What Almost Everyone Gets Wrong About Israel's Wars

They aren’t about territory, resources, or politics. They’re about faith, civilization, and moral frameworks that much of the world doesn’t understand.

photo: Toa Heftiba/Unsplash

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

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

---

As tensions mount between Israel and Iran this week, with Israel perceiving military exercises by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a screen to prepare a possible surprise strike against the Jewish state, the Middle East could be on the verge of another war.

Bot not all wars are the same — and the failure to recognize this distinction has led to some of the most profound misunderstandings of our time.

Some wars are fought over land, resources, trade routes, or economic advantage. These wars are transactional. They are governed by incentives, costs, and interests. When conditions change — when prices rise, supply chains break, or political pressure mounts — these wars often end. They are ugly, but intelligible. They assume a shared framework of human motivation: that people want security, prosperity, and continuity.

But other wars do not behave this way. They do not slow when suffering increases. They do not end when concessions are made. They do not respond to economic incentives or diplomatic language. In many cases, they intensify precisely when compromise is offered.

These are not economic wars; they are religious and civilizational wars.

In a religious or civilizational war, compromise is often impossible — not only because the opposing side measures success in sacred terms rather than material ones, but because the two sides do not agree on the very rules of the “game,” or even the “game” itself. What one side sees as a reasonable concession, the other sees as illegitimate, immoral, or even humiliating. Negotiations, ceasefires, and offers of peace are interpreted through radically different moral and civilizational lenses, making them meaningless or counterproductive.

In these conflicts, the battleground is not territory or resources, but legitimacy, faithfulness, and ideological purity. For Israel, this means that gestures which would satisfy a rational, interest-driven opponent are irrelevant — or even dangerous — when facing actors for whom religious and civilizational imperatives define what is permissible and what constitutes success. Until these fundamental differences are acknowledged, compromise is not merely difficult; it is logically impossible.

The wars Israel is fighting today — against Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, against Hezbollah, against the Houthis, and increasingly against Iran — belong to this category. And until we understand why religious wars are fought, we will continue to misread them, misreport them, and prescribe solutions that cannot possibly work.

At the core of every religious or civilizational conflict is not a disagreement about borders or policy, but a disagreement about reality itself. Civilizations are built on first principles, and when those principles collide, negotiation becomes nearly meaningless.

Different civilizations answer different foundational questions: What is a human being? Is life sacred in and of itself, or is it valuable only insofar as it serves a higher cause? Is morality something discovered through law and restraint, or something imposed through obedience and force? Is violence a tragic last resort, or a sanctified act? Is history moving toward peace and progress, or toward redemption through struggle and submission?

Modern Western societies are built on a particular view of human nature. They assume that individuals prioritize personal well-being, that violence is a failure of systems rather than a moral aspiration, and that peace is the natural preference once material needs are met. This worldview has produced extraordinary prosperity and stability within societies that share it.

But it is not universal.

Many religious and civilizational movements understand human nature very differently. In these frameworks, humans do not exist primarily to maximize comfort or longevity, but to serve God, divine law, or a sacred historical mission. Individual life is secondary to collective destiny. Death can be virtuous, even desirable, if it is sanctified. Violence is not necessarily a breakdown of morality, and can be its fulfillment.

When one side sees life as the highest value and the other sees obedience or martyrdom as higher, deterrence collapses. When one side treats civilian life, especially children, as an inviolable moral boundary and the other treats children as martyrs-in-waiting, shared moral language disintegrates. This is not a misunderstanding that can be clarified with better messaging; it is a civilizational divide.

This divide is deepened by radically different understandings of time itself. Western modernity is linear and progressive. Tomorrow is supposed to be better than today. Policy is judged by short- and medium-term outcomes like stability, growth, and quality of life.

But many religious-civilizational movements operate within sacred or eschatological time. The present generation is not the primary unit of moral calculation. What matters is alignment with divine destiny, historical vindication, or cosmic justice. Endurance is not failure; it is proof of righteousness. Suffering is not a deterrent; it is a purification.

This is why arguments about future prosperity, reconstruction, or coexistence so often fall flat. These arguments assume that life now is the highest good. But for those operating in sacred time, the present can be sacrificed for a transcendent future that no ceasefire can deliver.

This also explains why religious wars escalate rather than conclude. In economic wars, suffering creates pressure to stop. In religious wars, suffering can create pressure to continue. Pain becomes evidence of faith. Destruction becomes proof of commitment. Loss is converted into moral capital. Death is not merely endured; it is weaponized.

Groups like Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and Al-Qaeda do not celebrate death because they misunderstand reality. They celebrate death because they understand reality through a different moral lens, one in which martyrdom functions as currency. Each death generates legitimacy, recruits, outrage, and international pressure. Civilian casualties are not accidental byproducts of war; they are strategic assets. This is why ceasefires can be exploited, why restraint can be interpreted as weakness, why moral asymmetry produces escalation rather than reflection, and why one of the biggest misunderstandings persists in Western interpretations of the war.

In much of the West, Gazan suffering is instinctively understood as evidence of Israeli cruelty or indifference. Because Israel possesses military power, technological capacity, and state institutions, Western observers assume that suffering must reflect a failure of care by the stronger party. The moral logic is familiar: Power entails responsibility, and suffering implies neglect.

But this interpretation reveals more about Western assumptions than about the reality of the conflict.

Gazan suffering is not primarily the result of Israeli indifference. It is the result of Palestinian leadership operating under a radically different hierarchy of values, one in which the welfare of the population is not the supreme political objective. In Western political culture, legitimacy is earned by protecting citizens, improving quality of life, and minimizing harm. Leaders are judged by how well their people live.

Hamas and its associates operate under a different moral economy. Its legitimacy is not derived from prosperity, safety, or longevity, but from fidelity to ideology, resistance, and religious purpose. Within this framework, caring for the population is not the highest obligation; advancing the sacred struggle is. Civilian suffering is not merely tolerated; it is absorbed into a larger theological narrative in which sacrifice validates righteousness and loss proves moral seriousness. The population becomes the medium through which the cause is advanced, rather than the cause itself.

To Western eyes, this looks like monstrous neglect. To Hamas, it is moral coherence.

This is why Western demands that Israel “care more about Gazans” consistently miss the point. They assume a shared moral framework in which human welfare is the ultimate political goal. But Hamas does not measure success by safety or flourishing; it measures success by endurance, defiance, and symbolic victory, even when those victories are built on the destruction of Gazan society.

The result is a profound moral inversion. The party that treats life as sacred is held responsible for the suffering produced by an ideology that treats life as expendable. The leadership that instrumentalizes its own civilians is shielded from accountability, while the state that seeks to limit harm within a tragic necessity of war is condemned for failing to meet impossible standards.

Recognizing this requires a willingness to think critically, and to resist the temptation to outsource moral judgment to viral images, selective headlines, or emotionally curated social media feeds. Images of suffering are powerful, but they are not self-explanatory. They tell us that pain exists, not why it exists, who benefits from it, or who made deliberate choices that ensured it would continue.

When moral reasoning is reduced to reaction, context disappears, responsibility blurs, and intent becomes irrelevant. The result is a politics of empathy divorced from analysis, in which outrage is guided not by understanding, but by algorithms designed to amplify the most emotionally arresting fragments of reality. In such an environment, compassion is easily manipulated — and suffering, rather than being alleviated, becomes a tool in someone else’s moral and strategic calculus.

Nowhere is this moral distortion more consequential than in how the war against Israel is understood. Our wars are not tactical disputes that can be resolved through better negotiations or more generous offers. Hamas does not fight us because of borders, resources, or economic conditions. It fights us because Israel represents a civilizational contradiction for them: Jewish sovereignty, Jewish continuity, and Jewish moral agency in history. Israel’s mere existence violates an Islamist worldview that demands Jewish powerlessness or erasure in order to validate its own theology.

Iran’s hostility toward Israel follows the same logic. While it is often framed in strategic terms — regional influence, deterrence, or nuclear balance — it is fundamentally theological. Israel’s survival undermines a totalizing vision of divine order in which Jews must not be sovereign actors, no less on lands that used to be Muslim by virtue of Arab and Islamic colonization. This is why gestures, withdrawals, and concessions do not soften hostility. These conflicts are not about policy; they are about legitimacy, about whose understanding of reality is allowed to endure.

It is important to distinguish here between religion as such and theocratic totalism. Not all religious civilizations fight religious wars. Covenant-based traditions, including Judaism and some forms of Christianity, place moral limits on power and sanctify life rather than death. Religious wars emerge when theology fuses with absolute political authority, when divine language is used to justify domination, and when dissent becomes heresy rather than disagreement. This distinction matters, not as a rhetorical defense, but as an analytical one.

Cultural moral systems further widen the gap. Guilt-based societies, like much of the West and Israel, internalize morality. Wrongdoing demands accountability and repentance. Honor–shame cultures, notably Arab ones, externalize morality. Public humiliation demands retaliation. Symbolic victories matter more than outcomes. This is why humiliation provokes escalation rather than restraint, why images and spectacle dominate strategy, and why international condemnation can be interpreted not as moral rebuke, but as validation.

Western discourse struggles to describe any of this honestly. Its language assumes symmetry, shared values, and mutual misunderstanding. Terms like “cycle of violence,” “regional tensions,” and “escalation” flatten civilizational conflict into technical problems. But when one side views war as tragic necessity and the other views it as sacred duty, neutrality becomes incoherence.

Underlying this failure is moral projection: the assumption that others share our intuitions about life, suffering, and justice. Western observers often mistake their outrage for universal conscience. They assume that what feels immoral to them must feel immoral to everyone. When it does not, they conclude that something has gone wrong — with messaging, with leadership, with economic conditions — rather than with their assumptions.

Religious wars are fought not because one side wants too much, but because one side believes the other should not exist at all.

These wars end only when one worldview is defeated, transformed, or loses the power to enforce itself. They cannot be solved by economic incentives, diplomatic language, or moral equivalence. To understand them, especially Israel’s wars, we must stop asking what deal would make this stop, and start asking a harder questions: What kind of world does each side believe God, history, or morality demands, and what are they willing to sacrifice to bring it into being?

Until we confront these questions honestly, we will continue to mistake faith for grievance, ideology for poverty, and civilizational war for a solvable dispute. And we will continue to be surprised when it does not end.

---