The ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas is less than a month old, and already the race to rewrite history has begun.

Sixteen months after October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas terrorists and countless other ‘civilians’ from Gaza invaded Israel in a murderous massacre, the biggest mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust, spurring more than a year of intensive war between Hamas and Israel, a recent commentary in Canada’s largest-circulation daily newspaper took a highly creative revisionist look at the Hamas-Israel war.

In his February 10 opinion column in The Toronto Star entitled: “In Gaza, I lost my daughters and my home. But I still believe in a sustainable peace,” Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Gazan now living in Canada, called for a “sustainable peace between Israelis and Palestinians” based on the values of “justice, equality and dignity.”

While those statements are unobjectionable, what made Abuelaish’s column problematic is as much about what he omitted as what he wrote.

Abuelaish has certainly experienced the pains of war first-hand: three of his children were tragically killed during a previous Hamas-Israel war in 2009 when Israeli tank fire mistakenly hit his home as it was targeting terrorists. But despite the depths of his own experience, his commentary nevertheless contributed to the same inversion of reality that has helped allow Hamas to perpetuate war for decades.

He wrote that “the ceasefire may halt the immediate violence, but it does not address the structural inequalities or the systematic injustices that perpetuate circles of conflict,” saying that what’s needed is an end to “the systems of occupation and colonization that perpetuate Palestinian marginalization.”

With these words, he undid his previous flowery language about justice and dignity.

Since 2005, when Israel withdrew its citizens from the Gaza Strip, the Jewish State has not occupied the coastal territory. In fact, following the Gaza Disengagement, the Palestinians were given what was de facto an independent state. Tragically, rather than converting it into a hub of peace, it was transformed into a hotbed of violence and terrorism against Israel.

Hamas, and its extremist allies, do not need the alleged “occupation” to fight Israel because it views every square inch of the Jewish state as being “occupied,” of which, Hamas is sworn to destroy Israel.

However, Abuelaish did not mention Hamas or the remaining Israeli hostages being held by the terrorist group anywhere in his column beyond a subtle reference to Israel fighting “militants,” a striking omission given that it is Hamas which refuses to accept Israel’s very existence, and has sworn to never lay down its weapons until the Jewish State has been violently eliminated.

There simply is no honest accounting of the Hamas-Israel conflict that simultaneously erases Hamas from the record while blaming Israel for a non-existent “occupation” of Gaza, a point that even Palestinians in Gaza have acknowledged.

His reference to Israeli alleged “colonization” may be easily overlooked by readers, but in using these terms, framing Israel as an illegal robber of Palestinian land, he not only erased three thousand years of Jewish history and legal presence in the land, but he gave rhetorical cover to Hamas’ claims that Israel, as an illegitimate state, must be destroyed.

Ultimately, whether one speaks softly or harshly, by effectively denying Israel’s history and its very legitimacy, Abuelaish has helped rationalize the extremist worldview espoused by Hamas.

Three weeks earlier, Abuelaish penned another column in The Globe & Mail which read as a lament for post-war Gaza where he similarly made reference to Israel’s non-existent “occupation” of Gaza and omitted any mention of Hamas from the record.

If there is to be any peace between Palestinians and Israelis, it requires a full honest assessment of the facts, and that includes jettisoning the lies that Palestinians have told themselves – and the world – which have delegitimized Israel’s very right to exist. Until that changes, they are only creating future generations of Palestinians who feel that they have no reason to accept Israel’s existence, and instead should fight to see it destroyed. While that may not be the intention of Abuelaish’s column, it was the result.