Seeing the Cake, Missing the Wall
Pro-Israel advocates keep posting videos of Gazans living normal lives as proof there was no genocide. It isn't.
I was scrolling through social media after putting the kids to bed. It’s not a great habit. Then I saw several popular pro-Israel accounts posting videos from Gaza — a family on a picnic, food spread across a blanket, zaatar pitas and fresh vegetables, the kind of spread you’d find Arab families enjoying on the grass if you walk on the tayelet (boardwalk) in Jaffa on a Saturday. Another video: Gazan men at what looked like a nightclub, dancing. A third: 2,500 Palestinians running the Palestine International Marathon along the coast, sponsored by Egypt, held simultaneously in Bethlehem and Gaza.
Each post came with a caption that functioned as a verdict. “Genocide looks so fun.” “You have to be truly stupid to think there’s a genocide in Gaza.”
I tried to put myself in the seat of a neutral observer. How on earth does this disprove genocide?
I want to be clear about where I stand. I have argued against the genocide label and I think the legal and moral case for the genocide claim is weak. I know Hamas manipulates media coverage, that staging happens, that fabricated and misrepresented footage is real and widespread. I know that many Palestinians supported October 7. I hold none of this lightly.
None of that is what this is.
A marathon doesn’t disprove genocide. A cafe doesn’t disprove genocide. A picnic doesn’t disprove genocide. These videos show that life continues somewhere in Gaza for some people some of the time. The fact that during a ceasefire — partial and fragile as it is — some Gazans are doing relatively normal things proves nothing about what happened before it. Genocide is not disproved by its interruption.
This isn’t new. During the war, footage of a busy Nuseirat market circulated as proof there was no starvation. What went unmentioned: the IDF’s ground operation had not yet reached central Gaza. It proved nothing about conditions elsewhere in Gaza. A functioning market in one location on one day was not a survey of the Strip.
Nowhere in Lemkin’s definition of genocide is there a prohibition on picnics. Nowhere does it say marathons cannot follow massacres.
The accusation is serious. It deserves a serious rebuttal. If you want to argue against the genocide label, argue. Ask whether the specific intent required under international law — what genocide scholars call dolus specialis — can actually be met given the evidence. Push back on the ministerial quotes that get passed around: are these statements of state policy or the ravings of fringe figures whose votes Netanyahu needed to stay in power? Look at the combatant-to-civilian ratio and put it in comparative context. Make the legal case fail on its own terms. That’s an argument. That’s something a skeptic might actually read and consider.
Yakoby, Klompas, and Hillel Fuld are among the most prominent examples. They are far from the only ones. And none of them are making that case effectively. They’re posting picnics.
I don’t doubt their intentions. But these accounts aren’t run by policy analysts or legal scholars. They’re run by people optimizing for the next viral moment. Between Yakoby, Klompas, and Fuld, they have nearly 800,000 followers on X. The engagement is real — the marathon retweet post hit 13,000 impressions, the birthday photo 38,000. The incentive structure rewards this content. Likes from people who already agree feel like winning. They’re not.
One of Yakoby’s more viral posts — 304,000 impressions — showed a massive nightclub crowd, captioned as Gaza right now, a direct rebuttal to Doctors Without Borders reporting severe malnutrition across the Strip. Hillel Fuld posted the exact same video. The video’s actual origin is contested with no clear evidence it is from Gaza — but between them, it reached hundreds of thousands of people before anyone looked twice.
The birthday photo, from August 2025, is the one that stays with me. A father, two boys, a cake with a five on it, a Palestinian flag. Yakoby’s caption: “The UN calls this starvation. Ridiculous.” What Yakoby didn’t mention — what you can see clearly in the photograph — is the wall behind them. Bullet holes, scattered across the plaster, inches above the children’s heads.
Yakoby saw the cake. I saw both.
You are right, and the birthday cake with bullet holes says everything.
Of course, civilian casualties are a tragedy. But tragedy is not genocide. Israel didn't go into Gaza by choice,it went in because 1,200 people were massacred in a single morning. What followed was a war, not an extermination campaign.
But we lost this argument long before Yakoby posted a picnic. Not because we argued badly, but because we've spent decades arguing with people who've already decided, while ignoring the vast majority who simply don't know us at all. Three in four non-Jewish Americans know practically nothing about Jewish life, history or culture. And instead of filling that vacuum with who we actually are, our values, our traditions, our extraordinary contribution to civilisation, we keep relitigating the war in front of people who have no interest in facts.
So yeh we need real arguments but first we need people to care.
Of course these photos have no bearing on the issue of whether a genocide occurred. However, they are a welcome break from the non-stop images of emaciated children, crumbled buildings and dead bodies. If only the antizionist Western media would print photos like these occasionally. But that would be inconsistent with their non-stop narrative that Israel/Jews are despicable and evil and everything negative you have ever heard about them is true.