The accusations against Israel may be lies, but the fantasy world created by the anti-Zionists has devastating consequences in the real world.
Recently, UNICEF published the results of a survey showing that child malnutrition rates in the Gaza Strip are low, between 0.2% and 0.8%. Despite three years of war, despite Hamas stealing and hoarding aid, despite constant shouts of “famine," the children of Gaza are better fed than in many other countries in the Middle East. This is because Israel allowed a historic amount of food and aid to enter throughout the war, even knowing this helped Hamas and allowed the terrorist organization to both continue to fight and to hold Israel's hostages captive.
The most shocking aspect is not that the malnutrition rate is so low, but that a UN agency actually told the truth for once. The UN has a standing policy of never, ever telling the truth when it comes to Israel and of firing officials who commit the crime of putting some value on the truth, so this is a rarer occurrence than a blue moon.
The charge of famine was a lie, as was obvious to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention. The thousands of tons of food that constantly entered Gaza throughout the war, the complete lack of any photographs of a single starving person despite the millions of people desperate for any evidence of Israeli wrongdoing. The media, in an effort to serve their anti-Jewish clientele, were forced to resort to using pictures of children with other preexisting medical conditions in a failed effort to “prove" a starvation that they knew didn’t exist.
Indeed, the only people who we know for certain were starving in Gaza during the war were some of the Israeli hostages, who were the only people to have been shown to have lost significant weight over the last three years.
While the Gaza famine was a fantasy, another report from the British government shows just how serious the real-world consequences of this fantasy are. According to this report, the principals of Jewish schools have been forced to spend more time on security arrangements for their students than on education. One educator said that he spends as much as 90% of his time dealing with security instead of teaching.
This is the reality that has been created by the fantasy. By spreading lies about the Jewish State, antisemites create the permission-structure to threaten and harm Jewish children around the world. This was always the primary purpose of the starvation and genocide lies, to make those who want to harm Jewish children feel justified in fulfilling their sick fantasies.
The “empathy" over a fictional scenario was never real. It was meant to destroy empathy for children closer to home. Its purpose was always to deny empathy to Jewish schoolchildren, toddlers, and babies. When a Jewish child is spat on, slapped, or assaulted, when a terrorist attempts to blow up a Jewish preschool filled with 4-year-olds, when terrorists shoot Jewish children celebrating Hanukkah at an Australian beach, that is the end result and even the goal of all the lies. When people believe the lies, when they live in a fantasy world where Jews are the only evil that exists, then there is no empathy in their hearts for Jewish children.
This complete absence of empathy and humanity was personified in the vandals who felt the overwhelming need to draw Hitler mustaches on the posters of Ariel and Kfir Bibas. Only in a fantasy world could a four-year-old boy and a nine-month-old baby be considered just as bad and as guilty as Hitler, but in the fantasy world in whiich the anti-Zionists choose to live, all Jews are Hitler by virtue of being born. So empathy for Jewish babies becomes the same thing as empathy for the devil.
If the British government learns anything from its own report about the impact of antisemitism on its own children, then it must stop accepting and parroting the obvious lies of the people who want to make Jewish children suffer. Fighting antisemitism means finally living in reality, the true reality in which Israel has been fighting with both hands tied behind its back against genocidal enemies, and in which Jew-hatred masquerading as “anti-Zionism" has become the sole guiding principle of far too many in the West.
Jewish children deserve to be able to go to school in peace. But until people start living in the real world and abandon the fantasy of Jews as the ultimate evil, Jewish educators must continue to devote more time to keeping their students safe from those who wish to murder Jewish children than they are allowed to devote to teaching.