The Tragedy of Oded Lifshitz

In a video that circulated on X Tuesday, London Mayor Sadiq Khan did it again. He declared that “Islam is peace, love and tolerance. Islam celebrates diversity because diversity is our strength!” Coming just days before Hamas made its revolting display of bloodlust and hatred as it turned over the bodies that were supposed to be of four Israeli hostages it had murdered, but were actually only three of them plus an unidentified woman, this was particularly easy to dismiss.

The tragedy of it, however, is that some people still believe it, and this is no harmless fantasy: it is costing lives. One of them was in a coffin Hamas paraded around Thursday as Gaza’s “innocent civilians” cheered lustily at the sight of dead Jews.

One of the corpses Hamas returned to the Israelis on Thursday was that of Oded Lifshitz, an 83-year-old man whom Hamas took hostage on Oct. 7, 2023, as it murdered 1,200 Israelis. The jihad group later murdered Lifshitz himself. The Jerusalem Post gave this title to its Thursday story about this elderly man: “Super grandpa and lifelong peace advocate: Family mourns slain hostage Oded Lifshitz.”

Lifelong peace advocate. Many Israelis who lived in the southern part of the country, near the Gaza border, were indeed starry-eyed leftists who believed that they could befriend the Palestinian Arabs and show them good will, and that this good will would be reciprocated. We can shake our heads at their naivete, but we must remember that these people have been lied to relentlessly for decades. Sadiq Khan was only repeating what practically every last major politician in the Western world, with the notable exception of Donald Trump and a handful of others, has said at one time or another ever since jihadis with the same beliefs and motives as Hamas murdered nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001.

After all, it was one of President George W. Bush’s first priorities after those attacks to make sure that no one thought ill of Islam. On September 17, 2001, Bush spoke at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., while standing in front of Muslim leaders including Nihad Awad of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations and Abdurrahman Alamoudi, who later went to prison for financing al-Qaeda itself, the very group responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

Bush was there to exonerate Islam from any responsibility for the attacks. “These acts of violence against innocents,” he declared, “violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith….The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.”

This sort of twaddle became the establishment view everywhere. Oded Lifshitz likely believed it. The Jerusalem Post describes him as a “lifelong peacenik and Palestinian rights advocate.” It noted that “in his work as a journalist, Lifshitz reported extensively on the Bedouin sector in Israel and reportedly took a case to the High Court, which resulted in the return of some of their land.”

Lifshitz was also “part of an organization called Road to Recovery that helped Palestinians cross the Erez border in order to receive treatments in Israeli hospitals.” His grandson said of Lifshitz and his wife: “They have been human rights activists, peace activists for all their lives.”

All this doesn’t necessarily mean that Lifshitz was a naïve leftist in a land of predators. The Post adds that “because of his experience in activism and his connections to the Arab world, his daughter said that he was more than aware of how destructive jihadist forces were. Lifshitz, according to the Post, “had an unclouded vision of what could happen if Israeli-Palestinian divisions festered to a point beyond return.”

Lifshitz himself is quoted as saying: “When the Palestinians have nothing to lose, we will lose, big time. The question is, what do we do then?” This is an intriguing question. His assumption seems to have been the same as that of the American and European political establishment: we have to keep showering money on the Palestinians, so that they don’t become desperate and think they have nothing to lose. As long as they think they have something to lose, they’ll remain peaceful.

Behind this assumption is the further assumption that Islam is peaceful, and thus that if Muslims have no grievances, they will not attack non-Muslims.

These are false assumptions. On Thursday, when Hamas returned Oded Lifshitz’s body, we saw anew how they cost lives. The responsibility for these lies, however, does not lie with this poor old man who thought that his good will would be reciprocated. It lies squarely with those who told him these falsehoods all these years. These people need to be called to account and removed from all positions of power and influence. Will that ever happen? Only if we, as a society, have the courage to decisively reject these lies ourselves.