. It would have been a perilous thing to accept that offer. But we have learned that many of the hostages were held by civilians in their own homes, not only in Hamas’s tunnels. They were forced to cook, clean and watch after kids. Yet not a single Palestinian Arab seems to have been willing to save one of the hostages, even those harbored in their homes. There is also the fact that some of the worst of the Oct. 7 outrages were conducted by civilians and not the Hamas assault forces.

When it comes to the Palestinians, all of the well-meaning rhetoric about common humanity was defeated by a collective mindset that, like that of the Germans, demonized Jews.

Drawing conclusions about the Palestinians need not obligate us to mimic their hatred by dehumanizing them. But it does oblige us to be honest about their national culture and demand that it be changed before they are allowed to have any power to inflict further harm on others or themselves.

Faced with total defeat and with their country in ruins, the Germans did change and put their Nazi past behind them, even if not all of those responsible for the Holocaust were held accountable. The Palestinians, however, will never change until the civilized world stops coddling them and making excuses for their culture of death, hate and intransigent dedication to perpetual war on the Jews.

After the latest examples of their collective depravity—the slaughter of an old man, a young mother and her two babies—they should be made to see that a failure to transform their national culture will be punished with policies that will have permanent consequences for their national life and ambitions. The alternative is to doom both Israelis and Palestinians to another century of pointless conflict and more sick exhibitions of hate such as the one that Hamas staged to celebrate the deaths of innocents.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.