Last Friday evening at the Shabbat dinner table, I put a very hard proposition to my two young sons: Now you know what it means to be Jews; this is how it has been for our people for millennia. No one at the table disputed this proposition, and, indeed, in the ensuing discussion, it was not difficult to back it up with hard, historical facts. Moreover, in the case of our family, my sons were aware that their grandparents were Holocaust survivors, and, in recent days, one of them had seen his father weeping. But what ensued after a brief discussion on this topic was something that I had not anticipated. One of my sons asked me a very hard but very good question: Are Jews safer in the world since the establishment of the state of Israel?

Fair enough. A couple of weeks ago I would have quickly answered this question in the affirmative. But now it gave me pause. Searching for an answer, my first response was that had Israel existed before the Shoah, millions of European Jews might have been able to save themselves by fleeing there. As soon as I uttered this response, I knew that it was inadequate. Real history had already totally obliterated that imaginary scenario, and the recent and present butchery made a mockery of it. Though I did not express them at the dinner table, certain sickening thoughts immediately flooded my mind.

Propagandists for the Gazans are constantly repeating the canard that Gaza is an open-air prison created by Israel. All the facts fly in the face of this lie. When, in 2005, Israel ceased to occupy Gaza and evacuated all Israelis from the strip, effectively ethnically cleansing itself, it allowed free and open access to the area. It only instituted blockades to the area — as, by the way, did Egypt — after Hamas began its terrorist attacks. Presently Israel is urging Gazan civilians to evacuate southward before the ground offensive begins, but Hamas will not let them — nor will Egypt, which has closed the Rafah crossing that it controls, allow Gazans to find refuge there. So, the truth is that, insofar as Gaza is an open-air prison, it is a prison created by Hamas.

On the other hand, if Gaza is not an open-air prison of Israel’s making, what does that make Israel in the eyes of Iran, its terrorist proxies, and all hostile Arab nations? Seven million Jews living in a very small area makes Israel an open-air concentration camp. Iran, with American support, has been relentlessly pursuing a nuclear arsenal, which is its solution to its Israeli (read, Jewish) problem — a solution that it has often repeated is one bomb away. Most civilized people would like to think this would never happen — but that is not to say it could not ever happen. I do not have to remind the reader that in our time, we have learned that what, a decade or so ago, was unthinkable can come to pass. Sometimes, no matter how uncomfortable, it makes us feel we need to think the unthinkable.

Lest the reader get the wrong impression, I am not by nature a pessimist. Quite the opposite. But when speaking with other Jews, especially my Israeli family and friends, it is very difficult to escape these dark thoughts. Yesterday morning I called a cousin who lives in a moshav in the north of Israel. She is as strong and tough as any Israeli you will ever meet. I have never heard or seen her so distraught; in fact, for most of the conversation, she turned the camera away to keep me from seeing her face. She has six children of military age, and all of them and the spouses of those who are married have been called up for military service. In classic Israeli form, she and her husband are taking care of their grandchildren while their own children are in the field.

Yesterday a friend sent me a YouTube video of Douglas Murray addressing an audience about Hamas. At the beginning of his speech, he maintained, as others are now maintaining, that Hamas is no different from ISIS and that Hamas supporters should be handled the same way we handle ISIS supporters. Toward the end of his speech, he declared, “I am a Jew.” One cannot overemphasize how heartening and gratifying such a declaration of empathy and solidarity is for Jewish people. But one cannot help but wonder how many of those making this declaration are aware, in concrete terms, of how true the words they are saying are. At present, for the likes of Hamas, Jews are the most delicious, the most delectable, the most desirable prey. But we mustn’t forget how ISIS, Hamas’ previous incarnation, treated Christians, Yazidis, Bahai, and others not of the Islamic faith. And though it is almost never reported in the mainstream media, it should be noted that, for decades now, pogroms have been perpetrated against Christians living in Muslim-majority countries, including Pakistan and Nigeria. Once a month, Raymond Ibrahim chronicles the murder and mayhem perpetrated on a vast scale against helpless Christians in Muslim-majority countries around the world. Though it gets virtually no coverage by the mainstream media, month after month, year after year, thousands of helpless Christians are killed, tortured, raped, and expelled from their homes.

A couple of decades ago, the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck attempted unsuccessfully to introduce the concept of evil into his profession. His commonplace idea was that what characterizes evil people — psychopaths, sociopaths, narcissists — is their lack of remorse after they have hurt other people. (Even some Nazis showed some remorse about their cowardly deeds insofar as they tried to destroy some of the evidence when they were on the verge of defeat. In contrast, the Hamas butchers broadcast them to the world.) Psychiatrists call this state of mind — if that’s what you want to call it — not a mental illness but a personality disorder, and the general consensus in the profession is that it is incurable, in which case it must either be completely contained or destroyed for the sake of public safety.

Everyone knows that Sunni and Shiite Muslims have been at war with one another for time immemorial. That is their problem, not ours; our problem is that all non-Muslims are potential prey and victims of Islamic extremity. What Israel needs to do now, and, indeed, what the whole world needs to do now, especially truly peace-loving Muslims, is to make it Islam’s problem, not ours.