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.
{Reposted from the author’s site}
