Pulitzer Prize for Whitewashing Terror

This year’s Pulitzer Prize for Commentary has gone to Mosab Abu Toha for visceral, wrenching essays he wrote about life in Gaza for the past year and a half.

There’s no doubt that Abu Toha is a sensitive and talented writer.  The only problem with this award is the fact that he’s also an apologist for Hamas.  His essays paint a distorted, one-sided picture of Israel’s war in Gaza which slanders Israel as cruel and genocidal, while pretending that Hamas does not exist.

While Abu Toha has been a prolific author and commentator in recent months – always ready with a sound bite about Israel’s supposed wrongdoing –   the Pulitzer Board singled out four outrageous essays he penned for The New Yorker.  Abu Toha, the Pulitzer asserts, describes “the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza…of more than a year and a half of war with Israel.”

That’s “Gaza’s” war with Israel, not Hamas’.  In Abu Toha’s essays, Hamas doesn’t exist.  Through his gifted writing he describes a Gaza that inhabits the minds of certain groups of people in the West: where plucky refugees refuse to give up even in the face of a vicious enemy that tries to kill them again and again.  “We all felt like refugees,” Abu Toha wrote in one of his essays,” after moving in with relatives in Jabalia in Gaza, “but the camp was still alive with its old spirit.”  Adorable children played soccer in the streets, he describes, a show of courage in the face of cruel Israeli troops who are supposedly trying to murder them.

There are so many problems in Abu Toha’s four prize-winning New Yorker essays that at times they read almost like parody.  Yet Abu Toha is deadly serious.  Now living in upstate New York, Abu Toha has emerged as one of Gaza’s greatest spokesmen – and one of Hamas’ greatest apologists.  Here are three critiques of his dangerous work.

Erasing Hamas

In his lengthy and beautiful depictions of life in Gaza, Abu Toha completely sidelines Hamas.  In fact, in his four long prize-winning essays about daily life in Gaza, the word “Hamas” appears exactly twice, both to describe the impetus for Israel’s “offensive” on Gaza (“when Israeli forces began their 2023 offensive, in the wake of Hamas’s October 7th attack” and “When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023….”)

His decision to never mention Hamas’ brutal stranglehold on every aspect of Gazan society is a deliberate – and troubling – omission.

It’s not as if anyone in Gaza can avoid Hamas, though some certainly wish they could.  A 2023 Israeli military report described Hamas’ reign of terror: “Hamas runs a corrupt dictatorship over the Gaza Strip, often jailing, beating, damaging financially and even torturing opposing voices inside the Gaza Strip.”

Freedom of speech is non-existent: “Journalists in Gaza are under near-constant inspection, interrogated and threatened if writing anything the Hamas rule sees as damaging their image.”    The rights of women and gay people are severely curtailed: “Hamas governs in accordance with the sharia-based Palestinian Basic Law, violating many of the rights of women, including banning the participation of women in many social activities, and persecuting other minorities, like the LGBTQ community, which are in danger of a death sentence if revealed.”

In 2015 – before they began focusing solely on Israel’s perceived wrongdoings – Amnesty International even published a damning report on Hamas’ brutal repression.  Dissidents or anyone who didn’t toe the Hamas line were routinely arrested, tortured, executed, and made to “disappear.”

As far back as 2008, NATO documented Hamas’ widespread use of Palestinian civilians as human shields, including: “firing rockets, artillery, and mortars from or in proximity to heavily populated civilian areas, often from or near…schools, hospitals, or mosques”; “locating military or security-related infrastructures…within or in proximity to civilian areas….” and “combating the IDF from or in proximity to residential and commercial areas, including using civilians for intelligence gathering missions.

In February 2024, Israeli Lt. Col. (res.) Jonathan Conricus noted that Hamas military components are embedded in virtually every residential building in Gaza: “There’s hardly a house that our troops go to that doesn’t have either an entrance to a tunnel, a shaft, or weapons that are stocked inside, or explosives, or where they are manufacturing weapons, or it’s a hideout for terrorist activity, or any of the above combined.  And it’s pervasive all across the Gaza Strip.”

The only place Hamas’ footprint is notably absent is in the pages of Abu Toha’s articles, where this brutal Islamist terrorist group is nowhere to be found.

Ignoring Hatred in Hamas Schools

Having left Gaza, Abu Toha reflects warmly on his childhood memories and those of his relatives and friends.  “I often think of the places I will not be able to show my children or my grandchildren, the memories I will not be able to share: the kindergarten I attended in Al-Shati refugee camp….” and other locales.

In all his warm reminiscences, one topic never comes up: the textbooks which Abu Toha and the other children in his family learned from in Gazan schools, which routinely teach hatred of Jews and Israel and train children to grow up desiring to fight Jews and the Jewish state.

Former US Representative Steve Israel notes that nearly all children in Gaza are educated at either United Nations schools or Hamas-run institutions.  (Hamas adapted Palestinian Authority curricula – themselves replete with problems with radicalization and antisemitism – in 2013.)  “This is a curriculum designed to indoctrinate and radicalize its students in support of Hamas’ terrorist aims,” Rep. Israel observes.

Abu Toha writes fondly of relying on United Nations aid for food throughout his childhood.  If he attended a UN school in Gaza, his maps labeled all of Israel “Palestine” and failed to label “Israel” at all.  His history lessons would have glorified terrorists who killed Jews, and his religious study teachers would have taught that the Islamic concept of jihad – which many interpret as a personal quest for improvement – means killing oneself in a suicide attack designed to murder Jews.

Over a dozen UN school officials directly took part in Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel; about thirty more were aware of the plans.  Yet nowhere in his essays does Abu Toha mention this dark side of Gaza society.

Gaza’s children are its future, and all too often its children are being radicalized and groomed to become terrorists.  A true reckoning about Gaza and what life is like there today would grapple with these unpleasant facts.  Instead, Abu Toha serves up a saccharine, ersatz Gaza, in which everyone’s a saintly civilian being targeted for no reason by their cruel enemy Israel.

Accusing Israel of Genocide

Since there’s no Hamas and no will to fight in Abu Toha’s Gaza, the only explanation for there being a war there at all is Israeli bloodlust.  “It is as though Israeli forces are taking revenge on the camp itself,” he writes of the northern Gaza city (not a small camp) of Jabalia, which has been the site of some of Hamas’ fiercest fighting and where the bodies of several Israeli hostages were recovered.

Since Hamas broke its ceasefire with Israel on October 7, 2023, Hamas has launched countless missiles on civilian targets in Israel.  (They have killed Gazans too: in November 2023, a rocket launched by the Hamas-affiliated Islamic Jihad fell short of its target in Israel, killing people on the ground in Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City.)  Yet these figure nowhere in Abu Toha’s work.

In Abu Toha’s telling, Israeli troops are motivated not by legitimate military goals but by vengeance.  Those killed in fighting are “murdered” by Israel.  He accuses Israel of conducting genocide in Gaza and provides heartrending vignettes to illustrate this slanderous claim.  “Only months ago,” he writes, “my family survived Israel’s bombardment of northern Gaza….”  A friend’s “husband, who was deaf, was killed during Israel’s 2014 offensive in Gaza.  The moment I sat down, their eleven-year-old son, who lost his father as a toddler, took out a box of dominoes and taught me to play.”

He writes movingly of his friend, the poet Refaat Alareer, whom he asserts was “murdered” by Israeli troops.  No mention is made of Alareer’s October 7, 2023 appearance on the BBC in which he celebrated Hamas’ attack on Israel and called it “legitimate” and “moral,” nor of the fact that Alareer refused Israeli orders to evacuate northern Gaza in October 2023, as pitched battles raged there between Hamas and Israeli troops and most civilians fled south to safety.  These details would complicate Abu Toha’s fantasy of a Gaza where everyone is peaceful, humble, poor but grateful, and where the scourge of Hamas doesn’t exist.

Winning a Pulitzer doesn’t mean that Mosab Abu Toha is not a shill for Hamas who leaves out quite a few inconvenient truths when writing about life in Gaza.

Featured image: Screen capture: Youtube/Democracy Now! used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law

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