Israel is paying for the West's moral narcissism.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict doesn't need more UN resolutions. It needs truth.
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This is a guest essay by Paul Friesen, who writes the newsletter, “Minority of One”.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
The “peace process” has long since ceased to describe a strategy.
It has become a mood, a wellness regimen for the Western conscience. It asks for no measurable results, only participation. Like yoga for diplomats, it promises inner harmony through posture. The more we stretch, the more enlightened we feel, and the more distant the actual peace becomes.
We have elevated the word process to a secular sacrament. A ceasefire meeting in Geneva, a statement in Brussels, a new envoy with a new acronym — these are our liturgies. Each ends in the same ceremonial formula: “We reaffirm our commitment to peace.” No one ever asks why reaffirmations are needed so frequently or why commitment without competence still counts as virtue. The repetition itself has become proof of moral stamina.
In this moral economy, results are vulgar. Only sincerity matters. The Western negotiator is evaluated not by what he achieves but by how serenely he believes in the possibility of achievement. Cynicism is the only unforgivable sin; failure, on the other hand, is practically saintly. That’s why every collapsed accord immediately generates a foundation, a memoir, and a lecture circuit. Defeat is monetized as “experience.”
The illusion works because it flatters everyone. The Arab autocrat gets legitimacy without reform; the European minister gets gravitas without risk; the NGO director gets funding without scrutiny. Israel, meanwhile, is cast as the necessary antagonist: the designated grown-up who must absorb the tantrums of the peace industry so everyone else can keep pretending progress is being made.
We talk about “confidence-building measures” as if confidence were a bridge that could be assembled from donor money and press releases. In truth, these rituals build only dependency — on grants, on slogans, on the narcotic of good intentions. Each new initiative promises to “revive hope,” which is bureaucratic code for re-inflating the same corpse.
The genius of this system lies in its circular immunity. When violence erupts, it is not the policy that fails, only the momentum that was lost. When another war begins, we sigh that “the process must be restarted.” The process is immortal precisely because it is useless. Its futility is its survival mechanism.
Meanwhile, the vocabulary grows ever more abstract: partners for peace, confidence mechanisms, stakeholders in reconciliation. The nouns multiply as the facts recede. This is diplomacy as word-alchemy: the belief that if one can summon enough synonyms for harmony, the blood on the ground will politely dry.
The tragedy is that the West still mistakes linguistic creativity for moral courage. We rename Judea and Samaria “the West Bank” and think we’ve neutralized history. We call terrorism “resistance” and imagine we’ve balanced the scales. We invent euphemisms not to deceive others but to spare ourselves the discomfort of honesty.
The horizon called peace recedes with every step we take toward it, not because peace is impossible, but because we’re walking in circles — compass broken, map drawn by committee, every milestone celebrated as a destination. We are, as ever, the pilgrims of process, devout, exhausted, and utterly lost.
In the West, failure rarely ends a policy; it merely changes its font.
We rename, repackage, and relaunch. The plan that collapsed on a Tuesday is re-introduced the following Friday as a “new framework for dialogue,” preferably with a logo. This is how peace in the Middle East has become less a goal than a subscription service. It renews automatically, costs a fortune, and nobody remembers when it last delivered anything.
Every new envoy arrives convinced that this time will be different, that the right combination of empathy and PowerPoint will finally untie a century-old knot. When it doesn’t, we declare the process itself a success — proof that talking about peace counts as progress toward it. The gun keeps misfiring, so we praise the trigger discipline.
When inconvenient evidence appears — polls showing that militant rhetoric still pays better than moderation — the professional optimists reach for context like smokers for lighters. “Complicated,” they murmur, the diplomatic equivalent of sweeping shards under the rug. The word doesn’t illuminate; it tranquilizes.
What we’re really protecting isn’t anyone’s dignity, but our own self-image as benevolent fixers. Western diplomacy runs on the same fuel as social media activism: the dopamine of doing something. We cannot bear to admit that effort, in this case, has negative yield, that every “confidence-building measure” ends up subsidizing the very structures that destroy confidence.
The pattern has been the same since the Oslo Accords: We draw targets around our latest mistake and call it momentum. The analysts write papers, the NGOs host panels, and a few months later, a Palestinian launches another rocket or terrorist attack against Israel. Then the cycle begins again — retaliation, outrage, ceasefire, applause, funding, repeat.
It would be tragic if it weren’t so theatrical. A tragedy implies loss; a farce implies rehearsal. We are rehearsing peace for an audience that left the theater years ago.
The irony is that our naivety isn’t born of malice. It comes from the same moral reflex that once sent navies to hunt slavers and built institutions to restrain power. But we’ve mistaken empathy for strategy. We think that if we just keep caring loudly enough, reality will get tired and surrender.
It won’t. And deep down, we know it. Yet the ceremony continues, because no one wants to be the first to say that the emperor’s peace process has no clothes. The easiest way to look virtuous is to stay busy. The hardest is to tell the truth: that good intentions, repeated long enough, become their own form of deceit.
Every explosion has a fuse. The massacre of October 7th was not born in a vacuum, to be a phrase from UN Secretary-General António Guterres. It was educated, budgeted, and bureaucratically approved.
It began in classrooms funded by taxpayers from Stockholm, Ottawa, Berlin, and Brussels, where boys and girls memorized math problems that count the number of martyrs, where maps of the region omitted one country only, and where the word peace appeared mostly as a synonym for capitulation.
It was not Hamas alone that bred the theology of annihilation; it was the infrastructure of the international community that sustained it, invoice by invoice, fiscal year after fiscal year.
The world now knows the outcome: paragliders over kibbutzim, torched homes, mutilated bodies, and a jubilation so raw that it forced the civilized West to blink. Yet the funding spigot remains open. The organization that raised the generation of killers still collects its subsidies: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the bureaucratic hydra that cannot die.
UNRWA was conceived in 1949 as a temporary measure to aid roughly 700,000 displaced Arabs. It now claims over 5.9 million “refugees,” including every descendant down to the third and fourth generation — an absurdity unique in the history of humanitarian work. It is the only UN agency whose mission is not to end a crisis but to preserve it. By treating refugeehood as hereditary, it created a permanent political identity, a mythology of grievance, and an industry of dependence. The result is an agency larger than the state it pretends to await, one whose survival depends on perpetuating statelessness.
In Gaza, UNRWA is the nervous system of Hamas. Its schools, clinics, and social programs cover nearly every inch of the enclave, providing the infrastructure, payroll, and legitimacy that Hamas itself could never build alone. Investigations by UN Watch and IMPACT-SE have shown that UNRWA teachers routinely glorified the October 7th attack as “heroic resistance.” A Gaza school principal celebrated it online with emojis of knives and fire; another teacher called the slaughter “a lesson in courage.”
The evidence, documented and archived, is overwhelming. And, yet, the official response from UNRWA headquarters was as predictable as a bureaucratic shrug: “isolated incidents,” “under investigation,” “not reflective of the agency’s values.”
The pattern has endured for decades. After the 2014 war, when Israeli forces discovered rockets stored in three UNRWA schools, the agency declared itself “shocked.” In 2021, after videos emerged of students chanting “With blood and soul we redeem Palestine” during UNRWA-organized ceremonies, the same phrase reappeared in their textbooks as “with love and loyalty we serve our homeland.” The words softened, the sentiment remained lethal.
Then came October 7th, the first mass murder fully outsourced to the humanitarian imagination. The perpetrators were not orphans of poverty or illiteracy; they were graduates of a curriculum financed by the West and certified by the UN. Their instructors were paid by the European Commission and USAID; their schoolbooks were printed with logos bearing the blue-white letters of international legitimacy. The killing fields of southern Israel were, in a macabre sense, a line item in someone’s development budget.
When U.S. President Donald Trump cut American funding to UNRWA in 2018, calling the agency “irredeemably flawed,” he did what no European dared: He broke the taboo of moral arithmetic. For once, there was an attempt to measure cause and effect, to ask whether money intended for peace was financing war. Yet the messenger was all wrong. Trump, the West’s convenient villain, made the argument unhearable. The reaction in European capitals was a tantrum of virtue: “If he says it, it must be false.” So they doubled the contributions, a geopolitical version of freezing one’s ears off to spite one’s grandmother.
In 2021, then-U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration restored the funding “to reaffirm America’s commitment to humanitarian principles.” By 2024, U.S. contributions again exceeded $400 million, surpassing pre-Trump levels. In Brussels, bureaucrats congratulated themselves on “resilience in multilateralism,” a phrase so vapid it could describe a committee on elevator music. Within months, Hamas operatives were back on UNRWA payrolls, and UNRWA teachers were once again teaching “the right of return” as the moral duty of every child.
And so the loop closes. Western taxpayers finance an agency that educates hatred; the hatred produces violence; the violence provokes condemnation; the condemnation generates more funding “to address the root causes.” The same officials who sign the cheques deliver the eulogies.
By late 2025, after a year of reports, videos, and eyewitness accounts from the massacre, the façade is crumbling — but only in private. European diplomats whisper that “reform is necessary,” but no one dares pull the plug. The fear is not of humanitarian fallout but of political embarrassment: to end UNRWA would be to admit decades of subsidizing the machinery that led to October 7th. It is easier to blame “extremism” in the abstract, as though it arrived by meteorite.
The irony is exquisite. The very West that congratulates itself for combating radicalization at home funds its mass production abroad. The same governments that ban hate speech in their cities bankroll hate sermons in Gaza classrooms. The same ministries that celebrate “feminist foreign policy” pay salaries to teachers who tell girls their highest calling is to die beside their brothers. Each dollar arrives with a disclaimer: “We abhor terrorism but respect local culture.”
UNRWA is the world’s most indestructible institution because it has mastered the art of moral camouflage. Every scandal yields a review, every review a report, every report a new funding round. Its critics are dismissed as “politicized”; its victims are statistics; its defenders are diplomats fluent in the dialect of denial. It survives by the oldest principle of bureaucracy: if you can’t solve the problem, become the problem’s administrator.
The story would be comic if it weren’t so drenched in blood. Children taught under the UN flag grew up to burn the kibbutzim of Nir Oz and Kfar Aza; yet the donors still speak of “peacebuilding.” Officials who funded the indoctrination now light candles for its victims. And somewhere in Geneva, another press officer drafts another statement about “shared values.”
The civilized world once swore never again. It did not imagine that the next pogrom would be partly financed through its own humanitarian accounts. But here we are: The most moral enterprise of the 20th century underwriting the most immoral slaughter of the 21st. A self-inflicted blindness so perfect it has become a policy.
Diplomacy, like faith, has its own relics. And none glitters more brightly — or emptily — than the phrase “Two-State Solution.”
For three decades, it has been repeated with the reverence of a spell, as if the words themselves could conjure coexistence out of thin air. But spells lose power when spoken over corpses. October 7th exposed not merely the brutality of Hamas, but the intellectual fraud at the core of this mantra. The mirage evaporated under fire. What remained was not the failure of negotiations, but of imagination: the stubborn refusal to see the Middle East as it is, rather than as European diplomats wish it to be.
The numbers now leave no room for illusion. According to a recent poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 53 percent of Palestinian Arabs (a clear majority) still describe the October 7th massacre as “the right decision.” In the West Bank, the figure is even higher. These are not militants under duress or brainwashed teenagers; these are ordinary respondents in a professional survey conducted across both territories, interviewed face-to-face. A population that praises the slaughter of civilians is not yearning for peace.
Nor is it being disarmed. Sixty-nine percent reject even the hypothetical idea of disarming Hamas, “even if it guarantees an end to war.” In the West Bank, opposition rises to 78 percent. The slogan “Free Palestine” in Western capitals pretends to speak for a people seeking liberty; the data shows a constituency that demands perpetual militarization. Forty-five percent openly describe armed struggle as the most effective way to “end the occupation.” Barely 40 percent support even a demilitarized Palestinian state alongside Israel, a figure that collapses once any territorial or security compromise is mentioned.
These are not minor fluctuations of public opinion. They dismantle the entire premise of “two states living side by side in peace.” For any agreement to succeed, both sides must at least want the same horizon. Israel seeks security and recognition; the Palestinian Arab street seeks victory and revenge. There is no common horizon, only parallel monologues conducted in different moral universes.
The West refuses to accept this arithmetic because it confuses vocabulary with virtue. The term “West Bank” itself is a linguistic contortion: a post-1948 euphemism designed to erase the region’s Jewish identity. Before the Jordanian annexation of 1949, the area was known by its historical names: Judea and Samaria. To call it “the West Bank” is to perform an act of cartographic laundering: turning a cradle of Jewish civilization into a disposable colonial coordinate. The phrase survives because it flatters modern ears; it sounds neutral, bureaucratic, antiseptic. But every map that omits “Judea” and “Samaria” performs the same quiet violence as the schoolbooks that erase Israel altogether.
Under international law, the mirage fades further. The Montevideo Convention of 1933 defined statehood by four criteria: a permanent population, a defined territory, a functioning government, and the capacity to enter relations with other states.
“Palestine,” as it exists today, fails every test. It has two rival governments at war with each other; neither controls defined borders; both depend on foreign aid for survival; and both violate international norms they claim to invoke. A movement that cannot govern itself cannot be a state. Yet Western diplomats treat these facts as negotiable, like table manners.
The doctrine of uti possidetis juris, the legal principle that new states inherit the borders of their last internationally recognized administrative unit, makes the picture even clearer. When Britain ended its mandate in 1948, no sovereign Arab state existed in these territories. Jordan’s subsequent annexation of Judea and Samaria in 1950 was illegal and unrecognized, even by the Arab League. Israel’s control of the area since 1967, therefore, is not an “occupation” in the classical sense, but a territorial dispute pending resolution. Every claim to the contrary rewrites international law for the sake of sentiment.
Nor can the Oslo Accords, so often cited as holy writ, be invoked as proof of Israel’s obligations while the Palestinian Authority violates them at will. The accords explicitly prohibit unilateral recognition, violence, and incitement. Yet the Palestinian Authority has spent decades glorifying terror, funding convicted murderers through its “Martyrs’ Fund,” and waging a diplomatic guerrilla campaign for recognition at the UN. The 2012 General Assembly vote granting Palestine “observer state” status was not a triumph of diplomacy but a breach of contract. The process died the moment one side decided that signatures mattered less than slogans.
The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research poll data of October 2025 is therefore not a snapshot of despair; it is an indictment of delusion. It reveals a population shaped by generations of UNRWA indoctrination, rewarded for rage, and paid to preserve grievance. The moral ecosystem that produced October 7th did not arise in a vacuum; it was cultivated in refugee camps and classrooms built by Western taxpayers. The children who now chant “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya Yahud” in Gaza playgrounds will, within a decade, be counted in the same polls as “political moderates.” And the diplomats will quote them as partners for peace.
The deeper pathology is linguistic. Terms like “peace process,” “occupation,” “cycle of violence,” and “proportionality” serve not to clarify but to conceal. They turn moral asymmetry into moral equivalence. They erase agency. To say “both sides” is to pretend that one side’s self-defense and the other’s genocidal ambition belong in the same sentence. To call Hamas’ atrocities “resistance” is to declare that Jews, uniquely among nations, have no right to resist being murdered.
Every euphemism extends the war. Every donor check validates the lie. The illusion of a “two-state solution” persists because it absolves the West from confronting its complicity. If peace is always one more summit away, then no one must admit that peace was never on offer.
So the question lingers, blunt and heretical: With whom exactly is Israel supposed to share sovereignty? With a population that celebrates October 7th? With an authority that rewards murderers with stipends? With a movement that teaches its children that the borders of “Palestine” stretch from the river to the sea? A two-state solution presupposes two nations; what we have instead is one nation defending its existence and another defined by its ambition to erase it.
The data does not show a diplomatic failure; it shows the collapse of an illusion. The “peace process” has not been sabotaged by extremists; it has been invalidated by reality. The polls reveal not a society ready for self-determination, but one trapped in self-destruction, nurtured and financed by the very world that claims to seek its redemption.
The Two-State Mirage endures because it satisfies everyone’s vanity. It flatters diplomats with the illusion of relevance, NGOs with the illusion of virtue, and journalists with the illusion of complexity. It allows the West to feel morally superior while underwriting the continuation of barbarism. But illusions, like debts, must eventually be paid. And when they are, it is never the illusionist who suffers first. It is the farmer in Sderot, the family in Kfar Aza, the soldier at the border — those living in the crossfire of other people’s abstractions.
The poll did not merely measure opinion. It measured the death of reason. And the West, still muttering its mantras about “two states,” mistakes that corpse for a foundation.
Every civilization has its vice. The Romans had cruelty, the Victorians hypocrisy, and the modern West — benevolent, therapeutic, incurably self-fascinated — has moral narcissism.
It is not an ideology so much as an emotional disorder disguised as virtue. We no longer seek to do good, but to feel good about doing something that looks like it. The “peace process,” that eternal dress rehearsal for a performance that never premieres, is the purest expression of this impulse — a moral cosplay where diplomats, NGOs, and activists play saviors in their own psychodrama.
The West’s obsession with “doing something” for the Palestinians is not rooted in realism or strategy; it is rooted in self-therapy. It began as atonement and metastasized into addiction. Each failed initiative produces not disillusionment, but a craving for the next — another conference, another envoy, another declaration. The process itself is the reward, the photo opportunity the proof of compassion. The results, when measured, are either catastrophic or invisible, but that hardly matters. The gesture is the gospel.
This moral exhibitionism serves a deeper psychological function: It cleanses colonial guilt. Europe’s postwar identity rests upon the fantasy of having been reborn as a moral custodian of peace. The continent that industrialized slaughter now sells itself as an ethical superpower.
But every savior needs a sinner, and Israel — modern, armed, unapologetically sovereign — has become the necessary foil. The Jewish state is Europe’s mirror, a reminder of its own discredited strength. To redeem itself, Europe must treat Israel as its permanent moral pupil, forever on probation, perpetually summoned to prove that it deserves existence.
Hence the sermons: “restraint,” “proportionality,” “dialogue,” “humanitarian corridors.” The vocabulary of redemption delivered from podiums in Brussels and Geneva. Each time Israelis bury their dead, a European foreign minister appears to remind them of “international law,” as if reciting commandments to a wayward child. It is not diplomacy; it is catechism. The Jews, once condemned for dying too passively, are now condemned for defending themselves too effectively. Their redemption, it seems, depends on dying correctly.
Meanwhile, the Arab side is infantilized with equal enthusiasm but opposite logic. They are never held accountable because they are never seen as capable. Their violence is “understandable,” their fanaticism “contextual,” their antisemitism “a symptom of despair.” To condemn them would require treating them as moral agents, which would deprive the West of its therapeutic role. Better to cast them as victims of geopolitics, forever in need of aid, education, and “empowerment.” It is a soft racism that smiles while excusing barbarism. The donor becomes the priest absolving sin through money.
The NGO ecosystem thrives on this infantilization. Its language is the dialect of compassion stripped of consequence. Each report is written in the same soothing tone: “urgent need,” “restoring dignity,” “building resilience.” None mentions that aid often sustains the very structures that make dignity impossible. The activists don their keffiyehs, hold conferences about “intersectional solidarity,” and congratulate each other for standing on the right side of history. It is not solidarity — it is moral tourism. Gaza becomes a metaphor, not a place; its people, props in someone else’s redemption arc.
And Israel, in this theatre, plays the designated villain. Its existence supplies the tension that sustains the drama. Without Israel, Europe’s postwar conscience would lose its narrative focus. The moral authority of the European Union, the Nobel Peace Prizes, the endless “peace missions” — all require Israel as the perpetual question mark. Every airstrike, every checkpoint, every retaliatory operation becomes an opportunity for the West to rehearse its moral superiority. A continent that once outsourced genocide now outsources guilt management.
The United Nations provides the stage set: a temple of procedural empathy. Here, the moral narcissist finds his perfect habitat: a place where the performance of concern replaces the practice of justice. Speeches about “peace and coexistence” echo in halls adorned with murals of universal brotherhood, financed by regimes that execute dissidents and hang homosexuals. The diplomats know the hypocrisy; they just call it diplomacy. The applause is its own absolution.
This self-image problem is not peripheral; it is existential. Post-1945 Europe reinvented itself as the Enlightenment reborn: pacifist, pluralist, rational. But that identity depends on an antithesis. To sustain the fantasy of moral adulthood, Europe must keep Israel trapped in moral adolescence — the impulsive younger brother forever in need of guidance. It is a psychological inversion of power: the teacher lecturing the survivor, the bureaucrat instructing the besieged.
The result is grotesque. Israel must “prove” its morality after every terror attack, while its enemies need only display corpses. Israeli restraint is expected; Arab rage is explained. The standard is inverted so completely that morality becomes pathology: the more Israel defends itself, the guiltier it appears. Each Iron Dome interception becomes a public-relations liability, proof of “asymmetry.” The West measures virtue by body count, not by intention.
And beneath it all lies the final paradox: the cruelty of empathy. The West believes it is helping, yet its pity has become poison. By treating the Palestinian Arabs as eternal victims, it ensures their eternal dependence. By rewarding grievance and punishing accountability, it breeds the very despair it claims to heal. Compassion has become complicity, and “humanitarianism” the mask of neglect. The hand extended in aid is the same hand that keeps the recipient crawling.
Moral narcissism is the most seductive sin because it feels like sainthood. It flatters the ego while excusing the damage. The peace process is its cathedral: grand, empty, echoing with hymns of self-congratulation. Diplomats enter as penitents and leave as martyrs of their own virtue. And all the while, the people they claim to save continue to burn — on the altar of Western absolution.
In the end, this is the cruelty of our age: empathy without responsibility, virtue without truth. The West does not need to love Israel, but it must stop needing to redeem itself through her. Because when compassion becomes theater, someone must play the victim forever. And that, for all our moral pageantry, is not peace. It is perpetual sacrifice.
Today’s moral narcissism is repackaged anti Semitism
To see things as they are, rather than how we wish them to be.
What a simple, sensible statement.
Yet Western European politicians seem utterly determined to ignore simple, sensible common sense.
Why?