The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality. –James Baldwin

If you sit at a hipster café in Tel Aviv and start talking to a random person, 20 minutes later, this person, drinking a matcha latte and speaking perfect English, will start explaining to you that those [Palestinian] children will grow up to be terrorists, so it’s okay to kill them. -Activist and blogger Andrey Khrzhanovskiy (known online as Andrey X)

Below are a post by Hani Almadhoun and a comment by Ariel Eshkol, who lives in Israel. The level of dehumanization exemplified by the latter is typical of the vast majority of Israelis who have been indoctrinated to believe that they are superior and Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and elsewhere, who they refer to as “Arabs,” are “the other,” i.e., inferior.

Hani Almadhoun is a Palestinian-American humanitarian, professional fundraiser, and author who serves as the vice president of philanthropy at UNRWA USA and the co-founder of the Gaza Soup Kitchen. Hani has lost at least 150 members of his extended family since the start of the genocide in October 2023. (Please consider making periodic donations to one or both of these organizations doing life-saving work in Gaza.)

An early June 2025 Hebrew University survey revealed that 64% of all Israelis agreed with the statement that there are “no innocents in Gaza.” If you take into account the fact that Palestinians comprise about 17% of Israel’s population and 92% of them opposed the statement, the overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis embrace this view. It’s estimated that 30% of those killed in Gaza by Israel are children, many from “deliberate” targeting, according to the UN.

When I see photos of children and others in Gaza, my heart goes out to them. I think of James Baldwin’s quote. I do what I can to help. I wish I could travel to Gaza and work in a soup kitchen or wherever help is needed. When Ariel sees them, she sees “lies” and a “Hamas garbage pile.” This mindset explains why Israel can bomb tents, assassinate innocents with drones, target children by shooting them in the heart and head, shooting boys in the genitals, bombing a family on the beach, killing a girl carrying water by a drone missile strike, destroy life-supporting infrastructure, limit the import of basic necessities, etc., ad nauseam in dogged pursuit of the slow-motion genocide that is part of the regional land grab known as the Greater Israel project.

Shame on Ariel, all of her like-minded fellow citizens, Zionists worldwide, and the apartheid and genocidal country of Israel.

In contrast to the living hell that is Gaza, Ariel, her husband Michal, and their children live peacefully on stolen land in Beit Hashmonai, Israel, about 45 km (28 miles) from the northern Gaza border. It may as well be on another planet.

As the Wikipedia entry points out, Beit Hashmonai was established in 1970 by the Jewish Agency for teachers at the nearby Ayalon School on land that had been associated with the depopulated Palestinian village of al-Barriyya. (My italics)

MAA

Postscript: Here are some more examples that Hani shared on LinkedIn. The easiest way to deal with this, rather than manually deleting comments, is to use Facebook’s automated moderation. Here’s ChatGPT’s advice: “For someone running a Gaza soup kitchen and receiving sustained hostile comments, I’d configure it fairly aggressively. Facebook Pages can block up to 1,000 keywords, phrases, or emojis from comments. Comments containing those terms are automatically hidden. Facebook also has a profanity filter, and some Pages have access to Moderation Assist, which can automatically take actions on comments according to rules.” Using an external bot is another more cumbersome option. Fight hate with technology!