# Israel and America by Bryant McGill (October 2025) ## Israel’s Greatest Weakness: Silence in the Age of Narrative Israel has never mastered the art of self-promotion. For a people so skilled at invention—who can market water from the desert, code from a dorm room, and dreams into unicorn startups—Israel remains curiously inept at explaining itself to the world. Diaspora Jews often shoulder the task of defending Israel’s legitimacy, while Israelis, almost defiantly, speak as though no one beyond their borders is listening. They seem to inhabit a moral universe where the world’s judgment is peripheral, even irrelevant. The paradox is striking: a nation that can sell software and soda to every corner of the globe struggles to sell the most just cause in modern history—its own right to exist. Yet this is not mere arrogance or naïveté. It is a reflection of Zionism’s psychological DNA. At its core, Zionism was a revolt against the centuries-long degradation of living under the gaze of the anti-Semite. For millennia, Jews were forced to justify their humanity, to moralize their existence before courts of contempt. Herzl’s revolution was as much spiritual as political—a declaration that never again would the Jew stand before the tribunal of others, explaining himself to those who viewed him through the lens of their own hate. That defiance remains etched into the Israeli psyche. When Israelis appear unpolished on CNN or dismissive of the moral theater of social media, it is not because they lack awareness—it is because they refuse the premise. To justify one’s existence to an unrelenting world feels, to them, like a regression to exile. Zionism, at its heart, is emancipation from that need to beg for understanding. And yet, Israelis are not blind. They know they are losing the public relations war—perhaps even expect to. In moments of crisis, they look inward, not outward. The world may rage, the hashtags may burn, but Israel decides to win on the ground. Israelis live in the clarity of a people who understand that survival is not a debate. They have learned that history is not written by the loudest voices on Twitter but by those who remain standing when the smoke clears. So, yes, Israelis often tune out the world’s noise—not because they do not care, but because they have lived too long in a reality where caring could mean extinction. They fight, rebuild, and pray, knowing that truth, like life itself, must sometimes be defended with more than words. In this defiance lies their beauty. It is not a failure of diplomacy—it is the stubborn dignity of a people who, after two thousand years of exile and judgment, have finally decided that their freedom will not be negotiated in the court of public opinion. --- ## Gaza’s Lost Potential: How Terror Devoured Its Own Future Before the barbarity of October 7, Gaza was not the wasteland of humanitarian despair that much of the international press now pretends it was. The numbers tell a different story. Gaza’s GDP per capita exceeded that of Morocco, Lebanon, and even Egypt—an extraordinary fact for a territory said to be “under siege.” It was a place of genuine potential, its coastline vibrant, its markets alive. Yet all of that promise was strangled from within, not without. For seventeen years, Hamas transformed Gaza’s economy into an engine of war, diverting billions in aid and materials to build a subterranean empire of terror tunnels rather than a single hospital or high-rise. Between the 2014 and 2021 wars, more than **5.3 million cubic meters of concrete** poured into Gaza—enough to build sixteen Burj Khalifas, the tallest skyscraper on Earth. Yet no towers rose above the skyline. Hamas built nothing for life, only labyrinths for death. Its so-called “resistance” taxed shopkeepers into poverty and turned entire neighborhoods into launchpads. The single largest infrastructure project in Palestinian history became not a city of the future but an underground war machine designed to hold civilians hostage beneath their own feet. Israel, by contrast, builds. What makes Israel strong is not its tanks or aircraft, but its faith in creation—its instinct to plan, to innovate, to make deserts bloom. Hamas wages jihad; Israel builds hospitals. Hamas buries steel underground; Israel sends satellites to the heavens. It is a civilizational difference, one mirrored in America’s own story. When the United States faced its adversaries—whether rebuilding Europe through the Marshall Plan or transforming its own frontier into thriving cities—it too chose to create, not destroy. That is the shared moral DNA of Israel and America: the belief that freedom and prosperity are earned through ingenuity, discipline, and hope, not through martyrdom or hate. Our enemies mistake this strength for arrogance. They imagine that Israel’s endurance depends on America’s backing, as though the same providence that blessed America’s founding does not also bless Israel’s rebirth. But the truth is deeper. America is strong for the same reason Israel is strong: because both nations are built on the conviction that liberty, productivity, and moral clarity outlast chaos. The ideology of Hamas and Iran promises redemption through ruin. The covenant of Israel and America insists that redemption comes only through life, order, and work. So when Israel strikes back, it does so not to conquer but to preserve that order—to ensure that a people who build cities and plant orchards will not be ruled by those who dig tunnels and burn futures. The long game, contrary to what Hamas believes, belongs not to faith that destroys but to faith that endures. Israel’s victory will not be in the rubble of Gaza but in the rebuilding that follows—just as America’s greatness has always followed its own moments of trial. That is why Gaza under Hamas has no future, and why Israel, like America, always will. --- ## The World That Closed Its Doors When America closed its doors, so did nearly every civilized nation that claimed to stand for liberty. Britain, Canada, Australia, South Africa—all sealed their gates. In 1937, South Africa even codified laws specifically to keep out German Jews fleeing the inferno of Nazi Germany. Brazil and Argentina, too, shut their harbors. The earth itself seemed to turn its back on the Jewish refugee. And it was then, in the 1920s, that the great pivot of Jewish destiny began. For centuries, Jews had looked westward—to the promise of America—as their sanctuary. But after the U.S. Quota Act of 1924, that path was closed. In 1925, for the first time in recorded history, more Jews emigrated to Palestine than to the United States. It wasn’t out of preference or ideology—it was out of necessity. Zionism became not an idealist’s dream, but the last remaining lifeboat. Until Herzl, Zionists were mocked as lunatics shouting about storms that would never come. Herzl himself was jeered as “the king of the Jews” in Vienna’s opera halls. But then came the apocalypse they foresaw: World War I, the pogroms of the Russian Civil War, the mass slaughters in the East. One hundred and fifty thousand Jews butchered in their villages before the Holocaust had even begun. The soil of Europe had already turned red long before Auschwitz existed. By the 1930s, there were no alternatives. The Zionist movement, once a whisper, had become a multitude. It was not the ideology of the few—it was the desperation of the many. Israel was not born from conquest, but from exclusion. It was not seized—it was built from the last fragments of hope left to a people whom the world had decided could live nowhere. This is why anti-Zionism is not a moral argument—it is a historical fiction. To claim the Jews “chose” Zionism is to assume they had any other choice. They didn’t. The world had abandoned them, and so they turned to the one place that had never abandoned them—the land that had called to them through prayer, through exile, through millennia. And when critics today moralize about “colonialism,” they forget the precedent that America itself set when the persecuted came seeking freedom. The Pilgrims, too, fled religious tyranny. They crossed a wilderness not out of dominance, but desperation. America was built from the same primal human yearning—to live unmolested and to worship without fear. Israel, like America, was not the project of power, but of survival. The moral kinship between these two nations is not rhetorical—it is historical. Both are civilizations built by the unwanted, both born of conscience and courage, both guided by the belief that human dignity requires sovereignty. And in that shared inheritance lies the truest lesson of history: when the world’s gates close, it is the builders—those who dare to begin again—who reopen them for everyone. --- ## The Lesson the Holocaust Actually Taught I don’t want to dwell on the Holocaust—at least not in the way the world is accustomed to doing. We’ve all heard the recitations, the ceremonies, the slogans. Yet there is one sliver of that history that demands understanding, because it defines the Israeli mind more than any other: the simple, devastating truth that *no one came*. Yes, there were individuals—brave priests, farmers, and strangers—who risked everything to hide Jews. Those are the luminous exceptions that redeem humanity’s conscience. But the rule was collaboration. Across Europe, entire nations became instruments of genocide. In Belgium’s Flemish Antwerp, local police rounded up two-thirds of the Jewish community for deportation, while in nearby French-speaking Brussels, where officials refused to cooperate, survival rates doubled. In Hungary, 437,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz—not by Germans, but by Hungarian gendarmes. In Greece, the Nazis succeeded in Salonika because Greek nationalists were eager to erase their minorities, yet in Athens, where the locals refused to help, the Jews largely survived. This pattern repeated itself everywhere: where locals collaborated, Jews perished; where they resisted, Jews lived. The Holocaust was not merely a German crime—it was a European one, an expose of human nature under pressure. When the Nazis came asking for the Jews, nearly everyone handed them over. That is the living memory that built Israel. The men and women who survived did not arrive as idealists—they arrived as witnesses. They knew that “Never Again” would mean nothing without sovereignty. They concluded, quite rationally, that moral slogans like “Don’t be intolerant” would not have stopped the Gestapo. Only power, borders, and the will to defend them would. This is not cynicism; it is wisdom purchased at the highest price imaginable. The lesson Israel learned is the same one America internalized after Pearl Harbor and 9/11: that freedom is not secured by sentiment, but by vigilance and strength. A nation without the means to protect its people will soon be a cemetery for ideals. The real moral of the Holocaust is not merely tolerance—it is the necessity of home, of self-defense, of belonging. America and Israel both emerged from that same truth: that good intentions mean little if the righteous cannot survive to uphold them. And so, the Jewish state stands today not as a monument to grief, but as a declaration that the innocent will never again be dependent on the mercy of others. Israel’s existence is the world’s most enduring act of remembrance—an act that says, with finality, *never again means never again.* --- ## The Difference Between Resistance and Terror How did the people who would become Israelis drive out the British Empire? That question often hides another—an insinuation that if Jews used force against the British, then Palestinian terrorism today is somehow justified. But the comparison collapses under the weight of reality. If the Palestinians had truly followed the Israeli example of 1946—the King David Hotel, the rail sabotage, the strikes on British military installations—their story might have been tragically different, perhaps even more successful. Because what the Jewish fighters waged was not terrorism. It was disciplined, moral, and finite war against an empire, not against civilians. When the British took Palestine from the Ottomans in 1917, the Jews saw in them a potential ally. Herzl himself had petitioned sultans and kings; the Zionists were pragmatic. Yet by 1939, Britain betrayed that fragile trust. Just as Hitler’s war machine rose in Europe, London issued the infamous **White Paper**, shutting the gates of Palestine to Jewish refugees. With America’s doors closed by the 1924 Immigration Act, and every other nation refusing asylum, the British decree became a death sentence. Even their much-celebrated Kindertransport came with a moral stain: the children were saved, but their parents were left behind to perish. By 1945, a quarter of a million Jews still languished in displaced persons camps—living on the ashes of the Reich, behind barbed wire in former concentration camps, under British administration. Only with Israel’s birth in May 1948 did those camps begin to empty. Within six weeks, 150,000 survivors flooded home—not to paradise, but to sovereignty. So how did the British leave? In truth, it was not the Irgun or the Haganah alone that forced them out—it was the collapse of empire itself. Having lost India, exhausted by war, and financially broken, Britain could no longer hold Egypt and Palestine. Yet the Jewish resistance accelerated that retreat by making the cost of occupation unbearable. They targeted infrastructure, communications, and military command centers—not civilians. The **King David Hotel**, the most famous of these operations, was the British headquarters for all forces in Palestine and Transjordan. Seventeen Jews died in that blast. Menachem Begin was shattered by the civilian casualties, not triumphant. That distinction matters—it defines the moral boundary between resistance and terror. Israel’s underground fighters had one demand: *Leave our land. Return to yours.* Their struggle was to end foreign rule, not to annihilate a people. Contrast that with Hamas, which has made the destruction of Israel—not coexistence—its founding charter. When Palestinians turned their guns and bombs on buses, cafés, and children, they destroyed their own moral standing. They targeted life itself. If they had fought soldiers and demanded independence rather than blood, history might have given them a state. When Israel’s left once believed that withdrawal could bring peace, it acted—unilaterally, courageously. It left Gaza. It offered compromise. Yet the answer came in waves of suicide bombings, 140 in just three years, each one aimed at the innocent. No democracy—America included—could withstand that without hardening its heart. America’s own history proves the point. When Washington fought British tyranny, it attacked redcoats, not families. When Lincoln fought to preserve the Union, he aimed at armies, not civilians. When America was attacked on 9/11, it did not bomb mosques—it struck Al-Qaeda’s war machines. Civilized nations understand the moral limits of force. That is the enduring difference between Israel and her enemies: Israel fights to live; Hamas kills to die. The Jewish militias fought for liberation and built a democracy. Hamas fights for destruction and builds only graves. The Israeli example stands as a lesson in moral warfare—a hard, disciplined, and deeply ethical assertion of self-determination. It shows that freedom is not won by slaughtering the innocent, but by shouldering the burden of restraint. That is what separates the founders of Israel from the terrorists of Gaza, and what forever separates civilization from barbarism. --- **Title: The Day the Israeli Left Died** Ehud Barak, Yasser Arafat, and Bill Clinton were negotiating what many believed could finally be peace. The Oslo Accords had birthed the Palestinian Authority. Israeli forces had withdrawn from nearly every major Palestinian population center. The air was heavy with expectation—perhaps the world’s most improbable reconciliation was within reach. And then came the **Second Intifada**. From 2000 to 2003, Israel was hit by 140 suicide bombings. Not on battlefields, but in cafés, buses, markets, and nightclubs. One of the most searing images of that time was the **Dolphinarium bombing** in Tel Aviv, 2001: a discothèque for teenagers—no alcohol, just music. A Palestinian walked into the line outside and detonated himself, killing twenty-one young people, mostly girls. The following months brought more explosions: a 7:30 a.m. bus in Jerusalem, a Sbarro pizzeria, a Passover dinner. Israelis stopped counting the dead; they counted the days between massacres. Palestinians called both uprisings “Intifadas,” as if they were twins of resistance. But for Israelis—especially those on the left—the first and second were moral opposites. The **First Intifada** (1987–1993) had convinced many Israelis that occupation was untenable, even immoral. It inspired the peace process, the handshake on the White House lawn. The **Second Intifada** destroyed that hope. It was not spontaneous. It was engineered. Suicide bombers are not born in poverty; they are made through ideology. They require chemists, financiers, recruiters, preachers. Hamas built laboratories, trained engineers, and taught martyrdom in mosques as if it were a science. Streets, soccer fields, and schools were named after the bombers. When a society elevates the killer to sainthood, recruitment becomes easy. This was not grassroots fury—it was a top-down, state-organized campaign of annihilation. The effect on Israel was seismic. The left, which had built its moral identity on faith in coexistence, shattered overnight. Its narrative had been simple: *Occupation is wrong. End it, and peace will follow.* But when Israel did withdraw, peace did not come—bombers did. Israelis who had voted for hope buried their children instead. The same people who had believed most fervently in peace were now the most heartbroken, and their disillusionment has defined Israeli politics ever since. What happened between Israelis and Palestinians in those years resembles what happened between America and its illusions after 9/11. The idealism of the 1990s—the belief that democracy and dialogue alone could pacify hatred—met the cold reality of totalitarian zeal. America discovered that peace without vigilance is naïve; Israel learned that goodwill without security is suicide. The tragedy of the Second Intifada is not only the lives lost—it is the moral architecture that collapsed with them. Israelis learned that peace requires two partners, not one. The lesson was cruel but indelible: if you reach out your hand to a man with a bomb belt, he will take it only to pull you closer before he explodes. The dream of coexistence didn’t die because Israel stopped believing in it. It died because those who preached peace met a culture that glorified death. And since then, Israel’s left has been a ghost—still moral, still aching for reconciliation, but haunted by the memory of what happens when faith is not matched by responsibility. In this, Israel’s story mirrors America’s own: both nations learned that security and compassion are not opposites, but twins—that to protect life is itself the highest moral act. --- ## The Collapse of Faith and the Rise of Realism By the spring of 2002, the Israeli left had already been broken—its moral foundations shattered under the relentless cruelty of the Second Intifada. The bombing that finally buried it came on Passover night, April 27, 2002: a suicide bomber entered the Park Hotel in Netanya, where elderly Israelis were gathered to celebrate the Seder, and detonated himself among the families. Twenty-nine people were murdered. That attack—known forever as the **Passover Massacre**—was the point of no return. Ariel Sharon, then prime minister, responded with **Operation Defensive Shield**, the largest military operation in the West Bank since 1967. Tanks rolled into Jenin, Nablus, Bethlehem, and Ramallah. The goal was not vengeance but control—to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure that had metastasized after Israel’s earlier withdrawals. It took nearly two years, but by late 2003, suicide bombings had dropped dramatically, and the shattered Israeli intelligence network had been rebuilt. Then, in a stunning reversal, Sharon did something that no one—left, right, or center—expected. He announced that Israel would **unilaterally withdraw from Gaza**. “In the First Intifada,” he said, “we learned we cannot rule them forever. In the Second, we learned that when we withdraw, they cannot yet reciprocate with peace. So we will withdraw on our own terms, for our own security.” It was pure realism: not negotiation, not surrender, but strategic disengagement. In August 2005, he carried it out. Every Israeli soldier, every settler, every piece of infrastructure—gone. It was surgical, disciplined, final. And most Israelis supported it. They believed Sharon’s gamble could bring calm. Even many on the right accepted that holding Gaza was unsustainable. Sharon’s popularity soared. He had accomplished what the left had only preached: ending occupation by decisive action, not idealism. Then fate intervened. In January 2006, Sharon suffered a massive stroke and never recovered. His deputy, **Ehud Olmert**, became prime minister. In his campaign, Olmert promised to continue Sharon’s vision—to withdraw next from large parts of the West Bank, creating a de facto Palestinian state. “If you don’t want me to do it,” he said bluntly, “don’t vote for me.” Israelis voted for him anyway, still hungry for peace and exhausted by war. But within months, the dream imploded. In June 2006, Hamas militants tunneled under the border from Gaza, killed two Israeli soldiers, and kidnapped a third—**Gilad Shalit**. Three weeks later, **Hezbollah** launched a massive cross-border assault from Lebanon, killing four soldiers and capturing two more. Suddenly, Israel was fighting a **two-front war**, attacked from both territories it had just relinquished. By the end of that summer, the Israeli public’s patience had collapsed. The logic of unilateral withdrawal—“we’ll leave, and they’ll leave us alone”—was dead. The Olmert government, humiliated by war and betrayed by the very peace it had tried to create, could no longer move forward with disengagement. The electorate’s trust in concession evaporated, perhaps for a generation. In the years that followed, Israel’s politics shifted permanently. The center hardened. The right gained dominance not from ideology but from exhaustion. Israelis had learned that even when they withdrew fully and in good faith, they were met not with reconciliation, but with rockets and kidnappings. Yet, in a larger sense, Sharon’s doctrine still echoes. His withdrawal from Gaza—like America’s decision to leave Iraq—was driven by a hard truth: democracy cannot be forced where a culture rejects it, and peace cannot be built on one side’s goodwill alone. The difference is that Israel, small as it is, could never afford the luxury of idealism detached from reality. In that, the lesson was not only Israeli but American. Both nations have learned that strength must be paired with prudence, compassion with vigilance. The moral of the Gaza disengagement—and its bitter aftermath—is that freedom, to endure, must be defended not by hope alone, but by the disciplined realism of those willing to bear its cost. --- ## The People Who Tried Ask most Israelis—not the far right, but the vast middle, from moderate conservatives to the disillusioned left—what they think about the Palestinians, and you’ll hear a story of heartbreak, not hatred. They will tell you, in one form or another, *we tried.* That phrase has become the quiet refrain of the Israeli mainstream. It doesn’t carry arrogance or denial—it carries fatigue, bewilderment, and grief. For forty years, Israel’s politics have revolved around the effort to end conflict: withdrawals, peace talks, unilateral gestures, and international mediation. Each one, Israelis believe, ended the same way—in blood. The Oslo Accords, the withdrawal from Lebanon, the disengagement from Gaza, each began with hope and ended in funerals. Israelis have come to believe that every time they loosen their grip, they are met not with peace, but with rockets. Even among the Israeli left—the professors, journalists, and activists who still dream of coexistence—there is a deep conviction that something inside Palestinian political culture prevents reciprocity. It is not racism; it is exhaustion. They look at Hamas and Fatah, and they see leaderships that, for all their differences, are united by a theology of grievance. Whether cast in the language of anti-colonial struggle or Islamic redemption, that story always ends the same way: Israel’s disappearance. Ordinary Israelis, who long ago stopped quoting ideology, have built their views from experience. They remember the suicide bombings that turned buses and markets into infernos. They remember the Passover massacre and the Dolphinarium. They remember how their children were targeted, and how the world asked them to show restraint. Even those who once marched for peace now live with the unshakable fear that a Palestinian state would become another Gaza—a launching pad for the next generation of bombers. Polls show roughly 90% of Israeli Jews believe that if they withdrew again, the first act of that new state would be an act of terror. It’s easy for distant observers to moralize. But the Israeli experience isn’t theory—it’s lived memory. Every family has a story. Mine does too. My brother was standing in Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda market when a bomber detonated nearby, killing the daughter of a government minister. There is no Israeli untouched by that kind of proximity to horror. So when foreigners accuse Israel of apathy or aggression, Israelis bristle. They feel misunderstood, not malevolent. They do not know what to do because they have already tried everything they could imagine. They do not reject peace—they no longer trust that it exists. And that distinction matters. To understand Israel’s paralysis is to understand its trauma. These are not callous people; they are confused and heartsick, still haunted by the hope they once carried and the innocence they lost. They are, in truth, not unlike Americans after decades of failed wars and terror attacks—people who have learned that goodwill, without realism, can cost lives. Israelis know more than their critics because they have lived it. And if the world truly wishes to help them move forward, it must first have the humility to listen—to recognize that the confusion of those who tried and bled for peace is not moral failure. It is earned wisdom. Until that empathy takes root, the impasse will remain—not because Israelis are cold or stubborn, but because they remember. --- **Title: The New Axis of Influence** To understand the Middle East, one must begin with its fault lines. Nearly every conflict in the region—Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq—maps back to the struggle between three broad forces: the **Shiite bloc led by Iran**, the **radical Sunni Islamists led by the Muslim Brotherhood**, and the **conservative Sunni monarchies** such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates. These axes don’t merely define the battlefield—they shape the flow of money, ideology, and global influence. Among them, **Qatar** has emerged as the great financier of the radical Sunni current—the same movement that gave rise to Hamas in Gaza, the Brotherhood in Egypt, and Islamist factions from Ankara to Tripoli. Unlike Iran, Qatar wields not militias but **money**. Its wealth, fueled by natural gas, has been weaponized into soft power on a global scale. Doha has learned that what bullets cannot buy, billions can. In the United States alone, Qatar has spent an estimated **$120 billion** over the last decade—on lobbying firms, PR agencies, real estate, hedge funds, and, most tellingly, **universities**. It is the single largest foreign donor to American higher education, funneling between $7 and $20 billion into institutions like Harvard, Georgetown, and Columbia. These are not acts of philanthropy. They are investments in ideological infrastructure. Once, American universities were supported by their alumni—a thousand small donations that reinforced shared civic values. A graduate who gave $10,000 had a voice. A hundred alumni together could shift a university’s priorities. But when a sovereign wealth fund writes a check for $500 million, it purchases not a plaque—but silence. The administration becomes financially insulated from the moral expectations of its citizens. We saw the results in the aftermath of **October 7**, when university presidents across the Ivy League stammered through congressional hearings, unable to define anti-Semitism or condemn open calls for Jewish genocide. They weren’t unprepared—they were compromised. They were serving two masters: Western values and Qatari patronage. This is not conjecture; it is the anatomy of influence. While Jewish donors, for generations, built universities brick by brick—endowing libraries, scholarships, and science labs—Qatar and its allies endowed the *narratives* themselves: the departments, chairs, and professors who teach the worldview that erodes the moral clarity of the West from within. The result is an academy that now treats anti-Zionism not as bigotry but as virtue, and Jewish safety as negotiable. In a bitter irony, the propaganda once used by anti-Semites to accuse Jews of global control now applies almost perfectly to Qatar’s own strategy—an empire of wealth quietly buying ideological terrain. What the conspiracists imagined, Qatar has operationalized. And its goal is not enlightenment but leverage. Israel and America now find themselves confronting the same problem: not just hostile governments, but hostile *ideas* taking root in the institutions that once embodied their shared values. The strength of democracy has always depended on the independence of its universities, its press, and its public conscience. When those are bought, democracy itself is for sale. The American and Israeli projects were both founded on the premise that knowledge and freedom uplift the human spirit. They believed in education not as indoctrination but as liberation. That belief must be reclaimed. For if the future of learning belongs to regimes that celebrate jihad and excuse terror, then both nations risk raising a generation that no longer knows the difference between civilization and its enemies. It is time for America and Israel alike to remember that freedom’s first line of defense is not the army—but the mind. And whoever funds the classroom, shapes the conscience of the next century. --- ## Ideas at War — Why This Moment Matters In 1948, Israel survived and prevailed—at terrible cost. The fledgling Yishuv had already been hollowed by decades of persecution; when the guns fell silent, whole families were gone and the community was scarred. The victory was real, but it was fragile. For many Israelis it felt like a reprieve more than a triumph, because the region’s enemies were then disorganized, poorly led, and divided. That confusion spared the newborn state. By 1956 the landscape had changed. Arab armies were rearming, Soviet arms flooded the region, and Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser had fused nationalist pride into a pan-Arab project aimed at undoing Israel’s very existence. Israel in 1956 was still an impoverished country—it had only just stopped rationing eggs—and the fear that a united Arab front might overwhelm it was visceral. What ended that phase of the threat was not miracles; it was the grim reality of combat. Israel met massed armies in the desert and defeated them. Military failure broke the spell of Nasserism. A later wave of struggle shifted tactics from armies to terror. Inspired by anti-colonial wars—Algeria being the most famous example—movements adopted guerrilla and terror methods hoping that attrition would force Jews to leave. Decades of insurgency followed, and Israel, through force and intelligence, managed to blunt and break those campaigns too. Now we face a third organizing idea: a strand of radical political Islam that promises restoration through annihilation of the Jewish presence. Whether it is Sunni jihadi strands that spawned groups like Hamas or the Shia revolutionary export from Tehran, the ideological through-line is the same: the belief that victory comes through sacrifice and destruction, not through building and governance. That is why the current fight against Hamas is not merely tactical; it is strategic and civilizational. If the Islamist model succeeds here, it will be a template. If it fails, its appeal will be blunted across the region. Make no mistake—defeating this ideology is not merely a matter of military force. It is both practical and moral: we must deny the narrative the means to reproduce itself, show that violence does not deliver statehood or dignity, and then offer the only durable alternative: institutions that create prosperity, freedom, and opportunity. That is how ideas die—when they stop working and people prefer life over martyrdom. This is a global pattern. America knew it in the 20th century when it confronted ideologies that sought wholesale revision of the international order—Nazism, imperial Japanese militarism, Soviet expansionism. The United States did not simply punish; it helped rebuild societies so that grievance could be channeled into politics, not terror. The post-war Marshall Plan mattered as much for ideas as for economies. If Israel and its partners can combine decisive security action with long-term investment in civil life, the Islamist narrative will be exposed as a failed project. We do not pretend this is easy or quick. The defeat of an entrenched idea takes time, sacrifice, and consistent statecraft. But there is no credible alternative. To surrender to the logic that violence can win legitimacy is to invite a century of ruin. Israel’s survival—like America’s security—depends on refusing that bargain. Finally, the moral case: the common good demands that we not merely repel our enemies but also build the conditions in which peace becomes more attractive than perpetual war. Strength without a horizon of humane aspiration is cruelty; aspiration without strength is fantasy. The task before us is to marry both—to defend the innocent, to dismantle the destructive ideology, and to rebuild the institutions of life and hope so that future generations choose construction over annihilation. That is what is at stake, and that is why we have no choice but to act. --- ## The One Place They Stopped Dying When South Africa brought its case against Israel to the International Court of Justice, it did so while maintaining warm relations with Bashar al-Assad and other genuine perpetrators of genocide. That hypocrisy is not lost on Israelis. But acknowledging it doesn’t lessen the real suffering in Gaza—children uprooted, families displaced, cities reduced to rubble. What it does expose is how moral language itself has been hijacked. For nearly two years, international agencies have insisted that Gaza teeters on the edge of famine and genocide. Yet despite the horrors of war, not one credible report confirms mass starvation. There has been real hunger, yes, in pockets and moments, as happens in any siege or conflict zone. But it has not been systemic extermination. To repeat that claim endlessly is not compassion—it is propaganda. And when truth is sacrificed for narrative, trust collapses. Israelis now hear calls for humanitarian aid and remember the months of lies; they assume manipulation, not mercy. Meanwhile, the same international conscience that invokes the word “genocide” in Gaza is silent about **Sudan**, where entire ethnic populations are being wiped out. The death toll there is exponentially higher, the legal definition of genocide far clearer, yet the outrage is muted. Why? Because Israel is the easier target—safe to condemn, fashionable to oppose. And the cost of this hypocrisy is moral bankruptcy: a world that no longer knows when to believe its own humanitarian institutions. Still, criticism of Israel’s policies is legitimate—necessary even. Military rule in the West Bank, the toll on civilians in Gaza—these are matters of conscience and debate. Democracies are supposed to wrestle with such questions. What is *not* legitimate is the growing chorus that denies Israel’s right to exist at all. The Jewish people’s story is not one of conquest but of survival. The Jews of the Middle East are the last Jews still living east of Europe. They are the refugees of a century of expulsions—from Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Egypt—driven out by nationalist and Islamist regimes. They came to Israel because there was nowhere else to go. By 1948, every door in the world had closed: the United States, Canada, Brazil, South Africa, Britain. Two hundred and fifty thousand Holocaust survivors languished in displaced-persons camps—behind barbed wire in the ruins of Germany—until Israel opened its gates. That was when the dying finally stopped. To tell these people, after all that, that they do not deserve the land where they found safety is not moral criticism—it is historical amnesia. Zionism was never a colonial project; it was a rescue mission. Long before Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, Jews were already returning to Ottoman Palestine, tilling its fields, building schools, reviving a dead language. They were not empire builders; they were refugees. You can be liberal or conservative, believer or skeptic—but to be anti-Zionist is to reject the basic record of history. As the German historian **Götz Aly** reminds us in *Europe Against the Jews*, European antisemitism killed hundreds of thousands of Jews even before the Holocaust. The Shoah was not an aberration; it was the crescendo of a centuries-long persecution that left only one path to survival—self-determination. Israel was born because the world refused to save the Jews. It endures because the Jews refused to die. And that, above all, is what so many outside the region fail to grasp: Israel is not an abstraction, not a policy experiment or a colonial relic—it is the one place on Earth where Jewish children do not live at the mercy of someone else’s tolerance. You can debate its actions. You can criticize its leaders. But you cannot wish away its right to be. To do so is not progressivism—it is a relapse into the very barbarism that made Israel necessary. For anyone who still believes in a world governed by reason and justice, that must remain the starting point. --- ## When Law Becomes the Battlefield We are fighting a war in which the enemy has made the weapon of last resort out of the most vulnerable people it claims to represent. Hamas deliberately embeds fighters, tunnels, command posts, and weapons inside civilian neighborhoods, mosques, even hospitals—knowing full well that the world will measure Israel by the images it can circulate, not the facts that produced them. That is the strategy: manufacture civilian suffering on your side, present it as evidence of genocide, and force democracies that care about law and conscience into either self-censure or tactical paralysis. This is not abstract theory. It’s a conscious calculation. Hamas treats violations of international humanitarian norms not as problems to avoid, but as tools to be exploited. They count on the fact that liberal democracies, especially ones that pride themselves on obeying international law, will be judged under a microscope by journalists, NGOs, and international bodies. So they create the spectacle—digging the region’s largest tunnel network under populated blocks, parking rockets next to schools, and launching attacks from civilian zones—precisely because every civilian casualty becomes a propaganda win for them. That forces a terrible test on democracies: can a state that insists on obeying international law successfully fight an enemy that intentionally weaponizes the rules against it? We are watching that experiment play out. International law was designed to reduce suffering in war: to constrain violence, protect civilians, and impose moral limits on combat. But what happens when one side treats those rules as adversarial levers to be gamed? When every restraint you observe is converted by your enemy into a way to win the court of public opinion, the battlefield shifts from tanks and trenches to tribunals, headlines, and hashtags. There are hard, practical implications. International law does not—and must not—become a shield for fighters who hide behind civilians. If a hospital is used as an operations node, the law has long recognized that it may become a legitimate military target. To deny that reality in every circumstance is to hollow the law out of meaning. Likewise, the ratio of combatant-to-civilian deaths matters morally and legally: we must know who dies, not just how many. A one-to-one ratio in a given operation is a different moral calculus than ten civilians for each combatant. Numbers without categories are propaganda fodder; truth requires rigor. America has faced these dilemmas in other urban wars. In Mosul and Raqqa, U.S.-led coalitions confronted militants who embedded themselves within cities and used civilian populations as shields. The result was agonizing trade-offs: delay and allow the enemy to continue using civilians as cover, or attack and risk civilian harm while breaking the enemy’s capacity to slaughter more innocents. Those painful lessons informed changes in doctrine, precision targeting, battlefield intelligence, and post-conflict reconstruction. The same playbook—defeat the fighters, then help rebuild normal life—applies here. The moral instincts are the same: protect civilians, hold fighters accountable, and rebuild what has been shattered. We must also be honest about consequences of misinformation. For 19 months, repeated predictions of imminent mass starvation and invention of “smoking gun” massacres hardened Israeli skepticism. When humanitarian claims are exaggerated or weaponized, they erode trust and make later, genuine aid harder to deliver. That dishonors the suffering that is real—children out of school, families displaced, hospitals damaged—and it demeans the institutions that should respond objectively. Lying has moral consequences; it makes negotiation and relief more difficult, and it strengthens the hand of those who would exploit tragedy for political ends. Still: none of this excuses callousness. Israel and its allies must show the highest standards of care for civilian life, and the global community must insist on rigorous, independent accounting of casualties and causes. We need neutral teams with real access, forensic transparency about combatant versus civilian deaths, and credible mechanisms for proving misuse of civilian infrastructure by armed groups. That is how law regains traction: through evidence and accountability, not slogans. Finally, the deeper argument is moral and aspirational, and it must be included in any honest strategic calculus. We must protect the vulnerable, affirm Palestinian human dignity, and insist upon Palestinian self-determination—because the only durable antidote to militancy is a politics that rewards life-building, not martyrdom. The United States and Israel share that civilizational instinct: defeat the violent ideology, then create institutions that make the alternative—schools, hospitals, economic opportunity—so compelling that violence becomes unthinkable. This is not a short campaign. It asks much of democracies: moral clarity to use force when necessary; legal and procedural rigor to demonstrate that force is lawful; and imaginative generosity to help rebuild so the next generation refuses the cult of violence. If international law is to survive this stress test, it must be enforced evenhandedly, adapted to asymmetric threats, and defended by nations that will not allow its language to be prostituted for propaganda. That is the hard, but honorable, path: defeat the doctrine of destruction, protect the innocent, and build the institutions that make peace credible. Only then will the laws meant to civilize war keep doing their work. --- ## How Democracies Outperform Theocracies — Iran’s Strategic Malaise Iran today looks less like a cohesive, modern war machine and more like a brittle theocracy whose grand obsessions outstrip its competence. The regime’s fixation on Israel’s elimination—its willingness to devote vast sums and years of national treasure to a project that will never give it security or prosperity—has produced a self-inflicted strategic weakness. That fury, that ideological single-mindedness, is not separate from its dysfunction; they feed one another. Put bluntly: competent militaries survive by paying attention to indicators, by securing their leadership, by maintaining logistics and spare parts, and by protecting command-and-control. Authoritarian systems that prize ritual and secrecy over reality tend to hollow out those basics. Corruption steals fuel and munitions; factional rivalry sidelines the best commanders; ideology crowds out honest intelligence. Democracies, by contrast, suffer public scrutiny that forces supply chains to function, accountability to persist, and leaders to hesitate before sending sons and daughters into fruitless ventures. Iran’s regional campaign illustrates those patterns. Instead of building resilient defenses and diversified capabilities, Tehran invested heavily in proxies and long-range pledges of annihilation. When push came to shove, many of the regime’s vulnerabilities—exposed air defenses, fragile command nodes, and porous logistics—became plain. Its proxy network, which once seemed like an asymmetric force-multiplier, has been degraded faster than Tehran planned. From a distance, what appeared formidable turned out to be porous because the state that funded it was strategically short-sighted and institutionally weak. There are concrete reasons for that institutional weakness. Democracies build redundancy into their forces: elected leaders must answer to voters, parliaments check budgets, and free media expose corruption. This creates a crucible where matériel is not only on paper but actually ready to move, fight, and be maintained. Russia discovered this in Ukraine: hundreds of tanks existed on rosters but lacked fuel, spare parts, and effective crews. Ukraine’s effectiveness was not just bravery—though there was plenty of it—it was an operational honesty that made every unit a real unit. Democracy supplies that honesty; authoritarianism too often replaces it with paperwork and patronage. America knows these lessons intimately. After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. mobilized not just soldiers but the industrial base, the supply chains, and the civil society that could sustain a long war. That capacity—to turn innovation and economic depth into military resilience—is precisely the advantage Israel enjoys as well. Israel is not large, but it is adaptive: technological depth, compulsory service that trains citizens for rapid mobilization, civilian industries that pivot to defense needs. Combined with a free economy and civic solidarity, those features produce a force multiplier that authoritarian proxies cannot easily match. All this is not to insult Iranians as people. Iran’s population contains engineers, scholars, and artisans. The critique is of a system that squanders human capital on messianic projects. Theocratic obsession with destruction—spending generations’ worth of GDP to underwrite proxies and fantastical visions—creates the very incompetence it hopes to hide. Short-term prestige projects starve the logistics, training, and institutional depth that underpin real power. There is also a moral-political point that matters for those who want a better Middle East. Democracies are messy and imperfect, but they are structurally capable of reform. They can reinvent policies, correct mistakes, and rebuild after defeat in ways authoritarian regimes cannot. That capacity to self-correct is the ultimate strategic asset. If Israel and its partners can combine firmness in defense with an aspirational politics that invests in prosperity, education, and governance, the appeal of violent theologies will wither. In the end, the contest is not only about missiles and covert actions. It is about what kind of polity sustains life and dignity over generations. America and Israel, for all their faults, still model an alternative: open economies, accountable institutions, and social solidarity that converts hardship into innovation rather than ritualized sacrifice. If we hold to those values—and if we pair resolve with the humane work of rebuilding and opportunity—then theocratic fantasies of destruction will fail not merely on the battlefield but in the hearts and minds of the region’s people. --- ## The Logic of Loyalty — America, Israel, and the Old Hatred in New Clothes The story ends, always, where it began: with people trying to explain away their own failures by inventing an invisible enemy. That’s how antisemitism renews itself—whether in 12th-century Norwich or in a viral post today. In the age of hashtags, the blood libel doesn’t need parchment; it needs bandwidth. And the target has shifted from “the Jews” to “the Zionists.” The script, though, hasn’t changed. ### I. The Strange Case of America’s “Smart” Critics Every generation rediscovers the clever few who call America foolish for standing by Israel. They style themselves *realists* or *patriots* or *anti-globalists*, and they claim that U.S. support for Jerusalem is a sentimental mistake—proof that Washington is captive to a tiny ally with no “real” strategic value. Yet this argument collapses under the simplest scrutiny. America isn’t stupid. It is pragmatic, self-interested, and historically consistent. The alliance with Israel was not born of charity but of admiration: a small democracy that defends itself, takes its own risks, and never asks others to die for it. In every conflict since 1948, Israel’s competence—its readiness to go it alone—has been the reason America ultimately stepped in, not the obstacle to it. When the Jewish state acts with self-reliance, it signals to Washington that partnership will multiply power rather than drain it. That same lesson now belongs to every democracy facing tyranny, from Taiwan to Kyiv: if you wish for American support, build the capacity to stand before you ask others to stand with you. ### II. The First Algorithm of Hate Long before social media, the original “viral” story spread through medieval Europe. In **1144**, in Norwich, a priest named *Theobald of Cambridge*—a convert from Judaism—claimed that Jews conspired yearly to murder Christian children. It was absurd on its face; the local authorities initially laughed. But the rumor metastasized across centuries, leaving a trail of massacres in its wake. Thus was born the *blood libel*—the template for all modern conspiracy theories about Jews. From there, antisemitism evolved like a software update: religious, racial, ideological, populist—each era finding its own vocabulary for the same virus. The Enlightenment didn’t kill it; it rebranded it. Marx and others reframed Jews as the avatars of capital, cosmopolitan parasites undermining class solidarity. The nationalists of the 19th and 20th centuries recast them as the stateless “other,” incapable of belonging anywhere. Today’s populists—whether cloaked in leftist humanitarianism or right-wing “patriotism”—resurrect the same idea: that Jews, now symbolized by Israel, are the source of corruption, oppression, or whatever grievance needs a villain. ### III. The Birth of the Escape Plan Theodor Herzl, watching the rise of antisemitic politics in fin-de-siècle Vienna, once flirted with a naïve solution: what if every Jew simply converted? But the Inquisition had already answered that centuries earlier; conversion never saved anyone. The only answer was sovereignty—the ability to live beyond the reach of other people’s delusions. Zionism was not imperialism; it was self-rescue. And it worked. The Jews who built Israel were not conquerors; they were the last survivors east of Europe. They built the one place where they stopped dying. ### IV. The Old Logic Returns Today the same theology of blame has merely shifted targets. In many parts of the Muslim world, even in countries with no Jewish population, over ninety percent of respondents tell pollsters that a global Jewish conspiracy controls world affairs. That isn’t politics; it’s religion turned into ideology. The great clerical and populist movements that failed to modernize their societies found an easier story: someone else—somewhere far away—stole your destiny. Against this tide of fantasy stands a simple, democratic realism. America and Israel share it: a belief that competence matters more than conspiracy, that the dignity of a nation is measured by what it builds, not by what or whom it destroys. Democracies correct their mistakes; haters only repeat theirs. ### V. The Moral of the Story So when you hear that America’s loyalty to Israel is irrational, remember that irrationality lies with the regimes that spend their GDP on hatred. The alliance endures because both nations still believe in the slow, imperfect work of reality—the kind that produces medicine, innovation, and defense rather than myth and martyrdom. Antisemitism, in its medieval or modern form, feeds on a single lie: that the world’s pain is someone else’s fault. Zionism, and the American partnership that sustains it, are the rebuttal: proof that freedom is earned through responsibility, not resentment. And that is why, through every century’s reinvention of hatred, the alliance of free peoples endures. --- ## The Right to Be — Why Jewish Self-Determination Is Not Racism Start with the accusation: *Zionism is racism.* It’s repeated often enough that some forget to ask what it means. If the idea that Jews form a nation and require a homeland is “racist,” then every nationalism—Greek, Irish, Indian, Palestinian—is equally condemned. Because what Herzl and his generation argued was not a hierarchy of peoples; it was survival. They saw the old empires crumbling into ethnic nation-states, and they understood what happens to stateless minorities when borders harden and scapegoats are needed. The call for a Jewish homeland was not a claim of superiority but a plea for continuity. Rewind to the late nineteenth century. Europe’s new national movements were awakening—each people claiming self-determination, language, and soil. Herzl, watching antisemitic politics rise in Vienna, concluded that Jews needed “a place under the sun.” The alternative was catastrophe. History proved him right. When the empires collapsed and nationalism became the world’s organizing principle, Jews without a nation perished. Zionism was simply the Jewish application of the same logic that birthed modern Europe: that every people deserves security in its own house. If that’s racism, then Greece, with its constitutionally defined Hellenic identity, is racist. So are Ireland, with its Catholic heritage, and India, with its Ministry of Diaspora for ethnic Hindus. So are the many democratic states whose founding charters link citizenship to a national culture or faith. Nobody calls them racist; we call them nations. Even every draft of a future Palestinian constitution defines the state as *Islamic* with minority protections. No one blinks. Only the Jews are told that their form of nationhood is illegitimate. Can a Zionist be a racist? Of course—a human being of any ideology can be. Israel can commit wrongs; it can discriminate; it can fail its own ideals. But those failures do not erase its legitimacy any more than America’s sins erased the legitimacy of its founding. The claim that Jewish statehood is *inherently* racist is not criticism—it is prejudice disguised as moral philosophy. It singles out one people for the right denied to none. That inversion exposes the deeper bias. The modern antisemite doesn’t always wear a swastika; he waves a banner of “anti-racism.” He condemns Jewish sovereignty while romanticizing every other struggle for self-determination. It’s the same instinct that once said Jews were too cosmopolitan to be patriots, now saying they’re too national to be moral. Israel’s critics are welcome to challenge its policies, to argue its borders, to decry its injustices—indeed, Israelis do that daily in their own press and parliament. But to deny the very premise of Jewish nationhood is to cross from debate into bigotry. Because the moral lesson of the twentieth century is not that the Jews gained too much—it’s that humanity gained something precious when they finally secured a home. America understood that. Its support for Israel has never been an act of charity but of recognition—of another democracy built on the principle that all peoples are endowed with the right to live free, to defend themselves, and to shape their destiny. That is not racism. That is the bedrock of civilization itself. --- ## The Price of Being Seen Israel didn’t wake up one morning hungry for war. It woke up surrounded by 200,000 rockets buried under 300 villages in southern Lebanon, by Iranian and Houthi blueprints promising redemption through Israel’s destruction, and by an online world that declared—before a single shot—that the Jewish state was guilty of existing. “We won’t be killed online,” one Israeli soldier said, “we’ll be killed in the real world.” The choice was never between war and peace; it was between survival and annihilation. And yet, the hatred that followed—the algorithms amplifying grief in one direction and blindness in another—was as bewildering as it was familiar. Bashar al-Assad slaughtered more than **600,000 Syrians**; the region barely blinked. The **Yemeni civil war** starved **a quarter-million** to death, including **85,000 children**, and no marches filled Western capitals. But Gaza? Gaza ignited the world. Why? Because the deaths there could be cast not as tragedy but as theater, a morality play where the Jew remains the eternal villain. No Israeli denies the horror of this war. Civilians have suffered, families shattered, and the anguish is unbearable. But it is not unique. The difference is not the scale—it’s the story. When the same Middle East that forgave Assad and embraced him afterward decides to hold one small democracy to a higher moral code than the superpowers who arm its enemies, Israelis hear an echo they know by heart. It’s called antisemitism. That is why Israel exists—to ensure that Jewish safety no longer depends on the conscience of those who hate them. To be unloved as Israelis is painful; to have been unloved before there was an Israel was fatal. The founding of the state was not about glory—it was about not dying because someone else decided your suffering was convenient. The modern version of the blood libel is digital. If the only dead child the world has shown you is from Gaza, it’s because an algorithm has chosen your empathy for you. The Yemeni child, the Darfuri refugee, the Syrian orphan—none appear in your feed. The moral lens has been programmed. And yet, if you truly care about innocent life, all children should matter equally. Gaza’s agony does not absolve the world’s selective blindness. Israelis understand the need for this war to end as soon as possible. Many are tormented by what it demands of their own soldiers and conscience. But they also know that the indifference of those who shrug at Assad’s or Iran’s massacres and suddenly discover moral passion only when Jews defend themselves reveals something older and darker than outrage—it reveals an ancient comfort with Jewish pain. Those who sincerely condemn Israel’s actions, who mourn the loss of all life, can be heard and respected. But those who chant for Gaza while glorifying Hamas, or who justify a new genocide against Jews as “resistance,” have forfeited the moral ground they claim to stand on. They are not grieving war—they are grieving that the Jews refuse to lose. America understands this pattern because it has lived it. Every democracy that fights asymmetric enemies will face moral inversion—the accusation that strength is sin and restraint is guilt. Yet America and Israel share the same stubborn belief that reality, not propaganda, will prevail. Both have fought wars where public opinion turned hostile, and both learned that endurance—of spirit, of principle, of civilization itself—is the truest victory. Israel doesn’t ask the world to love it. It asks only to be judged by the same standard applied to everyone else. Until that day comes, it will do what nations must do to survive—fight, endure, rebuild, and hope that someday truth, not hatred, becomes the algorithm that governs the human heart. --- ## America in the Israeli Imagination It’s not the French or the British whose opinions Israelis weigh most heavily; it’s America’s. When London or Paris frowns, Israelis shrug. But when Washington hesitates, something deeper trembles. The bond between Israel and the United States has never been merely transactional. It’s emotional, almost filial—a mix of gratitude, admiration, and shared moral DNA. Israeli affection for America runs far deeper than policy. It is a reflection of lived history: for seventy-five years, Israelis have thrived inside a world system largely built and secured by American power. The Pax Americana—its shipping lanes, its currency stability, its open markets, its deterrence of tyrants—made possible a world in which a small Jewish state could prosper. Israelis know that. They see America not only as a superpower but as a benevolent architect of order. That’s why Israelis, unlike many other nations, have never divided their view of the U.S. along partisan lines. When **Barack Obama** was elected, more than 70 percent of Israelis viewed him favorably. When **Donald Trump** came to power, the number was roughly the same. They don’t share America’s culture wars; they simply love America. Losing American favor would be, to Israelis, not only a strategic blow—losing access to spare parts for an F-35 or coordination in intelligence—but a moral one, as if the light that shaped the modern world had dimmed. There is also realism beneath that affection. Israelis look around their neighborhood and see what the alternatives are: Iran’s revolutionary regime, theocracies, and militias devoted not to governance but to apocalypse. The **Iranian project**, in particular, is not about the Palestinians or territorial grievances; it is a theological campaign to redeem Islam by erasing the people who once resisted it. Hamas, too, treats its own population as kindling for a cosmic vision. Against that, what choices remain? This is why Israelis bristle when outsiders speak of their “easy alternatives.” The average Israeli doesn’t see a menu of good options and pick the worst one out of spite. They see a world where each option is terrible in a different way. You can criticize their government—many Israelis do—but to accuse them of blindness or malice is to miss the point. They are not choosing cruelty; they are choosing to stay alive. The deeper tragedy, as even many on the Israeli left admit, is that the peace movement’s great wager—that moderation would be met with reciprocity—collapsed under the weight of suicide bombings and theological absolutism. Every time Israelis tried to negotiate, factions within Palestinian politics, particularly Hamas, sabotaged the process, willing to destroy their own society in the name of divine redemption. That betrayal didn’t harden Israel’s heart; it broke it. And still, through all of this, Israelis have kept one unshakable affection—for America. Because the American experiment, like the Zionist one, was born of a conviction that free people can govern themselves and face evil without becoming it. America represents not just a partner in arms but a mirror in which Israel sees its own best self: flawed but moral, weary but free, battered yet determined to remain a light in a darkening region. When Israelis look at America, they see the same principle that drives their own endurance: a democracy’s strength doesn’t lie in perfection, but in the courage to choose survival without surrendering the hope of goodness. --- ## The Hunger That Wasn’t—And the One That Might Be Begin where the debate actually lives—not in Gaza, but in Western capitals. The argument over Gaza’s “humanitarian catastrophe” has long ceased to be about Israelis or Palestinians; it’s about the moral theater of the West itself. The outrage cycles are not driven by data, but by emotion. Every few days, headlines promise a new apocalypse. And yet, when you revisit those same reports a week later, the evidence has quietly dissolved. For nearly two years, journalists and NGOs have predicted famine-level starvation in Gaza. Each warning made global news; each correction barely made a whisper. United Nations reports have routinely claimed that only a small fraction of needed aid reached the Strip, omitting or minimizing the much larger volume of shipments facilitated through non-UN channels—including deliveries overseen by the IDF. Ironically, Israel has allowed more food into Gaza than any belligerent state has ever permitted to an adversary during wartime. Not because it is unusually merciful, but because this is a new kind of war: one where humanitarian logistics are part of the strategy. That strategy is delicate and easily misunderstood. Israel’s goal is not to starve Gaza but to starve Hamas—its military pipeline, not its civilians. The problem is that this nuance doesn’t fit the social-media narrative, where moral clarity must be simple, photogenic, and binary. In that flattened world, every child’s suffering is real—but only if the image serves the right storyline. When Assad murdered hundreds of thousands in Syria, or when Yemen lost more than eighty thousand children to starvation, there was no sustained outcry. Gaza, however, has become a global obsession—not because the suffering is greater, but because it is politically useful. And yet, now, the danger of genuine hunger may finally be approaching. After twenty-two months of false alarms, the exhaustion of infrastructure, and the disruption of distribution networks, Gaza’s food security is fraying in earnest. The problem is that almost no one believes it. Years of exaggeration have desensitized Israelis and much of the world. When every prior warning turned out to be opportunistic or distorted, how do you convince people that the emergency this time is real? This is the moral boomerang of misinformation. The humanitarian establishment—by inflating numbers and misrepresenting realities—has dulled the world’s capacity to respond to actual suffering. And Israel, though rightly skeptical, must now act precisely because truth is in short supply. Preventing famine is not only a moral imperative; it is a strategic necessity. Every hungry child is a victory for Hamas and a loss for Israel’s moral standing. The American military once confronted a similar paradox in Iraq and Afghanistan: exaggerated atrocity reports undermined real relief efforts and turned genuine compassion into cynicism. Israel now faces the same test. To win this war honorably, it must fight not only on the battlefield but in the domain of truth—proving, with evidence and transparency, that it can defeat its enemies without surrendering its humanity. The famine that was announced may never have existed. But the famine that wasn’t announced might yet arrive. And if it does, it will not be because food was absent—it will be because credibility was. --- ## Don’t Reward the War — Why Recognition Cannot Be a Ceasefire Prize Recognition of a Palestinian state as a reward for Hamas’s refusal to stop fighting would be the single most consequential diplomatic mistake Western capitals could make: it would hand victory to militants and prove that violence pays. If London or Paris declares statehood only after a group rejects a ceasefire, they will have turned the United Nations’ podium into a prize counter — and they will have done so at the expense of every peacemaking actor who chooses restraint over bloodletting. Work backward from that obvious consequence to the moment that produced it. British Prime Minister **Keir Starmer** and French President **Emmanuel Macron** announced they will consider recognizing a Palestinian state at the U.N. General Assembly in September unless a ceasefire is reached. On its face, recognition can be a legitimate diplomatic tool. The problem is the conditional framing Starmer used: he appeared to say, in effect, “If Hamas refuses a ceasefire, we will reward it with state recognition.” That logic is perverse. It turns a moral act into a tactical incentive for continued fighting. It tells Hamas: keep resisting, keep prolonging the struggle, and the world will validate you. This is not mere nitpicking about rhetoric. In asymmetric conflicts, incentives matter. Hamas already understands the mechanics of modern information warfare: global sympathy, amplified by activist networks, state sponsors, and sympathetic media cycles, can be transformed into real political leverage. The organization looks at Western activism and says openly to Gazans: “Even when we look like losers, the world will reward our intransigence.” With that political backstop, militants can refuse ceasefires with far less fear of strategic isolation. Starmer’s conditional recognition, however well-intended as pressure on Israel, risks becoming a direct subsidy for more death. There are two related failures underlying this danger. First is the tactical blindness of political leaders who unintentionally incentivize the opposite of what they claim to want. Second is the Western information ecosystem that often strips context from images and headlines: cropped photographs, missing frames, and incomplete reporting turn complicated realities into moral caricatures. When activists and some editors present Gaza as only a tableau of victimhood — omitting Hamas’s coercion of its own people, its suppression of dissent, its diversion of aid, and its use of civilians as shields — they empower the militants’ narrative and weaken the hand of any negotiator who seeks an end to the fighting. Israel’s strategic vulnerability here is partly self-inflicted: it has been notoriously poor at the information war. When the international debate is dominated by emotive snapshots rather than careful forensic accounting — who fired, where rockets were stored, which facilities were militarized — the political battleground tilts away from facts and toward feelings. That vacuum is where external actors with political aims (states, activist networks, and some media outlets) can shape outcomes that reward raw coercion instead of encouraging negotiated peace. If the West truly wants to advance a durable resolution, it should change course in three practical ways: 1. **Stop making recognition conditional on coercion.** Recognition is a blunt instrument that should not be used as a bargaining chip to reward violence. If it is to be offered, it must be tied to clear, verifiable political benchmarks that protect civilians and renounce terror — not to whether an armed group continues fighting. 2. **Deny Hamas its external lifelines.** Cut the organized financial and political support that sustains the group’s ability to fight. That means disrupting payments channels, sanctioning intermediaries who fund militants, and exposing state sponsors who channel money and legitimacy to violent actors. 3. **Fix the information battlefield.** Western governments and credible NGOs should fund independent forensic teams to document incidents transparently; media institutions should commit to context and verification; and Israel must learn to better explain its tactics and safeguards so that outrage is not always reflexive. There is an American parallel that helps explain the stakes. The United States has long refused to grant legitimacy to organizations that use terror as policy — it did not recognize the Taliban regime internationally despite tactical concessions, and it has consistently listed Hamas as a terrorist group. That policy wasn’t mere cultural posturing; it was strategic: democracies with moral authority refuse to confer state-level legitimacy on actors who target civilians. The same logic should guide European capitals today. An aspirational note: our higher duty is to protect civilians and nurture the political conditions in which peace can take root. The *Voice of Reason* principle applies here — strength should be used to create a horizon of hope, not to reward slaughter. That means using diplomatic levers to support reconstruction, political reform, and credible institutions in which Palestinians can govern without sending children into combat. If Western leaders truly want a ceasefire that lasts, they must refuse perverse incentives. Recognition should be a reward for a genuine political transition — not a prize for those who have mastered the art of prolonging war. The moral authority of democracies depends on the discipline to do what is right, even when it is unpopular. In this case, doing what is right means not rewarding those who weaponize human misery for political gain. --- ## The Lesson of the Tunnels — When Deterrence Becomes a Trap Israel’s most painful revelation in recent memory wasn’t what it *didn’t* know about Gaza, but what it *misunderstood*. Intelligence officers had the numbers. They knew of roughly 300 kilometers of tunnels beneath Gaza — a vast subterranean lattice of concrete, steel, and darkness. They mapped it, modeled it, and filed it away under “containable threat.” The assumption was simple: *Hamas had built too much to risk losing it.* That assumption was fatal. The Israeli security establishment believed that the sheer scale of its own power — its air force, precision munitions, and capacity for devastation — would deter any rational adversary. It assumed that Hamas’s investment in its underground city, its governance apparatus, and its territory meant it had something to lose. In October 2023, that illusion was shattered. The tunnels, it turned out, were not built merely to hide from Israel’s power. They were built to *invert* it. Israel had become deterred by its own firepower. Every missile, every airstrike, every bunker-buster represented not deterrence but paralysis — the unbearable cost of destroying Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. Hamas knew it. They counted on it. The tunnels were not just fortifications; they were a psychological weapon — a wager that Israel’s morality and restraint would become its own cage. When the assault came, the realization was almost instantaneous. Hamas had written off Gaza long before the first rocket was fired. They had already accepted the annihilation of their polity as the price of striking Israel. Deterrence fails when your enemy has nothing left to deter. That failure changed everything. It revealed how Israel’s strategic calculus — once rooted in the logic of deterrence — had been turned inside out. The IDF’s post–October doctrine is no longer built on interpreting intentions but on denying capabilities. No psychoanalysis, no wishful reading of adversaries’ motivations. If an enemy *can* strike, they *will*. Therefore, they *cannot* be allowed to possess the means. This shift explains the relentless rhythm of Israel’s new campaign: the precision strikes in southern Syria, the dismantling of Iranian proxy cells, the interdictions across the Red Sea. It’s not aggression for its own sake — it’s the logical response of a nation that no longer trusts the illusion of deterrence. “Never again” has become less a slogan and more an operational doctrine: *no monster will be allowed to rise on any border, ever again.* What the world often misses is that this isn’t arrogance — it’s humility. Israelis now understand the limits of intelligence, the fragility of assumptions, and the catastrophic cost of misplaced confidence. The old conversation — the one about “rational actors,” about “containment,” about reading your enemy’s psychology — is gone. The Israel that emerged from the tunnels is one that has learned, at a terrible price, that deterrence without comprehension is not peace. It’s just the quiet before the breach. --- ## Herzl’s Strategic Zionism — Survival Over Sentiment Theodor Herzl did not begin as a prophet or a dreamer of sacred landscapes. He began as a political realist. His Zionism wasn’t messianic, religious, or even particularly romantic — it was *strategic*. He looked at the collapse of Europe’s great empires and saw clearly that the Jews, like every minority caught in the birth of modern nation-states, were standing in the path of history’s grinder. The Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires were fragmenting into small ethnic republics, each claiming a “people” of its own. Herzl realized what few in Vienna’s cafés would admit: the Jews had no such homeland, and when the tide of nationalism rose, they would drown. This was not theology. It was foresight. Herzl watched as antisemitism hardened from social prejudice into political ideology. In his era, Christian Europeans defined their virtue by the Jew’s vice. To be “civilized” or “pure” meant not to be Jewish. The Jew became the mirror against which the Christian measured goodness. Herzl, as a journalist covering the Dreyfus Affair in Paris, saw how modern liberal France still needed the Jew as its scapegoat — a moral export product for defining “the other.” His conclusion was grim and empirical: you could not reason or assimilate your way out of that role. Thus, *Der Judenstaat* — *The Jewish State* — wasn’t a utopian fantasy. It was an emergency exit. Herzl’s realism was that of a policy analyst, not a preacher. He wrote that Jews needed “a land of their own under public law,” not divine mandate. It was survival politics. In that sense, it paralleled the American Founders’ logic in 1776: not a yearning for purity or conquest, but the pragmatic creation of a structure in which a people could live free from persecution. Yet Herzl’s other side, the one less remembered today, was his longing for dignity — for normalcy. In his novel *Altneuland* (*Old New Land*), written in 1902, he imagines a future Jewish state that looks more like Vienna than Jerusalem: opera houses, civil service, polite debate. For Herzl’s generation, European middle-class respectability was liberation. They dreamed of becoming what Europe never let them be — citizens without stigma. But when those European Jews met their Mizrahi brethren — Jews from Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, and Egypt — who arrived as refugees after 1948, the dream fractured. The new state, still run by the secular socialist elite around David Ben-Gurion’s **Mapai Party** (roughly equivalent to America’s mid-century Democratic establishment), treated the Middle-Eastern newcomers as a problem to be managed. In 1951, *Davar*, the Mapai-affiliated newspaper, ran an editorial warning that these “Oriental Jews,” unaccustomed to democracy, would soon make up half the electorate. They knew the injustice of their own prejudice — and kept practicing it anyway. That cultural divide between *Ashkenazim* (European Jews) and *Mizrahim* (Jews from the Arab world) remains visible today in income statistics and political fault lines — roughly, between voters for **Yesh Atid** or **Labor** (center-left, cosmopolitan) and those for **Likud** (nationalist, working-class, socially traditional — a rough parallel to America’s Republican base). Herzl’s “strategic Zionism,” however, remains the common denominator. It was never about supremacy or exclusion. It was about not dying — and about creating a framework in which Jews of every origin could live in safety, dignity, and self-determination. America’s founders would have understood him. They, too, built a nation not out of ethnic purity but out of necessity — a refuge for human liberty when empire had become tyranny. Zionism, in Herzl’s original conception, is that same practical idealism: the right of a people to exist securely among the nations, and the duty to evolve beyond the prejudices of both oppressor and oppressed. In the end, Herzl’s realism and his utopianism were two halves of one vision: survival with grace. He wasn’t asking for divine favor; he was demanding the basic civilizational courtesy to live, contribute, and endure. That remains Israel’s unfinished project — and, in its best moments, its highest aspiration. --- ## The Sound Israelis Hear When Hamas leader **Khalil al-Hayya** stood in Doha in mid-October 2025 and declared, *“The war never ends — we will commit more October 7ths,”* it wasn’t another slogan. It was a line that froze the Israeli bloodstream. That one statement reverberated louder in the Israeli psyche than any diplomatic reprimand, boycott, or protest chant echoing through Western capitals. For Israelis, it wasn’t rhetoric; it was a promise — one that confirmed every fear that had shaped their politics for a generation. No amount of moral pressure from the outside world — no UN resolutions, no celebrity manifestos, no jeers at European soccer matches — can compete with the raw emotional clarity of a sworn enemy saying *he will do it again*. For Israelis, that declaration is the sound that drowns out everything else. It immunizes them against the global tide of condemnation because it confirms their most fundamental belief: that this conflict is existential, not rhetorical. And that belief, whether one agrees or not, must be understood before any judgment can be fair. Israelis are not indifferent to the suffering in Gaza. They see it, many grieve it, and some even protest their own government’s choices. But when Hamas publicly insists that every pause in violence is merely an intermission before another massacre, Israelis hear something the world refuses to quote. Western coverage often edits those statements out, or buries them in paragraph seventeen, and then wonders why Israel’s public seems unmoved by international criticism. Yet this is the decisive fact of Israeli consciousness: they take their adversaries at their word. Having seen those words acted out once, they no longer gamble on disbelief. This isn’t unique to Israel. After September 11, America heard its own version of this — when al-Qaeda promised *more September 11ths*. Americans understood immediately that diplomacy could not soften a movement built on annihilation. The same realism governs Israel’s posture today. Like the United States, it is not animated by hatred but by survival, by the unromantic knowledge that some enemies mean what they say. That clarity explains Israel’s defiance in the face of world outrage. It’s not arrogance; it’s trauma turned to vigilance. You may disagree with Israeli tactics or policies, but you cannot fairly analyze them without acknowledging what Israelis are hearing, word for word, from those who seek their destruction. The dream — still beating beneath that vigilance — is that one day such words will lose their power, that Israel’s security will rest not on deterrence but on coexistence. But until that day, the echo of *“more October 7ths”* will drown every speech at the UN, every op-ed in *Le Monde*, and every chant in the streets of London. It is the sound Israelis cannot unhear — the sound that explains everything else. --- ## From Crisis to Capacity — What Israel’s Victory Should Make Possible The clean, difficult truth: Israel has become a regional superpower — not because it wanted empire, but because it had to. That power is now real, structural, and irreversible. The hard question that follows is not *can* Israel wield that power, but *what* will it choose to build with it. Work backwards a step. The October shock exposed a brutal strategic miscalculation: deterrence had been inverted. Israel once assumed that its overwhelming air and precision firepower would keep enemies at bay. Hamas’s tunnel system and the willingness of militants to sacrifice Gazan society showed that some adversaries had already written off the cost of their own polity — and thus could not be deterred. The response was surgical and relentless: the Israel Defense Forces (IDF — roughly equivalent to the U.S. military in function) and Israel’s intelligence services (Mossad and Shin Bet — akin to the CIA and FBI counterintelligence) systematically dismantled the Iranian proxy ecosystem across the region. Hezbollah was struck, supply lines were cut, command centers degraded, and a web of militias that once seemed resilient was fractured. That outcome was not accidental. It flowed from Israeli competence: a society that mobilizes innovation, civic solidarity, and a military culture that can execute complex campaigns. By contrast, many of Israel’s adversaries — a theocratic Iran that poured national resources into proxy wars while neglecting basic infrastructure, militias that prioritize martyrdom over governance — revealed deep, structural incompetence. The region’s once-menacing axis now looks brittle. The dictators’ rhetoric remains crimson, but the instruments that once animated it are damaged. And yet Gaza remains a sting in the tale. Hamas holds hostages and much of Gaza’s civilian population hostage to its own strategy. That fact prevents the easy arrival of a triumphant narrative. Victory on the battlefield can coexist with moral and political ambiguity at home. That is precisely Israel’s new problem: being powerful enough to reshape the region while still trapped in the moral difficulties created by hostages, humanitarian suffering, and the need for a sustainable political horizon. So the strategic question becomes political: what does Israel want to *be* as a regional superpower? This is the pivot from reactive to imaginative statecraft. Real power opens real options. If Israel wants a stable neighborhood, it must pair kinetic success with an affirmative story — not just reprisals and eliminations. Telling that story requires three moves: 1. **Define the regional order you want** — not in abstract slogans but in institutions. What does a secure Levant look like? Which states and actors will form the axis of stability? The Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and other pragmatic Arab partners are already hedging toward constructive partnerships. Israel must convert battlefield credibility into a diplomatic architecture that binds those actors together economically and politically, not merely militarily. 2. **Offer an alternative future for Palestinians** — the *Voice of Reason* aspiration: a politics that makes life-building irresistible. Israel must invest (with partners) in credible Palestinian governance alternatives to Hamas, in practical steps that create jobs, education, rule-of-law, and municipal capacity. The goal should be Palestinian self-determination that does not endanger Israel — a durable two-state horizon or confederal arrangements that secure rights and remove incentives for violence. 3. **Tell your own story, loudly and coherently** — democracies win hearts when they explain their ends as well as their means. The old script — “we’ll respond to slander by striking back” — is inadequate. Power reshapes narratives when it is used to build, to stabilize, and to uplift. The United States after 1945 paired military victory with the Marshall Plan; that reconstruction turned strategic triumph into long-term order. Israel must do the same in its neighborhood: when you can rebuild a port, a hospital, and a school, you change a civilization’s incentives. A few practical implications follow. Allies in the West (the United States, in particular) care about credibility and shared purpose. The American relationship is not mere patronage; it is strategic alignment. If Taiwan or any democracy seeks U.S. backing, they do what Israel did at its most compelling moments: build credible force and show the will to act so that partners’ strategic support compounds, not substitutes, for national defense. Israel’s readiness to act alone is precisely what invites partnership — because democracies prefer allies who do not ask them to do the heavy lifting alone. Finally: power is not an ethical neutral. The choice to be a superpower can be graceless or generative. Israel does not want to be an occupying empire; it wants a regional order in which its children are safe and its neighbors can prosper. That requires political imagination, not only munitions: mediating new economic corridors, endorsing Palestinian civic institutions that compete with violent entrepreneurs, and constructing legal and humanitarian transparency that undercuts propaganda. The day-to-day challenge is hard: hostage recovery, reconstruction after sieges, resettling displaced people, and enacting policies that reduce radicalization. But the strategic opportunity is clear. A nation that knows what it wants — security, thriving cities, educated neighbors, trade and shared infrastructure — has a remarkable chance to achieve it when it holds the capacity to deter and the will to build. In the end, the question is not whether Israel can break enemies a second time; it is whether, having done so, Israel will choose to use its unprecedented capacity to produce a regional peace that is credible, humane, and self-sustaining. If it does, the New Middle East will not merely be one where Israel survives — it will be one where the societies around it find better reasons to live than to die. --- ## Solidarity as Strength — and as Strategic Vulnerability The honest paradox: Israel’s greatest grace — an almost sacred duty to rescue its own — has become, in the eyes of enemies, a repeatable weakness. That solidarity means Israelis will pay any human cost to recover one kidnapped soldier; it also taught militants a cruel lesson: take a hostage, and you can trade it for your leadership back. Once you understand that, everything Israel does looks different. Work backward one step. Israeli Jews are not American Jews. Most American Jews arrived earlier, passed through the gates of the English-speaking world, and then spent a century proving liberalism’s promise: that rights, prosperity, and civic life could protect minorities. By contrast, the Jews who became Israelis are largely the people for whom those gates closed in the 1920s and who then endured the 20th century’s worst convulsions — pogroms, expulsions in the Arab world, and the Holocaust. They are the refugees who arrived in the Jewish state because there literally was nowhere else to go. That lived history forged an ethic: when the tribe needs you, you go. It isn’t sentimentalism; it is survival calculus turned into moral obligation. That ethic is visible in surprising ways. Polls of Israeli teenagers — secular and religious, left and right — repeatedly show the willingness to risk personal safety to rescue Jews abroad. It is the cultural DNA: you don’t leave our people behind. That solidarity produces astonishing civic energy — high birthrates among the secular left, a vibrant gay-rights movement whose leaders are often socially conservative in practice, and a society that prizes public service. It helps explain why Israel’s GDP per capita and human-capital indicators look nothing like its oil-rich or rent-ier neighbors: democracies that unleash human talent win. But this same grace contained a strategic lesson for Israel’s enemies. In 2011, Israel exchanged more than a thousand prisoners — including many of the Hamas planners of October 7 — for a single captive soldier, **Gilad Shalit**. That trade was painful and politically fraught, but it was also a moral imperative for a country that does not abandon its own. Militants learned: kidnap one Israeli, and the payoff can be enormous. That calculus helped make hostage-taking a central tactic in later attacks, and it converted Israel’s compassion into leverage for its adversaries. So today Israelis face a wrenching dilemma. The fury of protest and the political shouting matches you see are not proof of national disunity in the old sense; they are the grammar of a fierce, self-correcting democracy. Think of the **Knesset** as Israel’s parliament — roughly comparable to the U.S. Congress — where noisy debate is the norm, not a sign of collapse. The **IDF** (Israel Defense Forces), roughly analogous to the U.S. military in role, is filled with citizens who serve because someone else once did for them. The same loud democracy that frightens outsiders is the mechanism that produces rapid correction, innovation, and political accountability. That democratic openness has costs. Enemies misread the shouting as weakness, and they miscalculate. They assume that democracy equals paralysis. In the moment, they mistake protests and argument for lack of resolve. Historically, however, those displays of argument have preceded remarkable cohesion in crisis — a civic “circle of solidarity” where conscripts, reservists, and citizens answer the call. The lesson foes learn, always too late, is that loud democracies can be resilient, adaptable, and ruthless when survival is at stake. This is not to pretend Israel has no errors. There have been tragic tactical and political mistakes, and there will be more. But the strategic question now is how to turn this grace-achilles into deterrence. Israel’s leaders — and the society that elects or protests them — must change the lesson militants draw from hostage diplomacy. The goal is to make hostage-taking yield not bargaining chips but catastrophic strategic failure for perpetrators. That requires policies that combine moral clarity (we will recover our own) with systematic measures that degrade the value of hostages to terrorists: more robust intelligence and prevention, legal and economic pressure on sponsors, and political options that deny militants the returns they now expect. An American parallel helps here. Democracies are often counseled to avoid emotion in foreign policy; yet the United States has repeatedly proven that a civic people willing to bear costs for others — think of the solidarity that carried soldiers into World War II or relief into disaster zones — creates normative power. Israel’s ethic of “we go for our own” is a harder, bloodier form of that same communal pledge. The *Voice of Reason* aspiration is to convert that ethic into institutions that make such sacrifices less necessary — stronger prevention, better hostage protection, and credible alternatives for Palestinian governance so that violence is not the only channel of political expression. In the end, Israel must hold two truths at once: that it will never abandon its people, and that it must change the strategic incentives that hostage-taking creates. That is the path from grace to security — a long, morally demanding project that requires honesty, structural reform, and the steady work of rebuilding the conditions under which solidarity is a virtue, not an exploitable weakness. --- ## If Not Hamas, Then What? — The Hard Question Germany Asked Out Loud The short, uncomfortable answer is this: there is no credible shortcut. If the objective is to remove Hamas’s ability to rule Gaza and to wage war from there, then the alternatives offered so far—diplomatic pressure, conditional recognition, limited policing, or international administration—haven’t been shown to do the job. That is why the question Chancellor Friedrich Merz (and many Europeans) posed—“Is the destruction of Hamas worth the cost?”—lands as both moral protest and strategic bewilderment. It also forces the central follow-up: **what would a policy that actually eliminates Hamas look like in practice?** Work backward. Many people inside and outside Israel suspect that political statements from some Israeli ministers (think Bezalel Smotrich and other hawkish figures) express an intent that goes well beyond narrowly degrading Hamas’s military wing. That suspicion is not surprising: language matters, and when senior officials speak in maximal terms, publics infer maximal aims. For skeptics in Europe, the suspicion crystallizes into moral condemnation: “If the cost of removing Hamas is intolerable for Gaza’s civilians, why proceed?” Chancellor Merz gave voice to that unease—saying, in effect, that the suffering he witnessed made him doubt that Israel’s chosen means could produce the desired end. But Merz’s practical rejoinder—“Hamas can end this overnight by releasing the hostages” —while emotionally powerful, is a strategic non-answer. It assumes Hamas is a rational actor that values survival above all. In fact, Hamas has repeatedly shown it is willing to absorb horrific costs and to subordinate Gaza’s future to a broader ideological program. That reality leaves Israel with two unpalatable options: accept a permanent, armed Hamas in Gaza, or undertake a campaign that removes Hamas’s governing capacity. The former risks perpetual episodic violence and the export of terror; the latter risks severe humanitarian and political consequences unless it is accompanied by a credible, detailed plan for what comes after. Why do many analysts say there is “no alternative” to the military option? Because most nonmilitary proposals fail three tests: 1. **They do not eliminate Hamas’s coercive apparatus.** Political delegitimization or outside trusteeship can leave the militia’s rockets, tunnels, and command structures intact unless accompanied by force. 2. **They do not provide a credible security guarantor.** Transitional arrangements require boots on the ground or an enforcement mechanism; absent that, Hamas can rebuild. 3. **They do not solve governance.** Replacing a brutal de facto ruler requires institutions that can deliver services, disarm militant networks, and win popular legitimacy—things that take time and political capital to create. Consider the practical alternatives often floated: (a) the Palestinian Authority (PA) takes over; (b) an international (UN-led) trusteeship; (c) local technocratic administration funded by donors. Each has been tried or proposed in variants and each failed one test or another. The PA lacks the security capability and popular legitimacy in Gaza to displace Hamas without outside coercion. A UN trusteeship has no standing enforcement backbone and depends on contributions that can be cut off by geopolitical rivals. Technocrats can deliver bread and medicine but cannot stop rockets or neutralize tunnels. None of these solutions removes Hamas’s incentive to sabotage them. For democracies trying to think through the problem, there is a useful historical analogue in the U.S. experience: removing an embedded insurgent or terror movement is rarely, if ever, a purely military task. America’s campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan showed that battlefield success must be paired with credible governance, anti-corruption reform, and economic opportunity—or the vacuum will be filled by violence. That is the *Voice of Reason* lesson: force alone is incomplete; its moral justification rests on what follows—construction, inclusion, and durable institutions that make violence unattractive. So what would a viable plan look like in practice? Not all of this can be executed overnight, but the elements are clear: • **A calibrated security campaign** that degrades Hamas’s military capability decisively—tunnels, rocket arrays, command-and-control—while minimizing civilian harm as much as possible. • **Rapid protection and recovery for civilians**: corridors for food, medical care, and shelter that are strictly monitored to prevent diversion to militant networks. • **A credible interim authority** able to govern Gaza’s day-to-day life without being perceived as Israel’s proxy—drawn from neutral Palestinian actors, supported by a coalition of regional partners and international guarantors. • **An enforceable disarmament mechanism** backed by regional security guarantees and contingency forces, so the militia cannot reconstitute itself. • **A serious reconstruction and institution-building program** that ties economic recovery to clear benchmarks: demilitarization, municipal governance, and human-rights protections. None of the above is easy. Each step requires money, political will, and an international coalition willing to sustain the effort until new institutions take root. That is precisely what Chancellor Merz worried about—if the plan to achieve Hamas’s defeat lacks realism about post-conflict governance, the human and political costs will be immense and prolonged. If the goal is survival for Israelis and dignity for Palestinians, then the strategy must end with a politics that rewards life-building rather than martyrdom. The moral argument for action is strongest where any use of force is married to such an ambition—the real *Voice of Reason* in public life. Democracies succeed when they couple security with a credible horizon of hope: schools, courts, jobs, and civic space that make the alternative—violence—irrational. To be blunt: asking whether removing Hamas is “worth it” without specifying how stability and legitimate governance will be secured afterward is to ask an ethical question without a policy answer. The moral case cannot be separated from the operational plan. Europe’s unease is a crucial check—but it does not negate the strategic reality that, unless Hamas’s coercive power is addressed, the cycle will repeat. The only responsible path forward is the hard one: combine force with a meticulously financed political and institutional exit strategy so that Gaza’s future is governed by institutions that replace fear with opportunity. --- ## The Silence That Speaks — When the War Ends and the Masks Fall This is one of those moments that exposes everything. It is shocking not only for what has happened, but for what has *not* been said. For nearly two years, much of the world has demanded a ceasefire in Gaza — shouted it, marched for it, made it a moral badge. And now, with a ceasefire deal on the table — one accepted by Israel, endorsed by Washington, backed by every major Arab state, and carrying the promise of massive humanitarian rebuilding — those same voices have gone quiet. What does that silence mean? Even if one dislikes certain aspects of the agreement — the phased withdrawal, the second-stage disarmament, the slow timetable — this deal *ends the war.* It stops the suffering. It releases the hostages. It secures international investment for Gaza’s reconstruction. For anyone who truly believed that this war was a genocide, who genuinely wanted peace and relief for civilians, this moment should be cause for relief. Instead, the very activists who called most loudly for “ceasefire now” seem paralyzed by the arrival of the very thing they demanded. The reason is painfully clear: the deal separates Gaza’s future from Hamas’s fate. It disarms Hamas in stages, ensures no annexation or settlement, and guarantees every Gazan the right to stay or return. It is, in every measurable sense, *the best-case scenario for Gaza* — and therefore, the worst possible outcome for Hamas. Because Hamas cannot survive a peace in which Gaza prospers without it. The silence of the pro-Palestinian movement at this moment reveals that the movement was never purely about Gaza’s civilians. It was about Gaza’s *weaponization.* The activists’ narrative depended on perpetual victimhood — a morality play in which Israel must always be the villain, no matter what reality unfolds. They cannot process a world where Gaza is rebuilt, Israel refrains from annexation, and the bloodshed ends without Israeli defeat. That contradiction is cognitive dissonance at a global scale. Even European leaders have begun to recognize the absurdity. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, when pressed by journalists about labeling Gaza a genocide, replied simply: “This war will end immediately if Hamas releases the hostages and the weapons fall silent.” That is not how genocide works. The party capable of ending the killing by an act of will cannot simultaneously be its victim. What follows, then, is the moral inversion of our time. If your outrage depends on the identity of the dead — if you care about starvation only when the starving fit your narrative — you are not serving justice, you are serving prejudice. The incident with Greta Thunberg illustrated this grotesquely: when she shared a photo of an emaciated *Israeli* hostage, mistaking him for a Gazan victim, she didn’t correct herself or express empathy for all who suffer; she deleted the post in silence. Compassion that ends when the victim’s passport changes is not compassion — it is ideology. For Israel, this silence is more clarifying than any speech. Israelis see clearly now that many of those who claim to champion peace were never truly rooting for peace if it came through Israeli endurance. The global marches, the slogans, the hashtags — they were not built to process an outcome where Israel wins and Gaza lives. And yet, the irony is that the deal on the table fulfills the dream both peoples could share: a demilitarized, rebuilt Gaza — a Mediterranean emirate with natural gas, trade, and tourism — thriving beside a secure Israel. That is what every rational person should want. But rationality is not what drives extremism, or those enthralled by its moral theater. The *Voice of Reason* goal here is simple and universal: peace cannot be selective. If the suffering of any innocent moves you, then *all* suffering must. If you want peace, then you must want it even when your preferred side no longer bleeds. America once faced its own moral inversion during Vietnam and Iraq — movements that began in moral conviction but calcified into performative outrage. The lesson was that justice must outlast the passions of protest. The same applies now. The people of Gaza need rebuilding, not romanticization. The people of Israel need security, not scapegoating. Both deserve a world that values truth over theatre. So yes, this is a shocking moment — but not because peace is impossible. It is shocking because peace is *finally possible*, and so many who claimed to want it have nothing left to say. --- ## Do Israeli Successes Make Diaspora Jews Safer? — Answering Avhai’s Hard Question Yes — in important ways Israel has increased the safety of Jews everywhere. That is not a denial of painful trade-offs or new dangers; it is a historical point rooted in the last century’s brutal lessons. But to really answer Avhai’s question — “Would antisemitism in the Muslim world or on the far left exist *if not for Israel*?” — you have to unwind three layers: history, psychology, and political practice. First, the historical frame. The idea that *all* Jews will be judged for the acts of *some* Jews did **not** begin with the modern state of Israel. Long before 1948, Jews were scapegoated as a corporate, conspiratorial “other” by Christian and Muslim polemics, by racial ideologies, and by nationalist movements that turned minorities into convenient villains. Pogroms, expulsions, and massacres across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made whole regions “unlivable” for Jews. Israel did not create that pattern; it was the refuge born of it. The country’s very existence is the blunt policy answer to a grim historical fact: when empires collapse and nationalisms rise, stateless minorities are dangerously exposed. Second, the psychological fact. People who insist that “Israel is the reason Jews suffer” are often missing a prior truth: there have always been people who will demand that Jews anywhere answer for Jewish politics anywhere. That reflex — blaming a co-religionist or co-ethnic for a foreign polity’s conduct — is the essence of antisemitism. It works the same way if you try to make any group collectively liable for a distant government’s choices. The modern settler of that reflex onto Israel simply reused an old script; Israel became the proximate target because it was the one institution that actually made Jews a collective actor again. Third, the political reality: many states and movements in the region did not make themselves safe havens for Jewish life long before Israel. The modern Middle East produced expulsions of ancient Jewish communities — Baghdad’s Jewish quarter emptied, long centuries of Jewish presence vaporized — for reasons internal to those societies, not because of anything Jerusalem did. Similarly, some of the transnational ideologies that now weaponize Israel as a symbol were forming well before the Jewish state existed. Blaming Israel for those ideologies reverses cause and effect. Practical point for American, Canadian, and British Jews: if your safety in your home country depends on how a foreign government is treated on cable news, you are in a fragile position. Diaspora security historically improved when Jews had a sovereign refuge to which they could look and to which much of the world had to pay heed. That is not trivial: having a state changed international calculations about rescue, refuge, and political leverage in ways that had real, life-and-death consequences for people fleeing pogroms and genocide. Two quick structural facts that get left out of many debates: many states in the Middle East are not parties to international accountability instruments and many are not signatories in practice to global refugee protections in the way Western states are — facts that shape where refugees can go and who can be held accountable for mass crimes. (For example, the list of states party to the Rome Statute and the UN’s refugee-convention participation show wide regional variation; many Middle Eastern governments are not full participants in these regimes.) ([International Criminal Court][1]) ([FM Review][2]) A few practical takeaways, Voice-of-Reason style: - Don’t accept collective guilt as your fate. The idea that diaspora Jews must answer for Israeli policy is a moral inversion; it is the same tactic haters have used for centuries to deny a minority the status of a fully human polity. - Recognize the cost of solidarity — and plan for it. Israel’s ethic of “we don’t leave our own” is morally beautiful and strategically costly. It has saved lives, but it also taught enemies that hostage-taking extracts political victories. Diaspora communities need contingency planning of their own (legal, civic, and political) because their safety cannot rest solely on the existence of a faraway state. - Insist on even standards. If one region’s mass crimes go unremarked while another’s are amplified to the edge of moral performance, then the international system is failing. That inconsistency fuels resentment and radicalization; honest debate about selective outrage matters. - Build civic resilience at home. In liberal democracies the best insurance against being blamed for a foreign government’s acts is integration: strong civil institutions, political literacy, legal protections, and reciprocal civic ties that make it politically costly for bigotry to take hold. So, Avhai’s brave question deserves a clear answer: Israel increased the strategic safety net for Jews globally by making refuge possible and by altering international calculations about rescue and rescue costs. But that safety is not a panacea, and it does not erase the old patterns of blaming and exclusion. If the Gaza war, or any future crisis, risks destabilizing Jewish life in the West, that is a clarion call — not to abandon Israel, but to invest faster in diaspora security and civic health at home. The alternative is to let a fragile moral pattern reassert itself: one in which a vulnerable minority is still judged for someone else’s politics. That is exactly what the Zionist project was meant to end. [1]: https://asp.icc-cpi.int/states-parties?utm_source=chatgpt.com "The States Parties to the Rome Statute" [2]: https://www.fmreview.org/issue67/janmyr/?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Non-signatory States and the international refugee regime" --- ## The Ceasefire No One Wanted — Because It Worked There’s no hidden clause, no secret betrayal, no great geopolitical twist. This is the ceasefire that the world claimed to want — and Israel accepted it. It halts the fighting, opens Gaza to reconstruction, restores the hostages, and holds back the far-right fantasies of annexation or settlement. In every measurable sense, it delivers what peace advocates have demanded for nearly two years. Yet instead of celebration, we are met with outrage, confusion, and silence. Why? Because what some people wanted was not peace — it was victory. The truth is uncomfortable: many who have been marching for “liberation” were not envisioning a peaceful, flourishing Gaza. They were yearning for a revolutionary triumph — an *Algerian moment* — in which Israel would be humbled and Hamas would stand as the avatar of anti-colonial justice. But history doesn’t repeat that neatly, and Hamas is no liberation movement. It is a theocratic militia built on a theology of annihilation, not emancipation. Its creed is not freedom for Palestinians but death for Jews — and it cannot build a Dubai on the Mediterranean while dreaming of Auschwitz in Ashkelon. This ceasefire exposes the moral and strategic bankruptcy of that ideology. For the first time, Gaza’s path forward doesn’t depend on Hamas’s endless cycle of martyrdom. It depends on rebuilding — on investment, governance, and cooperation. The deal brings enormous resources for reconstruction, ensures that no Gazan is expelled or annexed, and invites international oversight to stabilize the region. Israel gets far less than it wants — no guarantee that Hamas will truly disarm, no reliable enforcement mechanism — but it gets its hostages back, and it gets a chance to stop fighting. That is enough. The Arab world, too, has shifted. The region’s power brokers — from the Gulf to Cairo — are finished indulging Hamas’s medieval ambitions. They know what a functioning Gaza could mean: trade, energy, infrastructure, and a stable partner on the Mediterranean. They’ve seen what Iran’s proxies did to Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria, and they will not bankroll another ruin in the name of “resistance.” This ceasefire is the quiet birth of a new Arab consensus: that survival and prosperity are better than endless revolution. And so, the only side that truly loses is Hamas. Its entire political theology depends on Gaza’s suffering — the spectacle of death as propaganda, the promise of redemption through destruction. A Gaza that thrives without Hamas is an existential refutation of everything it stands for. That’s why its apologists in the West are so uneasy. They cannot celebrate this peace because it disproves their entire narrative. Gaza could be a jewel of the Mediterranean — a port city with natural gas, fertile soil, and a young population eager to live rather than die. There is no reason it cannot resemble a modern, free Arab society except for the chains Hamas forged for it. This ceasefire, imperfect though it is, begins to cut those chains. If you can’t bring yourself to welcome that — to express even cautious hope that the killing might stop and a future might begin — then you were never in this for peace. You were in it for vengeance, or ideology, or spectacle. And that is the hardest truth of all: peace is not failing; it’s finally succeeding. It just didn’t look like the revolution some people wanted. --- ## The Difference Between Revolt and Terror When people ask, “How did the Jews kick the British Empire out of Palestine?” the question usually carries a hidden accusation — that if Israel exists because of “terrorism,” then Palestinian terrorism must be justified too. But this is a misunderstanding born from false moral symmetry and historical amnesia. Yes, Jewish underground groups fought the British Empire in the 1940s. They bombed railways, sabotaged infrastructure, and, in one infamous case, blew up the King David Hotel, killing both soldiers and civilians. Yet the historical context and intent matter profoundly. By the time of that insurgency, the Jews of Palestine were not colonizers fighting for expansion — they were a stateless, hunted people fighting for the right to survive. In 1939, Britain had issued the *White Paper*, slamming shut the gates of Jewish immigration just as the Holocaust was about to begin. Every major Western country — the United States, Canada, Argentina, Australia, South Africa — had already closed its doors to Jewish refugees. The result was catastrophic: millions who might have escaped Europe were trapped. Britain even boasted of its humanitarian “Kindertransport,” but each child it saved came with a cruel condition — parents could not follow. The children lived; the parents died. After the war, 250,000 survivors languished in British-run displaced persons camps — many in the same barracks where they had once been imprisoned by the Nazis. The Jews of Palestine watched this horror unfold. The British still forbade survivors from coming home to what was then *their only refuge on Earth*. In that context, the revolt against British rule was not born from zealotry or expansionism, but desperation. The goal was not to annihilate anyone — it was to make the British *leave*. The difference between those insurgents and modern terrorism is moral, strategic, and existential. The Jewish fighters targeted *military* and *imperial* infrastructure — police, railways, command posts. Civilians died, yes, but they were not the target. The King David Hotel’s southern wing, for example, housed British military headquarters and intelligence services. It was a strike against empire, not against innocents on buses or in cafés. Now imagine if Palestinian militants had followed that same pattern: if their campaign had targeted only soldiers, checkpoints, or command centers — and never children, schools, or pizzerias. Such a struggle, however fierce, would have been a war of liberation, not terrorism. It could have built moral capital, credibility, and perhaps even earned them a state decades ago. Instead, by turning their guns and bombs against civilians, they destroyed their own cause. When Israelis believed that peace could bring security — as they did in the 1990s — the left-wing peace movement flourished. But when Hamas and Islamic Jihad detonated 140 suicide bombs in Israeli cities at the height of the peace process, they didn’t just kill hundreds of innocents; they murdered the very possibility of trust. Every pizzeria, every bus, every school turned into a graveyard — not just for Israeli lives, but for the idea that compromise was possible. The early Zionists made many mistakes, but one they rarely made was mistaking death for glory. They never sought the destruction of Britain — only Britain’s departure. They built a nation while they resisted. The tragedy of Palestinian politics is that too many of its leaders — and too many of their supporters abroad — never made that distinction. The lesson is not that violence builds nations. It is that purpose does. The Jewish revolt was a demand for home. Hamas’s war is a demand for someone else’s extinction. One builds; the other devours. And the world should know the difference. --- ## The Truth About AIPAC — An American Lobby for American Values Let’s begin with a simple truth: AIPAC is not the wealthiest, the most powerful, or the most feared lobby in Washington. It’s the most visible — and that visibility tells us more about prejudice than power. Every dollar AIPAC raises is American. Every member is American. It’s a group of U.S. citizens advocating for an alliance they believe strengthens both Israel and the United States. And yet, unlike the far larger and better-funded lobbies representing Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or China, AIPAC alone has been branded as something sinister. The double standard is not subtle. Qatar spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year influencing U.S. universities, think tanks, and even political leaders. The current U.S. Attorney General once served as a registered lobbyist for Qatar. Beijing’s presence in Washington is even larger. But no one speaks of “dual loyalty” when discussing those foreign powers. Only when the issue is Jewish — only when the word *Israel* is mentioned — does a moral panic erupt. The myth that AIPAC simply “follows Israel’s orders” is equally false. It follows its *members* — American citizens with wildly diverse political opinions about Israel’s government. In fact, one of the few times AIPAC issued a blunt rebuke of Israeli policy was when Benjamin Netanyahu included the extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir in his coalition. AIPAC could take that stand precisely because nearly all of its American membership was horrified by that decision. AIPAC’s history reveals what it truly is: an act of American Jewish self-respect. In 1943, as reports of the Holocaust spread, 400 rabbis — many refugees from Europe — traveled to Washington to plead for President Roosevelt’s help in rescuing Jews from Nazi extermination. Roosevelt refused to meet them, slipping out the back door of the White House rather than face their desperation. One journalist who witnessed that humiliation never forgot it. Out of that shame — the realization that silence equals complicity — came the generation that founded AIPAC. Its founding principle was simple: **“Never again will we be silent while Jews are slaughtered.”** That vow has guided the organization ever since — not toward domination or conspiracy, but toward advocacy. AIPAC helped secure funding for the Iron Dome defense system, ensuring that the U.S. co-owns the technology it financed. Every cent of the annual $3.8 billion in U.S. aid to Israel is spent inside the United States, supporting American jobs, American industries, and American defense innovation. AIPAC itself pushed for that arrangement. It was not foreign exploitation — it was collaboration. Three times in its history, AIPAC has faced off against American presidents. Three times, it has lost. That alone should dispel the myth of omnipotence. What makes it influential is not some shadowy control — it’s credibility. When AIPAC speaks, it speaks for Americans who see Israel not as a burden but as a democratic ally in a volatile region. The Pentagon knows that partnership saves American lives, accelerates defense innovation, and projects shared values of freedom and self-determination. The irony is that those who demonize AIPAC today are recreating the very conditions that made it necessary. Each wave of antisemitic suspicion — each whisper that Jews “control Washington” — only drives more Jews toward solidarity, toward organizing, toward refusing to be silent again. AIPAC is not a foreign hand meddling in U.S. policy. It is an American heartbeat — the expression of a community’s vow never to let moral cowardice silence it again. Its story is not one of subversion, but of conscience. And like Zionism itself, it endures not because of power, but because of memory. --- ## Why Israel’s Commitment to Trump Actually Matters For many in the West — especially those who dislike Donald Trump — it’s hard to understand why Israeli officials keep saying things like, “We’ve committed to Trump on this, so you can trust it.” To Western ears, that sounds almost irrational. But in the Middle East, it makes perfect sense. Because in the Middle East, credibility isn’t just about policy — it’s about power, pride, and the willingness to exact consequences when crossed. When Israelis say they’ve “committed to Trump,” what they mean is that Trump operates according to the same unwritten rules that govern regional politics — rules of respect, honor, and deterrence. If you publicly promise Trump something and then humiliate him by breaking that promise, there are real costs. Every Middle Eastern leader understands this instinctively. Trump behaves, in that sense, like a Middle Easterner — and that’s why, in this region, he’s taken seriously. Whatever one thinks of his domestic record, Trump’s Middle East record is astonishingly pragmatic. His administration achieved several outcomes that many thought impossible: the Abraham Accords, the containment of Iran without plunging the world into a regional war, and the transformation of passive Gulf alliances into active partnerships worth hundreds of billions in trade. Trump understood leverage. He didn’t offer protection for free — he demanded reciprocal commitments. The contrast with the Biden administration is stark. The Biden team inherited all the same diplomatic tools but lacked the instinct for how the region actually functions. In the Middle East, predictability is not a virtue — it’s a vulnerability. When Trump’s policies were unpredictable, that uncertainty itself became deterrence. Biden, by contrast, signaled caution, and in doing so, forfeited influence. One of the best examples came after a botched Israeli strike in Qantar that drew regional backlash. Under previous administrations, that failure would have weakened Israel’s position. But the Trump team flipped it. When Qatar, fearing Israeli retaliation, came to Washington for assurances, Trump’s people said, “We’ll protect you — but you’ll have to deliver something in return.” Within days, Qatar pressured Hamas to end the fighting, Al Jazeera changed its tone, and an end-of-war deal materialized. This wasn’t chaos. It was calibrated unpredictability — the art of controlled fear. In the Middle East, leaders respect the player who might upend the table, because that player can’t be gamed. Trump’s strength wasn’t ideology; it was *negotiating psychology*. He made adversaries and allies alike believe that crossing him would be costly. And that belief — true or not — created real leverage. That’s why Benjamin Netanyahu’s current public alignment with Trump is so consequential. It’s not just about politics — it’s about power equilibrium. Facing immense domestic pressure from his far-right coalition, Netanyahu has finally used Trump’s involvement as political cover to push back against extremists like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who openly advocate ethnic cleansing in Gaza. By invoking Trump’s name — by saying, in effect, “We’ve committed to Trump, and we can’t betray him” — Netanyahu is signaling to his own right wing that he’s not acting alone. Trump’s looming presence creates a stabilizing paradox: he’s volatile enough that no one dares to test him, yet credible enough that his commitments hold weight. For Israel, that’s a lifeline. It allows the country to pursue an end-of-war deal that returns the hostages and stabilizes Gaza without appearing weak. In short, when Israelis say, “We’ve committed to Trump, so you can trust it,” they’re not appealing to Trump’s ideology. They’re appealing to his deterrent value — to his reputation for enforcing promises with unpredictable fury. It’s a language Middle Eastern leaders understand fluently, even if Western liberals don’t. Committing to Trump is dangerous. Breaking faith with him is worse. And in a region where every move is measured in risk, danger can sometimes be the only path to peace.