The real war has just begun.

For Israel and for the Jewish People, this is only the intermission.

photo: Cole Keister/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Guy Goldstein, a consultant by day, passionate Zionist and Israel advocate by night, and third-generation Holocaust survivor.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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As the bombs fall silent in Gaza, the diplomats congratulate themselves and the commentators breathe a sigh of relief.

The world tells itself the war is over.

But for Israel and for the Jewish People, this is only the intermission. The ceasefire marks the end of the kinetic phase, not the end of the war. The real war, the one for the legitimacy of Israel, the safety of Jews, and the truth itself, is only beginning. What lies ahead is not a peace process, but a global campaign of delegitimization, organized hatred, and institutional warfare that has already passed its point of no return.

In many Western cities, the protests that filled the streets during the war have not faded into memory. They have hardened into infrastructure. Movements capable of mobilizing hundreds of thousands at a moment’s notice are not protests; they are mass-mobilization systems. They operate like a new kind of army, with social media as its logistics, NGOs as its command centers, and ideology as its fuel. These networks no longer seek influence within the system. They are openly arrayed against it. They are fighting not for reform, but for replacement.

We have entered the end game, and we are starting from behind. Every action by one side feeds the radicalization of the other. The anti-Israel movement grows, creating backlash, which then validates its victim narrative, fueling recruitment. Pro-Israel efforts emerge to counter it, but these are portrayed as oppressive, further strengthening the opposing cause. Neither side can de-escalate without appearing defeated. The cognitive battlefield has become self-sustaining. There is no reset button.

This is not another cycle of antisemitism that time or diplomacy can cure. The old defenses are gone. The moral antibodies that once restrained public hatred, the memory of the Holocaust, the consensus around civil rights, the bipartisan support for Israel, have either eroded or turned against us. “Never again” has become “never again for anyone,” a slogan that strips the phrase of its meaning and redirects it against the people who inspired it.

The frameworks meant to prevent hatred now encode it. DEI programs treat Jewish identity as “privileged.” International law treats Jewish sovereignty as criminal. Holocaust memory itself is weaponized by those who equate the Jewish state with Nazism. The antibodies have mutated. The system no longer defends us; it attacks us.

And while this transformation has been underway for years, the past two have been decisive. Since October 7th, the machinery of global opinion has been working at full capacity to poison every channel of discourse. Israel’s moral case, the simplest moral case in the world, has been lost in translation by design. The Qatari buyout of the academy and the media created a filter that no amount of truth could pass through. We noticed it early, complained about it loudly, and then did nothing to match it.

Two years later, what do we have to show for it?

A few scattered initiatives. Some courageous individuals. A handful of small wins. But no systemic response. We have the same old organizations, the same leadership, the same defensive instincts. We had two years to build a real counteroffensive, and we spent them debating the ethics of survival. We are still trying to be more moral lambs in the hope it will dissuade the wolves. We are still throwing galas while our enemies build armies.

Across the world, you can find a thousand small projects, passionate, sincere, and almost entirely irrelevant to the scale of the war being waged against us. The so-called “influencer brigades,” the boutique NGOs, the donor-funded think pieces, these are acts of individual heroism standing in for institutional competence. They rely on bursts of energy and moments of outrage, but they lack permanence, coordination, and reach. They are candlelight in a storm.

On the other side is a professionalized system with permanent funding, infrastructure, and strategy. It produces narratives, institutions, and policies at industrial scale. They run a campaign. We run on adrenaline. They are building a civilization. We are posting responses.

Look at their architecture. They have sovereign wealth funds, international media outlets, intergovernmental bodies, global NGOs, and university systems all aligned around a single cause. They have doctrine, coordination, and patience. They have turned intersectionality into theology, propaganda into scholarship, and boycotts into virtue. Their infrastructure is professional. Ours is improvisational. They play for generations. We play for news cycles. And then we wonder why we keep losing.

This is the bitter irony of the post-Holocaust Jewish condition. We became so accustomed to winning the moral argument that we forgot how to win the actual one. We internalized a bargain that the rest of the world never agreed to.

After the Holocaust, the West promised “never again” through moral consensus and institutional safeguards. We took that promise at face value. We built our survival strategy around it. If we proved ourselves moral, we believed that we would be safe. We built an army that apologized for defending itself, a foreign policy that begged for understanding, and a political culture obsessed with moral optics.

It was noble. It was necessary. It also became a psychological prison. The wolves never agreed to the rules, yet we still act as if restraint will earn mercy. We have spent 80 years being shocked that the moral righteousness of our cause has not been enough to protect us. Every generation rediscovers the same surprise, writes the same essays, and holds the same conferences. And in doing so, we prove that we have learned nothing.

The post-war West shares this pathology. Its fear of moral compromise has made it incapable of responding to evil until it is too late. Our adversaries have learned to operate just below the threshold of Western response. Cognitive warfare is perfect for this world, always cruel enough to damage, never clear enough to justify retaliation. Israel, the last society still bound by moral memory, is uniquely vulnerable to this strategy. The instinct to stay clean, to stay good, to stay better, has become a form of disarmament.

And now we face the illusion of peace. The ceasefire, the humanitarian relief, the diplomatic relief, all are the quiet moments in which our enemies consolidate. During “peace,” the cognitive war intensifies. The DEI bureaucracies expand their power. Academic departments that equate Zionism with racism become permanent fixtures. The International Criminal Court’s investigations normalize the criminalization of Jewish defense. Wikipedia policies are rewritten so that our sources are downgraded and theirs become canonical. Every “temporary” outrage becomes a permanent norm.

In cultural life, this is the moment of embedding. Documentaries, novels, and classrooms begin to fix the new moral reality: the Palestinian as victim-saint, the Jew as aggressor-demon. The 10-year-olds being educated in this framework will be the policymakers of 2035. By then, the cognitive war will not be something we fight against; it will be the air everyone breathes. The next generation will not even remember a time when Israel was presumed legitimate.

The logic is clear. For our adversaries, peace is preparation. Every truce is an operational pause. Every diplomatic breakthrough is an opportunity to rebuild, retrain, and reframe. Israel treats ceasefires as endings. They treat them as beginnings. That is why every so-called peace has led directly to the next round of violence. The battlefield changes shape, but the war never stops.

If this continues, we know the timeline. In five years, Israel will face another campaign of delegitimization that constrains its military options. In 10 years, the graduates of today’s DEI programs will hold the levers of Western diplomacy, law, and media. In 50 years, the consensus that once said Israel had a right to exist will have been replaced by one that says its very existence is the problem. The next October 7th will not come out of Gaza; it will come out of a world that believes it is moral to erase the Jewish state.

So, what now? Do we accept this as fate? Do we retreat behind our walls, real or imagined, and wait for the next pogrom in a different language? Or do we decide, finally, that we are done being the world’s moral object lesson?

This is not about better PR. It is about power. It is about building the intellectual, cultural, and strategic infrastructure that should have been built decades ago. It is about creating institutions with the same scale, coordination, and ambition as those that now oppose us. It is about replacing the reflex of moral pleading with the habit of moral confidence.

We have two choices. Either we become a people capable of defending ourselves in every domain, or we prepare our children for the next ghetto. The bombs may have stopped falling, but the real war, the war over meaning, over memory, over moral reality itself, is only beginning.

And this time, the only way to win it is to fight it.

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