I have no right to claim that the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is the devil. Perhaps she once was an angel who felt the pain of climate damage to our planet, but then the angel spread her pristine wings and stained them with antisemitism. Her support for the Gaza terrorist entity, for those who cheered from rooftops as their Nukhba fighters, their brothers, murdered, butchered, kidnapped, and raped hundreds of Israelis in their beds and at a music festival, and her burning hatred of Israel, make her, in the eyes of most Israelis, a despicable, even demonic figure.
Riding the tailwind she received from the global media for her highly publicized fight to stop global warming and climate change, the brazen young activist now dares to promote herself in a deceitful digital video, shamelessly claiming that she was kidnapped by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and is being held captive. This, after provocatively trying to reach the area while willfully ignoring the 251 Israelis who were actually abducted, tortured, and humiliated by her friends, the Hamas terrorists and their supporters, and the 48 Israelis, 20 of whom are still alive — who have been languishing for two years, starved and abused in Hamas’s tunnels. It would be worthwhile for Greta to reveal who stands behind her and who funds her activities and hate campaigns against the IDF and the State of Israel.
Since she apparently has no idea whom and what she is supporting, and is driven by public-relations stunts, provocation, and hatred of Israel, it is worth setting out a few basic facts for Greta and for the world at large.
While she likely revels in the number of likes she collects on her hate tours, she might imagine, hypothetically, years of terror falling on Stockholm, Sweden’s capital, from the western neighbor, Norway: rockets, incendiary balloons, suicide attackers blowing themselves up in central Stockholm simply to kill Swedes for being Swedes.
Thunburg's anti-Israel advocacy
A Palestinian state is a fiction. The chances and justification for its existence are similar to the chances of stopping global warming thanks to Greta’s activism. Israel is the world’s only Jewish state, located on a territory so small that Swedes, Britons, and Italians can hardly imagine it. Surrounding Israel, across vast lands, are 22 Arab states and 48 Muslim states, led by Iran, the engine of global terror. Of all these, Israel is the only democracy. The IDF is the most moral army in the world, at times paying in soldiers’ blood so that Gaza’s children will not be harmed. Moreover, in a recent interview, the wonderful singer Idan Raichel recounted how, years ago, he helped save the life of a Palestinian boy, only to discover recently that the boy became a shahid (martyr) whose life’s goal was to kill Jews. These are human monsters, the new Nazis, whom Greta and her friends support.
Israel delivers millions of tons of food and humanitarian aid to Gaza. Hamas steals the aid and starves its own people. Israel feeds, Hamas starves. Is there any other country in the world that, during a brutal war, provides daily humanitarian aid to its enemies? There is no such thing. The only genocide is the one aimed at Israel. Were it not for Israel’s extraordinary defensive systems, tens of thousands of Israelis would have been killed by the thousands of rockets launched for years by the terrorists of Iran, Hamas, the Houthis, and Hezbollah at Israel’s population centers. They even demand Jerusalem, Israel’s capital, although the feet of Muhammad, the Muslim prophet, never trod there, and the name “Jerusalem” does not appear even once in the Quran.
Even before the State of Israel was established, the Arabs opposed its creation and refused even the UN partition plan. From the day Israel was founded, they declared war on it. From 1948 to 1967, Egypt controlled the entire Gaza Strip. No one spoke then of a Palestinian state, and no one intended to establish one. In the 1967 Six Day War, Israel captured the Gaza Strip and instituted military rule. That was likely the best period Gaza’s residents ever had. In 2005, then prime minister Ariel Sharon implemented his decision to disengage completely from the Gaza Strip. Israel withdrew, dismantled communities, and left not a single soldier there.
Gaza could have built the Manhattan of the Middle East. Instead, its majority apparently preferred Hamas’s terror rule, which seized the strip in 2007 after a clash with Fatah and has ruled it ever since. The Gazan entity invested all its resources in turning Gaza into a fundamentalist Islamist terror monster. Israel — due to a false concept and a grave, unforgivable leadership error — contained the situation instead of eliminating Hamas when it was young. Then came the October 7 massacre, which only a demonic mind could ignore, a day on which the murderers were recast as the pitiful and peace-seeking, while the murdered, kidnapped, and raped were recast as perpetrators of genocide.
Since 1993 there have been many attempts to reach agreements and peace. The leaders of the Palestinian Authority, established in 1994 as part of the Oslo Accords signed the previous year by the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, received extremely generous offers under American auspices. Their answer was an intifada (a campaign of terror attacks) in the heart of Israel’s cities. Later, since 2000, the Palestinians received generous peace offers from Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert in 2000, 2001, and 2008, and again in 2013 from the current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, but they always refused and agreed to no kind of permanent settlement generous from Israel’s perspective. Their rejection makes clear that the only thing that will satisfy them is the erasure of the State of Israel from the map and the casting of its citizens into the Mediterranean Sea. Apparently 48 Muslim states are not enough.
Everything written here is fact, not legend. Now you decide, Greta, whether your behavior toward the State of Israel is antisemitic and demonic, or whether your support for the Gaza terror entity is just and normal. Perhaps if you and your friends stood on the right side, the spread of fundamentalist Islamist terror that threatens the world would be halted, and who knows — it might even lead to a change in the human climate and help reduce greenhouse gases.
The writer is a strategic communications consultant at Peer Levin Communications.