Hebrew, like many languages, has a strict system of grammatical gender. Most verb forms indicate whether the subject is male or female; nouns are always either masculine or feminine. A group of females is addressed with a feminine form; a group of males, with a masculine form. For mixed groups, one uses the masculine form—but a few intrepid pioneers of political correctness have attempted to repudiate this last rule. Their reasoning is based on the long-debunked claim that language conditions thought, write Philologos:

The time-honored Hebrew convention . . . was that in addressing a sexually mixed group of people, one employs the masculine form, so that a resort to the feminine sounded bizarre. This had nothing to do, I maintained, with sexism. One should not confuse grammatical form with semantic content. The speakers of any language are quite capable of making the distinction between the two, and Hebrew speakers have no trouble understanding that addressing a classroom of 16 women and 11 men in masculine language is a grammatical technicality that does not exclude the women or privilege the men. In Hebrew, to take another example, the word for “father” is av and the word for “woman” is isha, but in the plural av takes the grammatically feminine form of avot while isha takes the masculine form of nashim. Does this mean that Hebrew speakers think of two or more fathers as females and two or more women as males? That would obviously be an absurd conclusion.

There is another reason, I think, that the anti-Hamas demonstrations are gaining momentum, and that is the IDF’s decision to target both Hamas military commanders and members of the civilian government. By picking off the latter, it is undermining Hamas’s ability to govern, and showing that it is serious not just about achieving battlefield successes, but about ending Hamas rule in Gaza. Alas, many in the West still cling to the idea, propagated in the press for decades, that Hamas and similar groups have military and political “wings” that are entirely separate. Khaled Abu Toameh comments:

President Donald Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, said last week that he does not rule out the possibility that the Iran-backed Palestinian terror group Hamas could be politically active in the Gaza Strip after it disarms. . . . This assumption, of course, is untrue and misleading.

There is no difference between a Hamas political leader and a military commander. They all share the same extremist ideology, which does not recognize Israel’s right to exist and calls for destroying it through jihad.

Put differently, it’s not just the means employed by Hamas (terrorism, mass murder, rape, kidnapping) that are evil, but the ends as well. And that brings us back to why undermining it politically—whether done by the IDF or by Palestinian protesters—is necessary:

Hamas’s political leaders are aware that they will not be able to play any role in the Gaza Strip without the presence of their armed wing. The military wing of Hamas is crucial for the survival of the group’s political leadership. The political leaders need the military wing to control the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, as they have been doing since their violent coup there in 2007.