This Is Not a War with ‘Hamas’—It’s a War with Palestine
Why Israel’s war cannot be won until it stops lying about who the enemy really is
Introduction: Who Is The Enemy?
I remember a viral clip from an Israeli news panel back in 2017, during yet another Gaza operation. (I’ve lost track of how many there have been.) On the panel sat Moshe Feiglin, a former Knesset 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-knocking 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," it 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, Islamic Jihad, Popular Front, People’s Front, all alike—and butchered our people, burnt our homes, and broadcast their joy on live 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 six-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 (I delve deeper into Romy’s story here: Are You From Israel?)
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 Hasbara. “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 the withdrawal from Gaza. 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 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. That is the focus of this essay.
(For a deeper analysis of how Israel’s public diplomacy abandoned truth in favour of appeasement, see The Moral Collapse of Hasbara).
The Myth of the Innocent Gazans
I. We Built the Illusion
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 Oslo, before 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, 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 Jews from their homes. 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, Judenrein, 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.
II. The Culture That Chose October 7th
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, a rival gang that shares the same genocidal ideology and now runs its own little anarchic state in Judea and Samaria.
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 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. This 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.
This is not a life-affirming culture. It is a culture that worships death. It trains for it. It sings of it. It builds its very infrastructure around it. Its highest moral value is the annihilation of the Jews, and it is willing to die for that ideal.
But what's unforgivable is not that war kills civilians. It's that we keep pretending they're innocent.
It's that we keep pretending this enemy is being held hostage by Hamas when, in reality, Hamas is only the face of a culture that has chosen this path.
If Israel had decent neighbours—Egypt—the Gazans could have evacuated into Sinai, and the war might have been over in weeks. But even Egypt doesn't want them. Even the Arab world knows who and what Gaza is.
This isn't just a war against a military force. It's a war against a people who believe in the cause of their murderers.
The real lie isn't that Hamas hides among civilians. The real lie is that there are innocent civilians. Not in the moral sense. Not in the cultural sense. Not when the population sustains, funds, and cheers for a genocidal regime. Not when the culture itself is the weapon.
Yet none of this—none of Israel's past naivety, none of the Western fantasies we indulged in—changes the reality of October 7th. It happened. They made it happen. A people, not a fringe. A society, not a cell. They slaughtered, raped, burnt, and filmed. And they celebrated. They danced with blood on their hands.
So yes, we created the monster. But now, we must demand its unconditional surrender—not apologise to it, not negotiate with it, and certainly not offer it humanitarian exits. We must name it, confront it, and end it.
Because moral responsibility isn't a one-time transaction, it's a continuous demand. We built the illusion. We handed them the match. And now, not out of guilt or mercy, but out of justice, we must finish what we started.
What began with our retreat must end with their defeat—not just militarily, but morally. They must surrender not only their weapons but their worldview. The death cult must be broken. Their only path forward is to renounce their hate, and embrace the only true alternative: Western values—freedom, reason, individual rights.
This is not vengeance. This is the bare minimum required for peace.
That is what justice demands. And that is what October 7th requires.
Israel’s Moral Collapse
You may wonder, why does Israel keep saying “Hamas” when it knows, deep down, that this war is with Gaza? Why does every press conference, every IDF spokesman, every Hasbara effort still parrot the line that “the people of Gaza are not our enemies”?
The answer isn’t just fear. In many cases, it’s an actual belief.
Many Israelis—especially those in high-ranking military officers, government and media—genuinely buy into the inverted morality of the West. They believe that righteousness comes from restraint, from pain, from sacrifice. They believe Gazan propaganda more than the evidence of their own eyes.
And they are proud of it.
Israel boasts, with tragic sincerity, that the IDF is “the most moral army in the world.” But by what standard? By the standard of self-sacrifice. By the standard of suicidal ethics. The pride doesn’t come from victory—it comes from how many of our own soldiers we’re willing to sacrifice to spare the enemy.
From how many warning leaflets we drop.
From how many phone calls we make to enemy homes.
From how many delays we accept so the world might applaud our “restraint.”
From how many food trucks we send into enemy territory—in the middle of a war—to feed the population that shelters our killers.
But this is not moral grandeur. This is moral perversion.
These are our sons. Our best. Our bravest. Young men who are forced into uniform by a system of conscription—and then sent to die, not for victory, not for security, not for their own families’ safety—but for the chance that maybe, just maybe, a New York Times columnist might write something less vile about the Jewish State.
This is not war.
This is ritual human sacrifice.
This is profoundly evil.
(I wrote in greater depth about how Israel came to adopt this suicidal morality in The Moral Collapse of Hasbara, tracing how Hasbara turned our battlefield into a branding campaign—and our survival into a PR liability.)
This perversion leads to strategic paralysis. If you accept that the enemy population are innocent victims, not collaborators, then every move you make to defend yourself becomes a moral scandal. Every airstrike is a “war crime.” Every territorial advance is a sin. You fight with one hand tied, and then wonder why the war drags on.
By refusing to name the enemy, Israel undermines its own right to self-defence. You cannot defeat what you refuse to condemn. You cannot win a war you don’t believe you’re allowed to fight.
And of course, it never works. It’s never enough. No amount of Jewish blood will ever suffice. There is no quota of “moral” casualties that will win the West’s approval. Because the only way to fulfil this deranged morality is to disappear. To die. To offer, not just our soldiers, but the totality of the Jewish people as a peace offering.
That is what this inverted morality demands.
And if Israel wants to live, it must reject it. Utterly. Proudly. Without apology.
The enemy is not just Hamas or even Gaza, the enemy is Palestine, not as a location, but as an idea. An idea built around death, resentment, and the dream of Jewish extermination. That idea must be defeated, not accommodated. It must be broken. Not with humanitarian aid or PR campaigns, but with the unmistakable, unforgettable consequences of choosing war against civilisation.
Only then, only when the people who carry that name abandon its poisoned meaning, will peace become possible.
They Chose This
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, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front—each a different mask of the same death cult.
This is not a tragic failure of democracy. It is its logical result when the soceity 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 man. 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 Fatah run Judea and Samaria. 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.
Because 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 UN agencies, the rivers of foreign aid—none of it is meant 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.
This Is a War Against a Culture
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.
By pretending the Gazans are mere bystanders, Israel is not being moral. It is being suicidal. It is gaslighting itself. It is choosing illusion over survival.
This is why we keep winning battles but losing the war. This is why every “victory” is followed by another funeral. Because we refuse to speak the truth: that we are not at war with “some bad tenants” who hijacked an otherwise peaceful apartment complex. We are at war with the building itself—with its architects, its ideology, and the culture that animates every floor.
Israel cannot win this war until it is willing to say, This is not about Hamas. This is not about any particular party. This is not about a few extremists. This is about a culture that has, for generations, chosen death over peace, sacrifice over responsibility, and hatred over coexistence.
And yes, saying that is uncomfortable. Yes, it defies the moral pieties of the Western press, the NGOs who live off Gazan corpses, and the architects of Israel’s so-called “eighth front”—the war for international approval.
(For a deeper analysis of how Israel came to worship its image over its survival—and why moral clarity, not moral performance, must guide our actions—read The Moral Collapse of Hasbara and Israel Doesn’t Owe You an Explanation.)
But truth is not a popularity contest. And survival is not a PR campaign. Until Israel finds the moral clarity to name its enemy—not just tactically but philosophically—it will remain stuck in a loop of useless restraint, righteous defeat, and funerals for its future.
Moral clarity is not a luxury. It is the first weapon in a just war. Without it, every bomb is half a bomb. Every soldier, half defended. And every act of self-preservation, half-betrayed.
But above all, this is not a debate we can afford to delay. We are past the point of abstraction. October 7th was not a fluke. It was the price of evasion. It was the harvest of decades of wishful thinking, of moral confusion, of treating a death cult like a political partner.
We do not have the luxury of another round. Another generation of this denial—of trying to surgically remove “the extremists” while preserving the culture that breeds them—will not lead to peace.
We keep changing the tyres, not realising the driveway is full of nails. It will lead to something far worse. And I don’t even want to imagine what that looks like.
We have no choice. Not if we want to live.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it: Israel doesn’t owe the world an explanation. What we owe is justice—for our dead, for our children, and for ourselves.
Conclusion: The Choice Is Ours
We stand at a civilizational fork in the road. One path leads to the continuation of evasion—of pretending this is a war against infrastructure, against a few bad actors, against tunnels and rooftops and factions with long names. The other leads to truth.
The truth is hard. It is ugly. But it is also liberating.
Because once we name the enemy—not Hamas, not just Gaza, but Palestinianism as a death-worshipping culture—then, and only then, can we demand what justice truly requires: unconditional surrender, not merely of arms, but of values. The defeat not just of rockets and rifles, but of martyrdom, grievance, and the Palestinian genocidal ambition.
And in its place, the only thing that can make peace possible: the embrace of freedom. Reason. Individual rights. The values of the West. The values of life.
Yes, these are lofty ideals. But they are not optional. They are the bare minimum for coexistence with a free people.
If Gazans want peace, let them show it. Not with tears on camera, but with action. Let them turn in their terrorists, reject their ideologies, educate their children in dignity, not death. Until that day comes, they are not victims. They are perpetrators. And they must be treated as such.
This war must be won, not just on the battlefield, but in the realm of moral certainty.
We must never again apologise for surviving. Never again sacrifice our sons for headlines. Never again bury our children to preserve an illusion.
October 7th was a verdict. However, it can also serve as a pivotal moment—provided we muster the bravery to confront evil, vanquish it, and establish a superior alternative.
That is how peace is built.
Not through appeasement, not through denial—but through moral clarity, military victory, and the unflinching defence of civilisation.
We owe that to our dead.
We owe that to our children.
And above all, we owe that to ourselves.
Because October 7th was not just a tragedy.
It was a turning point.
A moment that shattered every illusion we clung to.
A moment that demands a choice.
To name the enemy, or to bury more of our children.
To fight decisively, or to die for applause.
To defend our civilisation, or surrender it inch by inch to those who hate it.
The world may not understand.
But we must.
Because no one else will fight for our survival.
And no one else should have to.
Never again is not a cliche.
It is a promise.
And promises demand action.
If Israel wants to survive, it must keep it.
Without shame.
Without restraint.
Without apology.
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Well said. and also very transferable to the West in general.
It seems like the bottom line is the Jewish people cannot cross the line that been crossed against them in thousands of pogroms and atrocities culminating in the Holocaust.. which means truly destroying the enemy physically and spiritually. It’s an extremely difficult thing to do but if Israel can’t will itself to destroy the Palestinians mindset Israel will ultimately be destroyed.