Israel's Last Wake-Up Call

A Moral Reckoning in Four Movements: Before It’s Too Late

(Symphony No. 5)

Silence

I have not written about Gaza in a long time. And there is a reason for that. A real reason.

It is not because I don’t care. It is not because I have nothing to say. It is because I care too much. Because I have too much to say. And because the sorrow is too vast.

The whole hostage situation is among the most heartbreaking things imaginable. The images of October 7th remain the most horrifying of my life—perhaps of any Israeli’s life. It is a subject loaded with grief, fatigue, moral agony, and unspoken rage. And many of us, I believe, avoid speaking about it not because we are indifferent, but because we are overwhelmed.

We don’t want to look at those pictures again. We don’t want to think of those children again. We don’t want to imagine them still down there, in those tunnels, under that earth, in that hell. And for many, especially those who lost someone or still await someone, there is an added fear: that to speak truthfully about what must be done might offend those who suffer most. It might sound cruel to the broken. It might sound too cold to those who still burn.

But still, the recent news of the potential coming “ceasefire” reminded me that we must speak up.

Because if we don’t, it will happen again. If we don’t look at the fire, if we don’t name the enemy, if we don’t rise to our moment, we will be handing our children over to the same fate. We will be repeating the horror with open eyes. And that we must not do. That, above all, must never happen again.

This is not merely an article. It is not a policy memo, nor a rhetorical exercise. It is a symphonic reckoning.

It begins, like Beethoven’s Ninth, in silence—my silence. The silence of reluctance, of grief, of unbearable clarity. But then come the movements:

I. The grotesque eruption of October 7th.
II. The righteous war that was meant to be waged.
III. The disgraceful reality of what was actually done.
IVa. And finally, the call to act, now.
IVb. The choral affirmation: Victory Now.

This is the final resolution.

The thing that must be said before the music ends.

Because this war does not need more instruments, it needs a conclusion.

And we, the people of Israel, must rise to deliver it.

I. Scherzo Grottesco—What Happened

October 7th began with a sound no symphony should ever begin with.

Not melody. Not harmony.

But grotesque brass—barking, honking, howling. The sound of brokenness.

A scherzo, yes—but the most grotesque one imaginable. Rhythmless. Brutal. Animalistic. A parody of joy, stripped of all beauty.

That was the sound that flooded our country that morning.

It was a massacre.

It was not war—it was a day of pure evil. Of rape, of burning, of abduction, of murder.

Babies were burned in their cribs. Young women were dragged away on motorcycles. Children orphaned. Soldiers were gunned down in their sleep. Holocaust survivors were slaughtered in their homes.

It was the most grotesque day in Jewish history since the Shoah.

But even here—amid the vomit and the blood—there were glimmers of something else.

Of beauty. Of heroism.

Flickering, yes. But there.

There were soldiers who stood their ground against impossible odds, who fought off the invaders at the gates of their bases.

There were kibbutzniks who heroically defended their communities for hours on end.

There were civilians who drove back into hell to save others, again and again, even as bullets flew past their windows.

We will never know all their names.

We cannot.

There are too many.

That is our flickering melody—brief bursts of human greatness in the middle of a satanic symphony.

And then—the second section. A funeral march.

This, too, must be heard. Slowly. Deliberately. Reverently.

The march of the fallen:

The old and the young.
The Nova dancers of Re’eim and the Holocaust survivors of Sderot.
The babies and their parents.
The lone soldiers and the sons of kibbutzim.

All of them. Sacred. All of them were murdered.
Not for what they did. But for who they were.

We must not look away.

To look away is to forget.
To forget is to allow repetition.

This movement ends with the faintest sense of resolution—not justice, not victory, but the moment when the grotesque scherzo is finally silenced. When the raiders are pushed back. When the green uniforms retake the towns, clear the houses, and restore some safety to the ruins.

That was the end of the first movement. It was what forced this war to begin.

But before we move forward, let us be very clear about what October 7th really was.

It was not an aberration.
It was not a hijacking of a peaceful cause.
It was not a rogue act by a fringe group.

October 7th was the ultimate outburst of the sadistic, psychotic evil that lies at the very heart of the Palestinian movement.

It was the culmination of their deepest dreams—the grotesque fulfilment of everything they had ever preached, taught, broadcast, and raised their children to believe.

That was their moment to “shine”.
This was not a tragedy to them. It was a triumph.

It was not just a terrorist operation. It was a civilizational outburst.

The people danced in the streets. The mothers rejoiced at their sons’ murders. The so-called “moderate” voices rationalised, excused, or stayed silent.

And we must remember that.
We must never forget it.

I’ve written more about this in my essay, It’s a War With Palestine—because this truth is too large, too dark, and too dangerous to ignore.

But even without turning the page, you already know:

This was not just Hamas.
This was not just a war crime.

This was a revelation.

This was the ultimate manifestation of Palestine.

II. Allegro Maestoso—What Was Meant to Happen

On the morning of October 8th, 2023, Israel should have issued a single, uncompromising ultimatum:

“You have 24 hours to return every hostage.

You have 24 hours to lay down your arms.

You have 24 hours to abolish your regime, your war institutions, your political claim to statehood.

Capitulate fully—unconditionally—or Gaza will be no more.

The lights go out.

The water stops.

The fuel runs dry.

The crossings are sealed.

The air will fill with fire.”

That should have been the entire negotiation.
No diplomacy. No humanitarian corridors. No ceasefires.
Only this: justice demands unconditional surrender—or destruction.

It was not a time for talk. It was a time for truth.
And the truth was simple: October 7th was not just an attack. It was an unmasking.
What was meant to happen in the hours and days after that grotesque morning was not a “response.”

It was meant to be an ending.
The end of Hamas.
The end of Gaza as we knew it.
The end of the Palestinian Authority, whose schools and media had long prepared the soil for this slaughter.
The end of the fantasy called “Palestine.”

The cities of Gaza should have been reduced to rubble.
Not out of revenge, but out of necessity.
Out of the basic moral principle that a people who do this must never be able to do it again.

There should have been no safe zones, no eviction notices, no partial operations, no “humanitarian” aid, no illusions.
There should have been only this: the moral certainty of good destroying evil, or accepting its unconditional surrender.

And if the hostages were not returned—all of them—and if Gaza refused to disarm and dismantle its death cult, then Gaza would cease to exist.

That is what any sane, sovereign, self-respecting nation would have done.
That is what Israel should have done.

Some may argue that the army was unprepared for such an operation.
Perhaps. I do not dispute that.

But even so, much more could have been done.

There was no reason for hesitation.
A total siege could have been imposed immediately.
All services could have been shut down entirely.
A relentless, unapologetic air campaign could have begun at full scale, without setting foot on the ground.

There was no moral barrier. There was no legal barrier. There was only the question of will.

Even without a single boot crossing the border, Israel could have made the cost of October 7th unbearable.

Because this was not a time for “restraint.”

It was a time for revelation.

The people of Gaza—those who cheered, who handed out candies, who streamed their joy—were not hostages of Hamas.
They were its soil.
They were its breath.

And Israel should have said so:

“You want to live? Surrender.

Fight Hamas. Join us. Turn your weapons on those who have led you into hell.

Otherwise, you are part of the enemy.

And the enemy must surrender—unconditionally—or perish.”

No more illusions.
No more euphemisms.
No more hiding behind the words “children,” “women,” and “innocents” while your sons are dragging corpses through the streets and your daughters are broadcasting praise for mass murder.

You are either with life or with death.
And those who stand with death must fall with it.
But the moral reckoning should not have stopped at Gaza’s gates.

Prime Minister Netanyahu should have stood before the nation that night, looked into the camera, and said:

“We have failed you.

We, the political and military leadership of this country, have allowed this catastrophe to unfold.

The blood of our people—of the children, the soldiers, the grandparents—is on our hands.

I take responsibility. Not because I planned it—but because I failed to prevent it.

Because I led a system that grew complacent, divided, obsessed with power and appearance, and blind to the storm.

This entire political order is bankrupt. And therefore, I am stepping down.

I will nominate a replacement—someone not born of this rot, someone from outside this failed paradigm.

Someone with courage, clarity, and moral strength to do what is necessary.

As for the military and intelligence officials who share this responsibility—they will be replaced.

Not with loyalists. Not with cronies.

But with those who warned us.

With those who were right when it was unpopular to be right.

Because that is what justice demands. That is what the people of Israel deserve.

We are sorry. And now we will make it right.”

That is what he should have said.

Because October 7th was not just a failure of defence.

It was a failure of vision.

A failure of judgment.
A failure of morality.

And the response to it should have begun not with evasion, not with excuses, but with the courage to say:

We are not worthy to lead this war.
But someone must.
And the right people will.

Only then could the war have become not just but redemptive.

“We don’t owe you explanations.

We don’t owe you proportionality.

We owe our people justice.

And we will achieve it—with or without your permission.”

That is what was meant to happen.
That is how the arc of justice should have bent.
It would not have brought back the dead.
But it would have given meaning to their deaths.
It would have shown the world that the Jews are done pleading for the right to live.

And when the dust settled, even the world—confused, angry, hypocritical—would have had no choice but to understand:

“They had to do it.

Because if they didn’t, it would have happened again.”

And it will happen again—unless we reclaim that clarity.

III. Adagio Funebre—What Didn’t Happen

Of course, none of that happened.

Well, some of it did.

There was a partial siege, if that means anything.
There was a military invasion, eventually, delayed, fragmentary, and lurching forward at the pace of diplomacy rather than war.
There were airstrikes. There were battles. Some hostages were rescued—not by policy, but by the raw courage of soldiers and units acting under impossible constraints.

But the larger truth is this:
Israel refused to fight the war that justice demanded.

Instead, we fought a war shaped not by October 7th, but by the brittle pages of international law—that rotted legal fiction whose obituary I have already written.

Rather than confronting evil with fire, Israel confronted evil with footnotes.

We bombed, but let the enemy know where.
We invaded—but only after asking permission.
We lost soldiers—not to the enemy’s strength, but to our own moral restraints.

The war was conducted—and is still being conducted—in a state of permanent negotiation.

While our sons were crawling through booby-trapped tunnels, our delegates were sitting in Doha, negotiating with the sponsors of the war.
Qatar, the financier of Hamas, the host of its leaders, the enabler of this entire atrocity—they were the ones trusted to mediate.
Imagine Britain negotiating the Blitz with Berlin.
Imagine Roosevelt asking Hirohito for terms during Iwo Jima.

That is the level of madness we have normalised.

While our daughters were still in captivity, we were bargaining with their captors.

Ceasefires, hostage talks, pauses, humanitarian deals—a running negotiation since day one.

Imagine Churchill halting the bombing of German cities to negotiate the release of British POWs.

Imagine Roosevelt offering Japan a ceasefire in exchange for a few hostages.

Imagine asking Rommel to please move his tanks aside while we try to rescue some civilians.

That is how we have fought this war.

And as a result, we have invented a new kind of warfare.

A Kafkaesque, tech-optimised, diplomatic labyrinth that has never been seen before.
A “Startup Nation” war—run on Wi-Fi, coordinated via Zoom, waged in circles.

We have seen the same neighbourhoods “cleared” five, six, seven times.

Raided, evacuated, and handed back.
Raided again. Left again.
In and out like clockwork.
Soldiers dying to take ground that no one plans to hold.

This is not warfare.
This is a ritual sacrifice, and our children are the offering.

We did not fight the people who did this to us.
We did not fight the ideology that raised them.
We fought concrete.

Israel, in its infinite strategic confusion, chose to wage war not on a people, not on a culture, not on an ideology, but on buildings.
Apartment blocks. Bridges. Command centres. Cement.
We destroyed towers, but we left the worldview that built them intact.

Wars are not fought against infrastructure.
They are fought against those who want to kill you.
And more deeply, they are fought against the ideas that convince them to do it.

You’ve seen the images: the wastelands of Gaza, flattened blocks, aerial shots of destruction.
And yet, just weeks ago, when the Iranian regime launched ballistic missiles on Tel Aviv, Gaza cheered.
The people danced. The children waved flags. The streets were filled with joy.

What good is our “destruction” if it leaves their spirit intact?
What good is bombing their buildings if we refuse to touch the culture that built the tunnels to begin with?

They will rebuild. They always rebuild.
They will dig again. They always dig again.
They will indoctrinate again. They already are.

We are not showing strength. We are showing ignorance.
We are measuring our success in cubic meters of rubble, while their mosques, schools, and living rooms still echo with cries of death to the Jew.

This is not war.
This is demolition.
And even that, we have done half-heartedly.

We are not fighting to win.
We are fighting to be seen fighting,
to manage perceptions,
to play by the rules of a global audience that despises us no matter what we do.
We are fighting not to destroy evil, but to improve our negotiating stance with it.
To show restraint—so that perhaps, next time, evil will be slightly more reasonable.
This is not justice.
This is madness.

Our soldiers have gone into buildings they were forbidden to bomb, only to be ambushed.
They’ve carried rifles, but not authority.
They’ve needed permission to shoot, to advance, to breathe.

Many of them have died upholding laws that never saved a single Jewish child.
Not one clause in the Geneva Convention protected the babies of Kfar Aza.
Not one paragraph of international protocol defended the girls dragged from the Nova festival.

But our soldiers died for those protocols.

Our economy is being drained to satisfy those rules.
Our deterrence has been shredded to comply with those standards.

This is a war we were never allowed to win.
Not by the world, but by ourselves.

We have fought, not a just war, but a justifiable one.
A war built not on victory, but on plausible deniability.

And what we have created is something inhuman:

A war that refuses to end.

A war that refuses to decide.

A war without territory, without finality, without meaning.

A war where evil lives to fight again, and the good die proving their purity.

That is what didn’t happen.

Victory didn’t happen.
Responsibility didn’t happen.
Clarity didn’t happen.

What happened was a slow, suicidal mimicry of war.

A bloodletting without conclusion.

A state of permanent tension—designed not to protect Israel, but to protect the world from being offended by her.

That is what didn’t happen.

And it is killing us.

IV.a Allegro Con Fuoco—What Must Happen Now

This war is not over.
But it will be—one way or another.

It will end with victory. Or it will end with surrender.
With clarity. Or with more endless, managed decay.
There is no third option.

And we must now say clearly: this is not a war with Hamas.
It is a war with Palestine.
It is a war with the culture, ideology, and society that raised October 7th as its proudest day.
It is a war with a worldview that builds tunnels under cribs, that stores rockets in schools, that baptises its sons in blood and calls it resistance.

It is not a war for territory.
It is not a war for diplomacy.
It is a war for moral survival.

We must reclaim the one word that has been absent from Israeli strategy since October 7th:
Victory.

Not “degrading capabilities.”
Not “deterrence.”
Not “rounds.”
Victory.

Victory means:

• The complete military defeat of all armed forces in Gaza.

• The unconditional surrender of Hamas and its ideology.

• The dismantling of Gaza as a war-producing society.

• The end of Palestinianism as a legitimate political movement.

Airstrikes cannot achieve this.
It cannot be achieved by legalese.
It cannot be achieved by a “deal”.
It must be imposed. Through force. With finality.

What must happen now is the eradication of the mental viruses that have crippled Israel’s leadership, infected its military, and poisoned its strategic thinking for decades.

Gone is the concern for appeasing the circus of “international law.”
Gone is the restraint, the apology, the performance of suicidal morality in front of a world that celebrates our pain.

From this moment forward, Israel’s only answer to those who speak of “restraint” and “proportionality” should be this:

“We do not hear you.

It is as if nothing has been said.

Your words carry no weight.

You watched our children burn.

You do not get to tell us how to fight.”

No more humanitarian aid.
No more humanitarian zones.
No more sophisticated ways of distributing food so that it “doesn’t reach Hamas.”
That entire paradigm is over.

The Israeli military must speak with one voice—to the people of Gaza, to Judea and Samaria, and to the world:

“We are changed.

We no longer believe in your lies.

We no longer serve your corrupt morality.

We have a new leadership, a new army, and a new doctrine—free from the shackles of false virtue.

And to you, we say this:

You surrender.

You return our hostages.

You lay down your weapons.

You expel your leaders.

Or all hell will break loose.

There will be no negotiations.

There will be no ceasefire.

No cease but fire.

Until you submit.”

“We do not care what you call yourselves—Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad.

We do not fight names.

We fight enemies.

And you, the Palestinian people, are the enemy—until you choose not to be.”

You have an opportunity.
You can stop being our enemy.
You can embrace life.
You can embrace Israeli values—freedom, peace, civilisation.
You can bring us the hostages.
You can raise the white flag.

You can say: “We give up. We will not arm ourselves. We will not pursue war. We will not try to destroy you. We will be peaceful subjects of Israeli sovereignty.”

Until that moment, you are the enemy.
And you will be treated as such.

Anything short of this is not war—it is sacrifice.
The sacrifice of our soldiers.
The sacrifice of our citizens.
The sacrifice of our economy, our morale, our soul.

This is the only way forward.

There is no “day after” unless this becomes the day of reckoning.
There is no rebuilding, no coexistence, no future—until there is unconditional surrender.

And only then—only when evil falls to its knees, when the hostages come home, when the lies are over—only then will the fire cease.

IV.b Finale—Victory Now

For almost two years, this insane reality has unfolded before our eyes.

We have seen the horrors of that terrible day.
We have seen the confusion.
We have seen the hesitation.
We have seen the trucks of fuel and food sent to the homes of our murderers.
We have seen our soldiers raid the same neighbourhoods again and again, only to fall into traps set by cowards.

We have seen their faces—our fallen heroes—on our screens.
We have mourned them.
We have wept.
We have lit candles.
We have whispered their names.

We think of the hostages—still there, in the tunnels, in the dark, beneath that kingdom of evil.
We think of them.
We yearn for their return.

But it is not enough.
It is not enough to feel.
It is not enough to mourn.
It is not enough even to die in such a battle if the battle itself is built on a lie.

Because our strategy is wrong.
Our premise is wrong.
The very logic that has guided our decisions has betrayed us from the start.

Not just since October 7th.
For decades.

This war did not begin last year.
It began in every lie we told ourselves about the enemy.
It began in every policy of appeasement, every gesture of self-doubt, and every illusion of coexistence with a death cult.

And we must see that now.

We cannot afford to cry without seeing.
We cannot afford to grieve without thinking.

We must look at the wider picture:
The madness that now rages against the Jewish people around the world.
The eruption of antisemitism from every corner of the so-called civilised world.

And we must say clearly: this is not random.
This is not just “backlash.”
This is a mission—an ancient mission, older than memory, still alive:
To destroy the Jews.

My generation did not believe it.
We thought it was history.
We thought it was paranoia.

But it is here.
It never left.

And October 7th was the trumpet blast.
A wake-up call, louder than sirens.

Some have awakened.
Some have changed.
Indeed, many now see with eyes they never had before.

But it is not enough.

We must wake up fully.
We must rise—not just in spirit, but in action.
As the great lions of the Operation Rising Lion showed us, we are capable of greatness.
We can do the impossible.
We can shock the world.

But even there, we saw our greatest flaw:
We do not finish.

We strike—but we do not destroy the target.
We roar—but we do not bite.
We mourn—but we do not win.

We must finish.

We must finish the war.
We must end this lie.
We must eliminate the era of Jewish sacrifice, of moral confusion, of waiting for approval from a world that wants us gone.

Unless we do that,
we will be next.
We will be at the next funeral.
The next atrocity.
The next Yom Hazikaron.
The next generation forced to wonder why we let it happen again.

That is what is required of us now.
That is what history demands.
That is what justice demands.

We must rise.
And we will.

We must rise and declare it, not someday. Now.

Victory now.

Unconditional surrender.

Or else.

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