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A recent anti-Israel letter was signed by assorted denizens of Hollywood. Here, Michael Kaplan responds to several of its central claims: “Do Uninformed Hollywood Celebrities Realize They Are Hurting Chances of a Gaza ‘Ceasefire’?,” by Michael Kaplan, Algemeiner, September 19, 2024:

I could point out that Israel is not “waging a war of collective punishment on the civilian population of Gaza,” but rather going to extraordinary lengths to avoid civilian casualties to an extent unprecedented in modern, urban warfare.

A simple thought experiment underscores the absurdity of the above two claims: imagine if Israel actually did want to commit genocide or wage a war against the civilian population. What would that look like? Obviously, hundreds of thousands if not millions would be dead. Not tens of thousands….

And since Israel is being charged with “genocide” by Ruffalo et al, here’s another bit of data that they might want to consider. In 1967, when Israel took control of Gaza, here were 400,000 Arabs in the Strip. By 2005, when Israel pulled out of Gaza, there were 1.4 million Arabs — a more than tripling of the population in 1967. Furthermore, in the West Bank, when Israel took it over in 1967 after the Six-Day War, there were 900,000 Palestinian Arabs living there; today there are three million. And in Israel within the 1949 armistice lines, there were 160,000 Arabs, and today there are two million Israeli Arabs. Genocide, Mark and Susan? What genocide?

I could point out the brazen audacity of calling for the “release of all hostages — both Palestinian and Israeli” as though terrorists and armed enemy combatants taken prisoner are “hostages,” and in any way comparable to women and children dragged from their beds.

The Palestinians who are to be released in any exchange are prisoners, and should not be referred to as “hostages.” And most of those whom Hamas wants freed in an exchange have been imprisoned for their support of, or participation in, acts of terrorism. So the proposed exchange should more accurately be described as one of “hostages for terrorists.”

I could point out the inanity of the oxymoron “permanent ceasefire,” when a “ceasefire” by definition is temporary, just like the ceasefire that was in place on October 7, 2023, before Hamas violated it by invading Israel — and just like every other ceasefire that has been agreed to and violated by Hamas over the past decades….

A “permanent ceasefire” means an end to the war, with Hamas still standing and Israel still short of attaining its key war aim — to dismantle Hamas as a military threat. And that’s what Ruffalo, Sarandon et al think Israel should be forced to do: halt its operations before it has achieved victory, which would allow Hamas to proclaim that by “still standing” it has “defeated the mighty Zionist army.”

In its 1988 charter, Hamas has proclaimed its goal of destroying the state of Israel, and driving out, or killing, all of its Jewish inhabitants. This will not change. Any “permanent ceasefire” will be broken by Hamas as soon as it believes itself sufficiently powerful to take on the IDF again, akin to what Muhammad did when he broke his ten-year “treaty of al-Hudaibiyya” with the Meccans after 18 months, which is when he felt that his forces were sufficiently strong to defeat the Meccans. He was right. And the making-and-breaking of the Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya in 628 A.D. became the model, for Muslims, of all subsequent treaty-making with Infidels.

These Hollywood types exploit their celebrity status to push an anti-Israel narrative that grades into antisemitism, and includes their baseless charge that Israeli Jews are committing “genocide.” They refuse to recognize that the IDF does everything it can to minimize civilian casualties, while Hamas — the terror group they never mention by name — tries to maximize those casualties. They may be famous, they may be rich, but these celebrities are just as malignant and stupid as any down-at-the-heels obsessive antisemite ranting at Hyde Park Corner, spouting his antisemitic drivel before a rapt and appreciative audience of Muslims.