One would have hoped that the horrendous Oct. 7 terror attacks on Israel would at very least have provided clarity about Hamas, whose charter demands the killing of Jews and destruction of Israel. This is not sophistry or obfuscation. Earlier this month, after years of planning and deception, Hamas put its charter into action, slaughtering as many Jews as possible, targeting the elderly, the infirm and children, taking videos of their murders and proudly posting them to social media.

What is left to understand about the stated goals of Hamas and the necessity of a decisive response from Israel? What nuance, what moral equivalence, what falsehoods about Israel’s founding and cultural values could survive this barbarity?

As I read a pair of letters in the Oct. 11 edition of the Gazette, I marveled again at the hardiness of the anti-Israeli calumnies that, amazingly, still take hold in the Valley, and were actually brought forward again as the immediate response to the murders of more than 1,300 Jews. You’ve heard them all: Israel, the home of Jews for three millennia, is a “colonial state.” Israel, whose large Arab Muslim population enjoys full citizenship and government participation, is an “apartheid state.” Israel, whose military takes more care than any in the world to avoid civilian casualties, even as Hamas hides its fighters and weaponry in hospitals, schools, and mosques, “kills Palestinians with impunity.”

In their own way, these letters, along with multiple gatherings for “peace” (i.e., Israel responding to the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust with weakness and capitulation) in our cities and on our college campuses have also provided clarity about Israel’s reputation on large swaths of the political left.

No further illusions are possible. Let’s hope that the rest of us see these calumnies, and those that perpetuate them, for what and who they are.

John Montanari

Shutesbury