Israel cannot win this war until it stops lying about the enemy.
This is not a war simply against Hamas. It is a war against "Palestine."
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This is a guest essay written by Yonatan Daon, a student of philosophy and art history.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
I remember a viral clip from an Israeli news panel back in 2017, during yet another Israeli military operation responding to Hamas attacks emanating out of Gaza. (I’ve lost track of how many there have been.)
On the panel sat Moshe Feiglin, a former Knesset1 member, and Giora Inbar, an ex-brigadier general in the IDF. Feiglin asked a simple question: “Who is the enemy: Hamas or the tunnels?”
Inbar didn’t hesitate. “The tunnels,” he said.
And there it was: an entire war effort reduced to an infrastructure problem. Not an enemy, not an ideology, not even a people — but concrete and rebar. We weren’t at war with Gaza, apparently. We were at war with a construction project.
The so-called “roof-knocking2 doctrine,” which was formally adopted by the IDF in 2009, is the most obvious example of how Israel fights something other than the people of Gaza.
When Israel determines that a target may contain “uninvolved civilians,” the IDF calls the building. They drop leaflets. Occasionally, they even toss a small dummy missile onto the roof as a warning. All of this is done to give people time to evacuate, at the cost of forfeiting the element of surprise. In many cases, the IDF would call off the attack. In other words, Israel doesn’t strike the enemy. It schedules the strike, as if war were a municipal demolition project.
This is not moral warfare. It is moral blindness, a refusal to recognise who the enemy is. Israel’s war strategy treats Gaza not as an enemy but as a collection of buildings with some bad tenants. It is not a fight against a culture; it is a zoning dispute with a few bad apples.
You would think this delusion died on October 7th. You would think that, after thousands of Gazans crossed the border — random civilians, militias, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, all alike — and butchered our people, burnt our homes, and broadcast their joy live on social media, Israel would finally be willing to name the Gazans as the enemy.
But no, we’re still busy splitting hairs like a Monty Python sketch, debating whether it was the People’s Front of Palestine or the Palestinian People’s Front who pulled the trigger, as if the nuance matters to the dead.
Even a 6-year-old could discern the reality our leaders hesitate to acknowledge. In the aftermath of the October 7th massacre, young Romy, having witnessed the brutal murder of her parents by Palestinian terrorists, asked her rescuer, “Are you from Israel?” This question wasn’t about geography; it was about trust, safety, and the desperate need to distinguish friend from foe in a world turned upside-down.
From the first days of the war, the talking points were ready: “Hamas is ISIS.” Israeli spokespeople repeated it like a mantra, as if the core task were not to destroy the enemy but to rebrand them. I remember how our media celebrated this comparison, how it was supposedly a strategic “win” for Hasbara3. “It’s a major embarrassment for the Palestinian side,” they said. “It disrupts their alliances. It gets the West on our side.”
You probably don’t even remember that campaign, do you?
That tells you everything about how well it worked. This was supposed to be a Hasbara breakthrough, our slam-dunk. It vanished without a trace. That’s the shelf life of messaging built on evasion. As if the goal of war were sympathy. As if Western discomfort were the metric of victory.
What they didn’t see, and still refuse to see, is that the Hamas-ISIS comparison is not only a failure. It’s a distraction. It preserves and reinforces the central lie — that this is a war against a specific political faction, not a population.
This essay is about the cost of that lie. A lie that has guided every Israeli campaign since Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. A lie so dangerous, so entrenched, that even after our greatest national trauma, we still refuse to abandon it.
We cling to it like a drug, injecting it into every press release, every justification, and every speech, even after October 7th. Even after the massacres in the kibbutzim, after the slaughter at the Nova Music Festival, after the unspeakable horrors of that day, we still didn’t let it go.
And that’s because this isn’t just a strategic error. It’s not just a PR failure. It is a moral collapse — a refusal to identify evil as evil and to defend the good without apology. That is the cost of evasion.
Before we speak of Gaza, we must speak of ourselves, and we must speak candidly: Israel created this nightmare. Not in the way our enemies allege, not by siege, starvation and/or occupation, but in a far more devastating, civilisational sense. We legitimised it. We empowered it. We shook hands with death and called it peace.
There was once a time, before the 1990s Oslo Accords, before longtime Palestinian leader (and mega-terrorist) Yasser Arafat, when Gaza, though troubled, was relatively quiet. No utopia, but no inferno either. Israel administered it directly. The Gazans could work in Israel, and many Israelis would do their shopping in Gaza. The Gazans could build lives. They did not vote for terrorist regimes. The violence was real, but it was containable.
Then came the dreamers and the diplomats. The architects of peace. The builders of illusions. They gave us the Oslo Accords in 1993. They brought Arafat back from exile and gave him land, guns, and glory. They told us the Palestinians needed to govern themselves. So we let them.
And what did they do with it?
They built “Palestine.” Not the imagined “Singapore of the Middle East,” but the real one — the one their movement always promised. A state not of liberty, but of hatred. Not of justice, but of jihad. A state built not on the dream of life, but on the worship of death.
This isn’t a betrayal of the Palestinian cause. This is its fulfilment.
In 2005, we uprooted Israelis from their homes in Gaza. We left synagogues standing, greenhouses intact. We offered the chance, however slim, that they might choose another path. They did not. They chose Hamas. They chose rockets. They chose tunnels. They chose October 7th.
We should have known. We should have stood firm. We should have assimilated them, as we did with the Arabs of Haifa, Nazareth, and Jaffa, who live under Israeli sovereignty with equal rights and relative peace. Instead, we abandoned Gaza to the wolves, and in doing so, we abandoned the people who might have been something better.
Gaza is not just a strip of land. It is the first true expression of the Palestinian dream: self-ruled, Judenrein4, and armed. And what it built was not a country; it was October 7th. Israel created the conditions, but the nightmare they built within them is theirs.
There is no regime on Earth that receives more indulgence than the regime of Gaza.
It is one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world, with no civil rights, no individual rights, no rule of law, and no protection for women, men, gays, non-Muslims, or atheists.
It is a totalitarian religious state, voted for, celebrated, and sustained by its people. It was challenged only once, by Fatah (which runs the Palestinian Authority), a rival gang that shares the same genocidal ideology and now runs its own little anarchic state in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank).
The rest of Gaza's factions are all branches of the same poisonous tree: Islamist, Communist, or both. There are no classical liberals in Gaza. No capitalists. No dissenting opposition. Just an array of death cults competing for power and Western sympathy.
October 7th was not the act of a rogue group. It was a cultural eruption. The pogroms were not merely perpetrated by Hamas commandos; they were joined by civilians of all stripes. The attackers came from all walks of life, but they all came from one place, and that place celebrated their actions. They filmed themselves. They looted. They took hostages. They cheered.
Even now, no credible reports exist of any significant number of Gazans rebelling, condemning, or even attempting to save a single hostage. On the contrary, footage shows celebration and complicity.
And the one thing uniting them all was not a faction, but a flag.
They came from the Gazan state of “Palestine” and massacred Israelis in the name of that identity. Even the Hamas commandos wore the Palestinian flag on their chests, not the green of Hamas, but the red, black, white, and green of the Palestinian cause. It was not jihadists versus civilians. It was a society unified under one symbol, one dream: to annihilate the Jews.
And like every ideological parasite, that society lives off what it cannot create. The hospitals, the neighbourhoods, the schools — many bear the names of their foreign donors. Because Gaza is a fundamentally parasitical society, it produces nothing but tunnels, rockets, propaganda, and death. Its greatest national export is grievance. Its economy runs on foreign guilt. It manufactures victims the way tyrannies manufacture medals. It is a kleptocracy funded by humanitarian masochists.
They raise their children not with hope, but with hatred — not for a future to build, but for a (Jewish) people to destroy. From a young age, they’re given toy guns and martyr songs. Their heroes are killers. Their lullabies are chants for slaughter. It is not education. It is indoctrination.
Why not leave? Thousands have. Every year, Gazans bribe Egyptian officials to escape. It’s difficult, but it’s not impossible. Yet the masses stay. They raise families. They pass on the culture. And they call it dignity.
Yes, it is tragic to be born into such a culture. But at some point, tragedy becomes choice. If you bring a child into Gaza and raise him in this death cult, then no, you are not innocent. You are complicit in his death.
It is heartbreaking. I take no pleasure in stating it. It’s not a triumph of conscience to say that people raised in this culture are complicit in its crimes. It is a tragedy — a tragedy Israel enabled. We watched a generation get poisoned, and told ourselves it was just politics.
But after October 7th, illusions are a luxury we can no longer afford. It cannot be allowed to continue.
This is not a call for endless bloodshed or random slaughter. War is a means of forcing the enemy to surrender, and civilian casualties are a tragic but often necessary cost of defeating an entrenched, totalitarian enemy, especially one that hides in schools and hospitals by design. The fastest path to peace is revolt. Surrender. Information. Turn over the killers. Reject the lies. Help dismantle the death cult that devours your children. Do it not only for us; do it for yourselves.
Until then, this war must be fought — and won.
Because peace will not come from restraint; it will come only when the evil is named, exposed, and defeated. Not managed. Not negotiated. Defeated.
The Gazans are not metaphysically doomed. They are not prisoners of fate, nor eternal victims of history. They are men and women, human beings with minds, values, and free will. And they have made their choice.
They voted overwhelmingly for Hamas. Not once, but in poll after poll, year after year. They celebrate October 7th with parades, baklava, and songs. They raise their children not to dream of becoming entrepreneurs, but to die in the name of genocide. The runner-up parties are no better — Fatah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — each a different mask of the same death cult.
This is not a tragic failure of democracy. It is the logical result when a society worships death. Gaza is not under occupation. It is a society that funds, fuels, shelters, and sanctifies terror. This is not a fringe. It is not a faction. It is a culture.
And here is the great inversion: To hold them accountable is not to dehumanise them; it is the opposite.
It is to recognise their agency, their moral responsibility, and their capacity to be better. It is to give them the only path toward growth: the opportunity to recognise guilt. Only then can redemption become possible. But if we keep telling the Gazans that they are eternal victims, how could they ever grow? You cannot repent for a crime you’re not allowed to acknowledge. That is not compassion. That is moral imprisonment.
It is the West’s and Israel’s infantilisation of Gaza that is truly racist — the idea that Palestinians cannot be held to the same moral standard as other people. That they are doomed to violence, never to be judged, only pitied. That is not compassion. That is contempt.
Responsibility is not punishment. It is dignity. To say: “You chose this. You could have chosen otherwise.” To say: “You are not an animal. You are a human. So act like one.”
And yes, cultures can change. Germany changed, Japan changed — not by being indulged, but by being defeated. Gaza could have changed, too. But Israel never demanded it.
Worse, it treated Gaza’s hatred not as a threat, but as a tool. Let Hamas run Gaza. Let the Palestinian Authority run the West Bank. A divided enemy. A balance of terror. A useful stalemate.
It was cynical. It was wrong. Because what Israel allowed to grow was not a rival regime; it was a death cult. A culture that would one day burst through the fences with fire, knives, and cameras. And in doing so, Israel handed the perfect weapon to the world.
Gaza is not just a failed state; it is a pawn, used in the world’s larger war against the Jews. The indulgence, the exceptionalism, the United Nations agencies, the rivers of foreign aid, none of it is used to help Gazans. It is meant to use them.
They are not loved. They are kept, preserved as a grievance, paraded as victims, wielded as a moral club. And Israel, in its weakness, gave that club its handle.
You cannot win a war against a group if the people who birth it, fund it, raise it, shelter it, educate it, and glorify it are treated as neutral. You cannot separate a movement from the mothers who sing its songs, the schools that teach its doctrine, the mosques that preach its hatred, and the children who grow up dreaming of slaughter.
This is not a war against a fringe militia. It is a war against a culture — a culture that celebrates mass murder as divine justice, that trains its youth for death, and that views life not as something sacred to protect but as something to sacrifice for the destruction of others.
Hamas is not the exception. It is the expression, the political instrument of a deeper moral rot.
And if Israel cannot name that rot — if it cannot say out loud that the enemy is not merely a flag but a worldview — it cannot win. It can bomb buildings. It can kill figureheads. It can flatten tunnels. But it will never destroy the thing that gave them life. And that means it will never win.
The goal of war is not punishment. It is not vengeance. It is not posturing for the next CNN segment. The goal of war is to break the enemy’s will to fight. To destroy not only their means, but their desire to try again.
And you cannot break the will of an enemy you refuse to name.
The Israeli parliament
A term used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to describe its practice of dropping low-yield devices on the roofs of civilian infrastructure shielding terrorists and/or their assets, as a prior warning of imminent bombing attacks to give the civilians time to flee the attack
A Hebrew word for Israel’s public diplomacy and/or nation branding efforts
German for “Jew-free”
This is quite simply the best thing I’ve seen written about the Israeli Palestinian conflict: the magnum opus. Every sentence is 100% accurate and not debatable. Jews have willfully ignored the obvious reality that we are fighting an evil ideology which must not be tolerated. I’ve formed a group for Jews on Facebook based on the harsh realities of what is called Jews for Jews. This is exactly what we preach. Without fighting the enemy within (utter denial) we can never defeat the Palestinians. We have engaged a campaign of committing suicide in an effort to shape world opinion by fighting every war “not to win.” This is a fools game.
We keep thinking like ghetto-bochers and make the same mistakes again and again and again. We have one of the world’s best militaries but hamstring it out of some timid Jewish foolishness. Just as we separated the Nazis from the Germans and the Poles and the Ukrainians, even though the citizens of all three were more than happy to help slaughter us, so we coddle the ‘palestinians’ who are even worse. This is all to curry favor with the rest of the world but all in vain. We were despised even on the morning of October 7, before the IDF even started to respond. Would we be hated more if we had completely flattened Gaza, civilians and all? I’ve just been to Hiroshima. No one knocked on their roofs.
I begin to think that the world hates us even more because we come across as that timid little ghetto-bocher, asking nicely if we could possibly be allowed to live one more day. Perhaps things would be different if we responded with utter destruction when attacked. Flatten Gaza. Flatten Tehran. And then wave our middle fingers at the world and ask who wants to be next.