Israel is fighting the hardest war in modern history — and winning.

No other country is expected to even remotely come close to living up to the expectations and judgments that plague Israel for no other reason than the fact that it is a Jewish state. Keyword: Jewish.

An Israeli tank operates in Gaza. (photo: IDF/X)

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There is probably no such thing as an “easy” war.

All wars require tremendous strategy and execution, courageous leadership, a willing populace with adequate psychological and emotional stamina, and perhaps a little divine intervention and/or luck.

But the war that Israel was dragged into on October 7th is just plain different, mainly based on the multitude of factors that virtually no other country in modern history has been forced to deal with.

Let’s start with the obvious ones, like the multiple fronts. Many people call this current conflict the Israel-Hamas war, which is both misleading and incomplete. In fact, this is an Israel-Iran war mostly fought between the Jewish state and Iranian proxies, such as:

• Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza

• Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other terror groups in the Palestinian West Bank

• Hezbollah across from Israel’s northern border in Lebanon

• The Houthis in Yemen

• Iranian-backed militias in Syria (which borders Israel to the northeast) and Iraq

Israel is literally completely surrounded by enemy fronts, much like it has been in previous defensive wars, such as the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, but there’s a key different between those wars and this one: Israel is fighting this current war against non-state actors, thus creating an asymmetrical, seriously lopsided dynamic.

Unlike traditional state-to-state warfare, where the adversary is a nation with clear borders, government, and military, Israel’s battles against non-state actors are more unpredictable and multifaceted. These groups often operate within densely populated civilian areas, use human shields, and are not bound by the same international laws and norms that apply to state actors.

One significant challenge Israel’s foes nefariously create is making it incredibly difficult for Israel to distinguish between combatants and civilians. Non-state actors like Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah habitually embed themselves within civilian populations — using actual people, homes, schools, mosques, and hospitals as shields.

This complicates Israel’s military operations, since efforts to neutralize threats can result in civilian casualties, leading to (unsubstantiated) international condemnation and (baseless) accusations of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and disproportionate use of force.

The challenge is exacerbated by the fact that non-state actors do not adhere to traditional military uniforms or insignias — meaning, they purposely dress like civilians as “camouflage” — which also makes it increasingly difficult for Israel to identify and zero in on legitimate targets.

And yet, even as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah cowardly “hole themselves up” in urban areas as one of their primary “strategies,” Israel is said to have achieved an estimated one-to-one ratio of civilian-to-combatant casualties in this war, compared to the nine-to-one international average according to the United Nations. In other words, nine civilian deaths for every one combatant death. And Israel is roughly at one-to-one.

What makes this data even more impressive is the nature of Israel’s self-proclaimed enemies. I am talking, of course, about genocidal, Jihadist lunatics. For these perverted minds, the most amount of deaths on all sides is a massive victory, and their calculus is insane.

For example, when more Palestinians die — mostly because their own people use them and civilian infrastructure as human shields — the Jewish state is by default blamed across the world (more on this soon), which makes the Israelis second-guess future operations.

Increasing Palestinian deaths also means a ton more international aid for “the Palestinians” granted by mostly gullible Western audiences who take things at face value and lack serious critical thinking skills. To add insult to injury, much of this aid is stolen by these genocidal, Jihadist lunatics for themselves, or resold on the black market in order to generate more revenues for their genocidal, Jihadist terrorism.

And we all know that these genocidal, Jihadist lunatics celebrate the deaths of Israelis — both Jewish Israelis and Arab Israelis, who these Jihadist lunatics consider “traitors.” When news of Israeli (largely civilian) casualties surfaces in the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza, masked men hit the streets to dance and hand out candies to pedestrians. After all, one of the Muslim hadiths (commandments), which is directly quoted in Hamas’ charter, states:

“Judgement Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews. The Jews will hide behind the stones and the trees, and the stones and the trees will say, oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew hiding behind me — come and kill him.”

Another debilitating challenge for Israel is the political and diplomatic fallout of this war. When Israel engages in military action against non-state actors, the perception of these groups as underdogs or “resistance” fighters can garner them sympathy and support internationally. This perception is often fueled by the high-profile nature of (grossly inflated) civilian casualties and the portrayal of the conflict in global media.

Furthermore, Israel’s ability to achieve a decisive military victory is hampered by the decentralized and fragmented nature of non-state actors. Unlike a conventional military, these groups can quickly disperse, regroup, and continue their operations, making it difficult for Israel to generally eradicate the threat. This leads to protracted conflicts, where military gains are often temporary and the cycle of violence persists.

Israel’s actions, even if justified in a military and wartime context, are frequently scrutinized under the lens of so-called “international law” and human rights — virtually none of which applies to Israel’s self-proclaimed enemies who systematically (even proudly) violate “international law” and human rights to a degree astronomically higher than Israel.

Indeed, Israel is not just fighting on the actual battlefield. While the Jewish state’s self-proclaimed enemies know that they have zero chance against the IDF and Israel’s intelligence community, they (or at least their leadership and partners) have mastered the “war of information” — an ever-changing and filthy game of propaganda designed to hide the transgressions and miscalculations of Israel’s self-proclaimed enemies, and cause devastating damages and effects on public opinion of Israel.

As the Jewish state, Israel has little recourse in the “war of information.” Especially since so many people around the world have been conditioned over the course of thousands of years to believe anti-Jewish blood libels at face value.

When, for example, Hamas “reports” that Israel killed Gazan children in an airstrike, much of the mainstream media runs with this “Israel story” ad nauseam, delivering it to a gullible, uneducated audience that assumes it to be true because of all this Jewish blood-libel preconditioning.

The “Israel story” across much of the mainstream media is a predetermined narrative of Jewish moral failure, in which the Israelis are incessantly blamed for things they do not really do (or that occur as isolated incidents and not as a matter of policy and record) while the uglier characteristics of Arab (e.g. Palestinian) politics and societies are mostly untouched by the international press — because they would disrupt the “Israel story.”

Think about how many times you have heard media outlets and their “journalists” explicitly and implicitly state that this war has not ended because of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Right-wing government. Nine times out of 10, the media ignores who started this war (not Netanyahu and his government) and who is chiefly prolonging it (the same group that launched this war: Hamas).

But because reporting these cold, hard truths contradicts the “Israel story,” the Israelis are always to blame since (in the minds of the media) the conflict is predominantly Israel’s fault, and the Palestinians and the greater “Arab world” are effectively blameless.

All of this is to say that Israelis are not just fighting militarily; they are also fighting for their reputation that has been smeared with outright lies, distortions, half-truths, Islamist propaganda, gaslighting, and omissions (the hardest lie to detect).

This is all the more amplified by social media, a phenomenon that did not exist in Israel’s previous wars (and there has been one about every decade since the country’s modern founding in 1948). On platforms like TikTok, there has been a 36-to-one ratio of “pro-Palestinian” to “pro-Israel” content, the vast majority of which is not “pro-Palestinian” in the humane sense of the term; it is “pro-Palestinian” in the psychologically and emotionally exploitative propaganda sense.¹

Since so many people get their “news” from social media nowadays (which is oftentimes just headline-reading or watching videos that run a handful of seconds), long-form content has been put on the far back-burner.

Thus, context, nuance, depth, and historical facts are either omitted from people’s psyche or reduced to insignificance, while at the same time tons of folks feel like they need to have an opinion about and pick a side in a conflict that has zero bearing on their lives.

The only argument that holds weight among these people is that they do not appreciate their countries giving money and/or other resources to Israel while their country struggles with its own resource-scarce socioeconomic issues.

On the surface, I can understand why people would think this way, but if you want to make an argument about your country’s budget, then make this argument about every single line item in the budget, not just the Israel one. Otherwise, you run the risk of perpetuating antisemitism by singling out the Jewish state and holding it to a standard that you essentially hold nothing else.

Another significant challenge that Israel has been facing is the infighting in Israel amongst Israelis ourselves. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis (which, to be clear, represents less than five percent of Israel’s total population) have co-opted the hostages and their families’ plight to combine it with their pre-war animosity for Netanyahu and his Right-wing government.

I had no problem with the pre-war protests in Israel against Netanyahu and his Right-wing government’s attempts at controversial judicial reforms, and not because I agreed with the politics of it all — but because I appreciate the democratic right to peacefully protest.

However, I find it nothing short of disgusting and disingenuous that so many Israelis (including quite a few Israeli politicians) have manipulated the hostage situation into trying to further their political agenda, however “good” this agenda may seem on the surface.

This has caused exponential tension in Israel and amongst Israeli society, which I believe is unnecessary. People are perfectly free to make the argument that Netanyahu and parts of his governing coalition are leveraging this war for their own political advantages, but these same people ignore the other side of this coin:

Every politician on planet Earth is leveraging this war for their own political advantages, such as U.S. President Joe Biden and his Vice President Kamala Harris, Australia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong, Jordanian King Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein, U.S. politicians Mike Johnson and Gavin Newsom, now-former U.K. Foreign Secretary David Cameron, and Israeli “Opposition” members Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid.

Truth be told, I purposely shortened this list for the sake of brevity.

To purposely focus on Netanyahu and his Right-wing government, while ignoring all of these other people and more, is nothing short of a Jewish double-standard, or in more frank terms: antisemitism. Not to mention that Iran-backed Hamas is largely unscathed for their part in starting and prolonging this war while perpetrating some of the worst crimes against humanity that we have seen in recent memory.

And yet, despite all these hurdles in front of Israel, the Jewish state has been whooping those who started this war. The war in and of itself, on the battlefields, is not even close. Israel is rather easily having their way with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and, ultimately, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

At the same time, it has become painstakingly obvious that there are three types of countries in the world: developed, developing, and Israel.

No other country is expected to even remotely come close to living up to the expectations and judgments that plague Israel for no other reason than the fact that it is the Jewish state.

No other country is lied about and gaslighted as much as Israel, and the gap is thousands-fold.

No other country is literally forced to fight with two hands behind its back, in unreasonable fear of geopolitical and/or diplomatic backlash that is more often than not invented out of thin air for sociopolitical reasons which, at their roots, have absolutely nothing to do with Israel.

Just imagine if Israel was afforded the sensible opportunity to fight this war fair and square. It would probably be over by now, and the Middle East would be a better place for those who believe in democracy, human rights, and civil liberties.

But when it is the Jews in question — logic, reason, and justice seem to get thrown out the window.

Israel will keep defending itself, unapologetically, while the rest of the world hopefully figures its sh*t out.

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1. “Inside the Israel-Hamas Information War.” TIME.