Category Archives: 2023 Gaza War

A Divide in Aid and Perception Between Ukraine and Israel

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Since 2022, the United States has funded two wars at historic scale.

  • ~$65–70 billion in direct U.S. military aid to Ukraine
  • ~$21–22 billion in U.S. wartime military aid to Israel since October 7, 2023

Ukraine’s funding is more than three times larger, delivered faster and sustained longer.
Israel’s is smaller, largely defensive, and focused on interception and resupply.

Yet only one of these aid streams has been treated as morally illegitimate.

The Moral Divergence

Aid to Ukraine is framed as defending democracy.
Aid to Israel is framed as complicity.

Both wars involve urban combat.
Both involve civilian casualties.
Both rely on U.S. weapons.

But only Israel’s aid is placed under moral indictment.

The Political Record

Progressive politicians aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America have been consistent in drawing this distinction.

Bernie Sanders voted for massive Ukraine aid packages while introducing resolutions to block or condition arms transfers to Israel.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez supported Ukraine military assistance as solidarity, while opposing emergency funding for Israel as morally disqualifying.

Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib made opposition to U.S. military aid to Israel a defining cause—calling for halts and embargoes—without mounting a comparable campaign against the much larger Ukraine funding stream.

“This is not only the Israeli government’s genocide, Mr. Speaker. this is our government’s genocide.” – Rep. Rashida Tlaib

No similar moral test was applied to Ukraine.

The erosion of support in long wars

As the wars in Ukraine and Israel dragged on, Americans began to tire of spending so much money abroad in both wars. In September 2025, a Pew Research poll found that one-third of Americans thought that the US was providing too much military aid to Israel, while 23% thought the figure was about right and only 8% said it was not enough.

The figures were about the same for Ukraine in a February 2025 poll – 30% said too much aid, 23% about the right amount, but a significantly different figure – 22% (versus 8%) said there was not enough aid going to Ukraine. The gap is likely due to the visuals of a totally devasted Gaza and the elimination of most of the Hamas leadership.

A deeper dive shows a significant divide between Republicans and Democrats, especially over time. Republicans moved from 9% feeling there was too much aid and 49% not enough aid in 2022, to 47% feeling there was too much aid and 10% not enough aid in 2025. While Democrats did change their views over time, it was not as dramatic as the Republican shift.

At least for Ukraine.

The Ideology Behind the Distinction

This asymmetry between Ukraine and Israel is not about budgets or battlefield conduct. It is ideological.

Within DSA thinking, Israel is not merely a state that acts wrongly; it is framed as an illegal colonial project. The claim rests on a core assertion: that Jews are not indigenous to the land of Israel and therefore have no legitimate sovereign claim to it.

That assertion is historically false — and morally bankrupt.

It denies Jewish history, identity, and continuity in their ancestral homeland. It treats Jewish self-determination as uniquely illegitimate. And it transforms Israeli self-defense from a security question into a moral offense.

Ukraine, by contrast, is granted full legitimacy. Its sovereignty is assumed. Its right to fight is unquestioned.

Further, the far left is trapped in an empathy swamp, with the destroyed pictures of Gaza trumping the immorality of the Hamas death cult.

The Conclusion

A war funded at $70 billion is treated as a cause.
A war funded at $22 billion is treated as a crime.

That gap has nothing to do with the weapons. It has everything to do with an ideology that denies Jewish indigeneity — and therefore Jewish legitimacy, and a perverted view of right and wrong seen through the lens of empathy rather than morality.

This is not a debate about military aid. Ukraine gets much more than Israel. As does NATO. This about the Jewish State overwinning and the depravity of antisemites who want to end the Jewish State.

Hamas and ISIS

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The headlines are the same. Another plot uncovered. Another attacker radicalized online. Another manifesto stitched together from familiar phrases about vengeance, purity, and divine obligation.

Was it ISIS-inspired?
Was it Hamas-aligned?

In practice, the distinction is collapsing.

From Manchester to Sydney and across Europe and North America, security services increasingly encounter the same ideological core animating different actors. Antisemitism framed as righteousness. Violence framed as duty. Death framed as meaning. The slogans vary, the flags change, but the belief system underneath remains remarkably consistent.

ISIS flag on the car of murderers in Sydney, Australia

These movements are not converging by accident. They are aligned by doctrine. They are the banners of jihad.

When stripped of geography, branding, and media strategy, Hamas and the Islamic State reveal the same worldview: a sanctified war against Jews, against pluralism, and against life itself.

They are branches of the same antisemitic death cult.

God Alone Rules

Both movements begin with a totalizing claim: sovereignty belongs exclusively to God. Political authority, democratic choice, civil law—all are illegitimate intrusions into divine rule. Religion is not guidance; it is command.

This theology leaves no room for coexistence. Difference becomes defiance. Dissent becomes apostasy. Submission is the only acceptable outcome.

Violence as Obedience

Violence is not an unfortunate consequence of struggle. It is the struggle. Jihad is framed as obligation, killing as faithfulness, death as fulfillment.

This is why attacks around the world feel interchangeable. Civilian targets are central because civilians matter symbolically. Children are drawn into the story because innocence amplifies impact. Suicide becomes virtue because it collapses the distance between belief and action.

When ideology outranks life, mass killing is not excess. It is alignment.

Jews as a Theological Obstacle

The conflict is often described in political or territorial terms, but the animating hostility is theological. Jews are cast as an enduring enemy embedded in sacred narrative, not as a community with whom disagreement might be resolved.

That framing explains the permanence of the war. Agreements become pauses. Ceasefires mere tactics. The goal is not compromise but eradication.

Scripture, once weaponized, does not negotiate.

Death as Currency

In societies shaped by this ideology, death is elevated and life is instrumentalized. Martyrdom replaces mourning. Sacrifice replaces survival. Civilian neighborhoods are folded deliberately into military design.

Homes, schools, mosques, hospitals become launchpads and shields. Suffering is curated for export. Images of devastation are not collateral damage; they are strategic output.

What the outside world experiences as tragedy, the ideology treats as leverage.

Power Without Freedom

The end state is always the same. Total control enforced by fear and sanctified by religion. No speech outside doctrine. No faith outside orthodoxy. No dignity outside obedience.

ISIS ruled this way openly. Hamas learned to cloak the same destination in the language of resistance and grievance. The structure beneath remains unchanged.

The Lesson Already Learned

When ISIS surged across Iraq and Syria, the West recognized the threat clearly. It did not argue for partial containment. It did not imagine ideological evolution. It organized, committed resources, and dismantled the movement.

And it succeeded. For a while.

Israel has carried that same burden. By Israel’s own assessments, roughly 95 percent of Hamas’s fighting capacity—its leadership, battalions, tunnels, and command infrastructure—has been destroyed.

Stopping here would not stabilize anything. Allowing the group to maintain its weapons – the way the majority of the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) want – would preserve the conditions for revival. Ideologies built on sanctified violence do not soften when wounded. They metastasize.

The remaining fragments are not a political movement in transition. They are an ideology waiting to rearm, re-export, and re-infect—far beyond Gaza.

Yet the world is rearming and financing ISIS and Hamas. It is allowing the jihadi groups to gain strength.

The world once understood this when ISIS was the name on the banner. The jihadist doctrine of Hamas is the same and has not changed. Only the branding has.

Hamas leadership promises to continue war against Israel forever

ISIS in Africa in Somalia, recruiting from around the world

Every Picture Tells a Story: The War Gazans Didn’t Start—and Aren’t Ending

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The headline asked why hundreds of Gazans have been killed. The article never answered.

In its December 24 piece, The New York Times assembled an inventory of grief—names, faces, photographs, shattered families—documenting civilian death in Gaza with intimate precision. What it did not assemble was an explanation. The question at the top functioned as decoration; the answer was assumed. Israel hovered everywhere as implication, never as argument.

What the article omitted is not marginal. It is decisive.

It did not say that Hamas still holds an Israeli hostage, in violation of the ceasefire framework. As long as that person remains captive, the war has not ended and the terms of the ceasefire have not been met.

It did not say that Hamas has refused to disarm—flatly, publicly—even though disarmament is a core requirement of the multi-point plan meant to end the fighting. The vast majority of Palestinian Arabs in both Gaza and the West bank agree. This is not procedural quibbling. A movement that keeps its weapons is declaring its intention to keep killing. Leaving that fact out does not clarify the story; it inverts it.

“a core, cross-regional [Gaza and West bank] red line remains: overwhelming opposition to disarming Hamas, complicating any post-war arrangement.” – PCPSR poll of October 28, 2025

It did not say that Hamas continues to state openly that it will pursue the war until the Jewish state is destroyed. These are not coded remarks. They are repeated commitments. When a belligerent announces genocidal intent and retains its arsenal, civilian deaths are not mysterious. They are the predictable outcome of strategy.

“The resistance is capable of continuing, and I am confident that the outcome of this conflict will be the demise of this entity [Israel].” – Senior member of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, Osama Hamdan on December 23, 2025

Instead, The Times presented Gaza as a place acted upon—its people rendered passive, its leadership reduced to background noise. The governing reality was blurred, that the popular, armed movement that began the war – with overwhelming local support – insists on continuing it. Palestinian Arabs appeared as if history were happening to them, rather than through institutions that still mobilize society for conflict.

The photographs – eleven in all, a remarkable number for an article, mostly featuring children – did their work. They always do. Images narrow the moral aperture. They locate causality at the edge of the frame. What lies outside—tunnels, refusals, threats, the last hostage—falls away. Repetition turns absence into innocence.

This is not empathy. It is evasion.

Civilian death is tragic and deserves coverage. But tragedy without agency becomes accusation by implication. When Arab suffering is anatomized down to the last tear while their popular elected leadership’s war-making is erased, journalism is no longer news but advocacy.

The Times did not lie. It curated. It acted as the political-terrorist group’s propaganda arm.

Readers are left asking why Israel is still fighting, when the honest question is why Hamas is still waging war—still holding the last hostage, still refusing disarmament, still promising destruction.

Every picture tells a story. This one tells a story about the author.

The New York Times’ Year in Pictures and the Architecture of Moral Inversion

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Hamas does not rule Gaza against the will of its people. It rules because large numbers of Gazans want it to. Hamas articulates aims that many in Gaza accept: “armed struggle,” permanent war, and the eradication of Israel. This is not an imposed ideology. It is a shared one.

That reality is the reason the war has not ended.

Hamas refuses to disarm. It promises to fight again. It rejects coexistence as a moral crime. And Palestinian Arabs have not rejected Hamas. There has been no uprising, no mass refusal, no turning inward to say this has destroyed us and must stop. The tunnels remain. The rockets are rebuilt. The hostages were hidden in plain sight and with complicity.

The Arab world understands this. So does the Muslim world and international community, quietly if not publicly. No money will rebuild Gaza while Hamas governs. No state will guarantee security for a territory whose leadership is openly genocidal. Even those who chant Gaza’s cause from afar refuse to absorb the cost of dismantling its rulers. Words are cheap. Responsibility is not.

And so the world fractures.

One side insists Gaza deserves unlimited sympathy—stripped of agency, frozen as a permanent victim, absolved of all consequence. The other side sees a society that has embraced a war of annihilation and asks the world whether moral condemnation is not only justified, but necessary. This divide is not about compassion versus cruelty. It is about whether moral judgment still matters.

What cannot be sustained is the fiction that Gaza is merely trapped between Hamas and Israel. Gaza is trapped— by leaders and parents who have chosen martyrdom over future, ideology over life, and war over their own children’s survival.

That is where sympathy collapses.

Because the only people in Gaza whose moral claim is uncontested are the children—and they are being sacrificed by a society willing to place guns in schools, tunnels under bedrooms, and hostages among families. A society that teaches its children that nothing is nobler than dying for the cause of destroying the Jewish State.

Sympathy cannot be demanded for that choice. It can only be extended—narrowly, painfully—to those who never had one.

That is why the ritualized outrage of the West’s most powerful institutions now feels so hollow. Each year, The New York Times publishes its Year in Pictures, and the selection itself becomes an argument. In 2025, the year with the largest spike in antisemitism including several incidents of mass murder, there were no pictures of Jewish victims. Instead, page after page of Gaza: rubble, smoke, bloodied streets, dust-covered children. Destruction, repeated until it acquires the authority of inevitability. Israel appears only as force. Gaza appears only as suffering. Context is stripped away. Agency is erased. The camera becomes a verdict.

Two-page spread in New York Times’ 2025 year in pictures showing Gaza rubble. The only other 2-page spread was the election of Zohran Mamdani, an anti-Israel member of the DSA, as mayor of New York City

But the depravity lies not only in what is shown—it lies in what is omitted.

There are no photographs of Jewish life under siege: no police guards posted outside synagogues, no concrete barriers and metal fences erected around schools, no quiet images of fear normalized into daily routine. There are no frames of mourning for Jewish victims abroad, the couple shot in Washington, D.C., the arson at the home of the Jewish governor of Pennsylvania over Passover. No recognition of the global consequences of a war whose ideology has traveled far beyond Gaza. Violence against Jews outside Israel didn’t even make a footnote.

New security fence erected outside synagogue in 2025 (photo: First One Through)

When Israeli hostages appear in the Times, they are reduced to a single visual trope: a large military helicopter, as if their captivity were a logistical problem rather than a crime. Even Jewish victims of Gazan atrocities are set against a large Israeli military. The human cost of hostage-taking is laundered into abstraction.

New York Times only picture of a Jewish victim is a tiny speck in a large Israeli military helicopter

What does receive sympathetic attention are arrests—multiple images of pro-Palestinian demonstrators detained by police, framed as moral courage meeting state power. Advocacy for Israel’s destruction is softened into dissent. The pages preen about resistance while refusing to name what that “resistance” seeks to accomplish.

This is not journalism. It is moral choreography.

The pictures ask only one question—who suffered more?—while carefully avoiding the only one that matters: who chose this war? To launch it? To continue it? They do not show Hamas leaders refusing disarmament. They do not show weapons beneath nurseries. They do not show the ideological choice to sacrifice children for permanence of war.

In this telling, Israel becomes the aggressor by existing, and Gaza becomes sympathetic by persisting in annihilation. The refusal to surrender is recast as resilience. The willingness to sacrifice children is aestheticized as tragedy rather than condemned as crime. Sympathy is manufactured by amputating responsibility. The global anti-Israel advocates are embalmed in the moral light; Jewish victims disappear off the pages.

When the world’s most influential newspaper presents destruction without causation, suffering without choice, and death without ideology, it does not advance peace. It sanctifies perpetual war. It promotes a global blood libel. And it teaches readers that moral clarity is cruelty, while moral confusion is virtue.

The far-left media hopes that history will remember its curated selection of photographs and the modern moment will gather sympathy for the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish horde. Hopefully they are proved very wrong, and this time capsule will forever mark The New York Times for its profound antisemitism and moral depravity.

Related:

Every Picture Tells A Story: There Are No Genocidal Leaders In Iran, Just Fancy Women (November 2024)

Every Picture And Headline Tells A Story: Columbia’s Pro-Palestinian Students Are NOT Antisemitic (April 2024)

Every Picture Tells A Story: No Brutal Slaughter Of Israeli Civilians (October 2023)

Every Picture Tells A Story: Palestinian Terrorists are Victims (November 2020)

Every Picture Tells a Story: Anti-Semitism (February 2017)

The Jewish Golden Years, 1991-2016

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People tend to both forget and exaggerate. Today, many Americans speak as if antisemitism vanished for decades and only resurfaced after the October 7, 2023 massacre of Israelis by the Arabs of Gaza. The narrative goes: everything was fine, and then suddenly the world turned against Jews.

That is simply false.

Jews have always been the most targeted group for hate crimes in the United States on a per-capita basis. Jews were assaulted, synagogues were attacked, and Jewish centers were bombed long before social media existed to broadcast the hate. The 1970s alone saw a litany of terror: Jewish places targeted, flights to Israel hijacked, hostages separated by religion, and Jewish children born into a world where the UN itself declared Zionism—a core component of Jewish identity—to be racism. That infamous 1975 UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 did not merely insult Jews; it institutionalized antisemitism on a global stage.

But something remarkable happened in 1991. U.S. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s crusade finally came to fruition, and the UN revoked its poisonous declaration. For the first time in modern history, the Jewish story—people, land, and identity—was not officially stigmatized by the world’s central diplomatic body. Israel was no longer framed as a racist project; Zionism was permitted to exist as a normal national movement. With that reversal, Jews in the diaspora experienced something astonishing: a geopolitical tailwind.

Begin Center hosts event in Jerusalem about 50th anniversary of UNGA Resolution 3379, in December 2025 – a condemnation of the United Nations

The Jewish Golden Years had begun.

From 1991 through 2016, Jewish life flourished across the West. Israel integrated into global markets, made peace with former enemies, and became a hub of innovation admired even by countries without diplomatic ties. Antisemitic incidents did not disappear, but they lost their ideological legitimacy. The world’s leading institutions were no longer branding Jewish self-determination as a crime. Jews could breathe—never fully secure, but broadly accepted.

That period ended with a vote.

In December 2016, the Obama administration allowed UN Security Council Resolution 2334 to pass—a measure far more extreme than the 1975 resolution it resembled. The 1975 General Assembly resolution slandered Zionism; UNSC 2334 criminalized Jewish presence. It declared that Jews living anywhere east of the 1949 Armistice Lines—including the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, the holiest ground in Judaism—are in violation of international law. Jewish prayer at the Western Wall was, according to the world’s most powerful diplomatic forum, an offense.

Hasidic Jews at the Kotel in Jerusalem’s Old City, learning, praying, and inserting wishes into cracks in the wall (photo: First One Through)

It was not merely a political resolution. It was the legalization of antisemitism.

Once the UN stamped Jewish presence in Judaism’s holiest places as illicit, the global tide shifted quickly. The Jewish Golden Years began to collapse.

By 2018, Jews were being murdered in Pittsburgh and Poway. On college campuses, BDS campaigns metastasized into doctrinal dogma. In public schools, students were taught that Jews are not indigenous to the Land of Israel but “white Europeans” with no ancestral claim—a complete inversion of historical fact. Jews were physically beaten in the streets of New York and Los Angeles during the May 2021 Gaza conflict, years before the post–October 7 mobs marched with chants to “globalize the intifada.”

By the time American cities filled with crowds celebrating Hamas’s massacre, the unraveling was already underway.

The Golden Years—the 25 years of relative acceptance—were gone.

For generations, Jews believed that Israel’s existence itself guaranteed Jewish safety. The 1970s proved that was untrue. The present moment proves it again. A Jewish state cannot protect its people if the world delegitimizes it, demonizes it, or criminalizes Jewish presence in Judaism’s holiest places.

The real guarantor of Jewish safety is not Israel’s strength, but the world’s willingness to accept the basic history and human rights of Jews. That legitimacy existed only in a narrow window: from the UN’s repudiation of its Zionism-is-racism libel in 1991 to Obama’s decision to let UNSC Resolution 2334 pass in final days of 2016.

Those twenty-five years were an intermission in a much longer historical pattern. A rare pause in which Jews were not told by the world that their existence—national, historical, spiritual—was a crime.

Since 2016, the message has returned with force: Jews may live, but not there. Jews may pray, but not here. Jews may exist, but only on someone else’s terms.

The Golden Years did not end because Israel faltered, but because the world revoked its permission. Without it, the old hatreds rushed back as if they had never left.

Jews are not witnessing a sudden outbreak of antisemitism. They are living through the collapse of the only era in modern history when the world briefly pretended to accept the Jewish story.

Collective Responsibility From Dinah in Shechem to the Hostages in Gaza

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When Shechem raped Dinah in Genesis 34, the Torah condemns not only the man who violated her but the entire city that allowed her to remain captive. Dinah was held openly in Shechem’s home, and no one objected. Not one elder confronted the crime. Not one resident demanded her release. Their silence became their guilt.

This is the Torah’s principle: A society that tolerates the humiliation of the innocent becomes responsible for it.

October 7 Made That Principle Contemporary

The political-terrorist group Hamas did not merely murder and rape on October 7, 2023. They dragged 251 human beings—children, women, men, elderly—into Gaza. For months, those hostages were kept in houses, apartments, tunnels beneath family homes, mosques, and clinics. People fed their captors. People guarded entrances. Crowds celebrated the kidnappings. The captivity was not hidden from the population; it was woven into daily life.

Crowds of Gazans celebrate the taking of captives – alive and dead – on October 7, 2023

And just as in Shechem, no one in Gaza intervened. Not one hostage was smuggled out. Not one family risked itself to free a stranger. Not one community leader demanded their return.

The Torah would not call this ignorance. It would call it complicity.

Dinah’s City and Gaza: A Shared Moral Failure

Shechem’s offense was personal; the city’s offense was communal. The same moral structure applies today: the crime begins with Hamas, but it enlarges to those who shelter, celebrate, or simply accept the captivity of innocents. The vast majority of Gazans supported Hamas’s actions.

Jacob criticized Shimon and Levi for endangering the family, but the Torah never suggests that the men of Shechem were innocent. Their passivity was enough to implicate them. When God protects Jacob’s family afterward, it signals that defending dignity—even forcefully—was morally justified.

The Torah’s Message for Our Generation

The world tries to draw a sharp line between Hamas and “the people of Gaza,” as though collective moral responsibility vanished in modern times, and the celebrated terrorism is not inherently a collective attack on an entire society. Dinah’s story rejects these illusions. It teaches that a society that houses kidnapped people is not neutral, and a population that normalizes and endorses cruelty shares responsibility for it.

Jacob scolded his sons Shimon and Levi for carrying out the revenge attack against Shechem’s people, and said that it would make their family a pariah. That too is repeating today, as many countries condemn and isolate the State of Israel for its actions in Gaza.

Dinah’s captivity was a test of Shechem’s moral fabric, and it failed. The captivity of Israeli hostages – for years – was a test of Gaza’s, and it also failed. The anger over the slaughter of the guilty has also left a deep mark then and today.

The lesson is simple and ancient: When a people accepts atrocity in its midst, the stain becomes communal. But it will not leave leave the actors in the just war untarnished in the days and years ahead.


Passings

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To arrive in Israel is never just a landing. For millennia, Jews faced this land in hope and longing, turning toward Jerusalem even when the path was blocked by oceans, armies, or fate itself. Countless generations passed on without ever setting foot on the stones their ancestors walked.

The architects of Ben Gurion Airport understood this ache.

Between the terminal and passport control, travelers move through parallel glass corridors — one for those entering the land, one for those departing. You can watch them the entire way: people going home, people leaving home. From above, the scene resembles Jacob’s Ladder, angels ascending and descending, a ceaseless movement connecting heaven and earth. Biblical commentators taught that the angels Jacob saw were the guardians of the Land of Israel — one set departing when he left, and a new set arriving to accompany him in the diaspora. So too here: those making aliyah rising in spirit; those heading abroad descending from holiness for a time, yet still tethered by an invisible thread.

In the last two years, this modern ladder of the Land of Israel took on a painful weight. Along the railing, as every arriving passenger stepped into the corridor, 251 photos lined the wall — the faces of each hostage seized by Hamas on October 7. Every person entering the land confronted them. No one could step onto the soil of the Jewish homeland without understanding the national wound, the unfinished promise that Israel would bring every soul – living and dead – home.

Photos of the hostages hung from railings meeting every person arriving in Israel at Ben Gurion Airport in 2024 (photo: First One Through)

On my most recent trip, the first picture I met was that of Dror Or. I did not pass. I lingered. For two years, his body was held in Gaza — a grotesque bargaining chip in a war the captors refused to end. Israel kept searching, praying, fighting, refusing to abandon its dead. A week after my arrival, his body was finally returned to his family and to the state. When I walked back through the airport corridor to depart, his photo was gone. His picture had been removed, but his passing — and his dignity — stayed with me.

On arrival
At departure

In Israel, passings are never casual. In this small land, every encounter feels like a reunion: bumping into someone you have not seen in years; meeting friends to celebrate a simcha; honoring the memory of someone who has passed on; meeting a stranger and then talking intimately for twenty minutes. Moments here are not ordinary. The land itself seems to insist that they matter.

To pass by someone, to pass through a hallway, to pass from life — in the Jewish homeland, is not trivial. This is a country stitched together by arrivals and departures, by longing and fulfillment, by angels ascending and descending in steady and deliberate devotion.

Who Will Shoot Hamas?

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The western world keeps repeating the same slogan: Gaza must be demilitarized. Every peace plan, every UN speech, every press conference insists that Hamas cannot continue to rule Gaza with guns in its hands. Billions of dollars for reconstruction are on hold until someone ensures those weapons are taken away.

There is only one problem: Hamas says it will never disarm. Not yesterday, not tomorrow, not for a state, not for the UN, not for Europe, not for the Americans, and certainly not for Israel. Hamas did not slaughter and rape Israelis on October 7 to abandon its quest to vanquish the Jewish State.

So a question hangs over every diplomat and every cabinet meeting from Cairo to Paris, a question no one wants to speak out loud: If Hamas refuses to disarm, who is going to shoot Hamas?

The West calls Hamas a terrorist organization responsible for massacres, rape, torture, kidnapping, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. But to many Palestinians, Hamas is not a rogue gang. It is the leadership they voted for, winning 58% of parliament in the last elections, and polling suggests they would win again today. To disarm Hamas is not to disarm a fringe—it is to confront their popular governmental leaders and legitimate military.

So who will go into Gaza, walk into the war tunnels, into the apartments, into the mosques used for rocket storage, and take those weapons away? Who will drag commanders from basements and seize the launchers hidden under family homes?

Hamas in Gaza war tunnels

Israel? The world says no. Israel may have destroyed Hamas battalions, but the same leaders who demand demilitarization say Israel must not stay in Gaza to enforce it.

The Palestinian Authority? Hamas threw them off rooftops in 2007. The PA’s authority barely extends through parts of the West Bank. They are not disarming anyone in Gaza without outside troops and a graveyard’s worth of casualties.

Members of Hamas drag the body of a “collaborator” through the streets of Gaza

Arab and Muslim states? This is the newest fantasy. An “International Security Force” of Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi, Emirati, Moroccan or other troops is supposed to enter Gaza, secure the borders, keep the peace, and—if necessary—shoot Hamas fighters to take their weapons. Will Egyptian soldiers do that? Jordanians? Saudis? The UAE? And what of Qatar, which housed Hamas leaders in luxury hotels for years? Will Qatar now arrest the men it financed?

The UN? NATO? Peacekeepers do not storm bunkers or raid arms factories. It has never happened in the Middle East, and it will not start in Gaza.

Which leaves one final option, the one everyone pretends not to see: No one will disarm Hamas. The world will congratulate itself on a “post-war framework,” aid will pour in, cement will be shipped, tunnels will be rebuilt, rockets will reappear—and we will repeat this in two years, five years, ten years, with more dead children on both sides.

This is the part no diplomat wants quoted back to them: You cannot demand a demilitarized Gaza, forbid Israel from disarming Hamas, refuse to disarm Hamas yourself, and still pretend you are building peace. Those positions cannot coexist. Either someone will use force against Hamas, or Hamas remains armed, and Gaza remains a terrorist enclave.

Ask the diplomats, ask the presidents and prime ministers, ask the foreign ministers drafting communiqués they will never enforce: Who will shoot Hamas?

Peace is not built on Security Council resolutions. It is built on the willingness to confront those who would destroy it.

The Ghosts of Genocide

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To visit Poland is to walk among ghosts.
The thriving Jewish civilization that once filled its towns and marketplaces was almost completely erased. Three million Jews were targeted for extermination — a number too vast to grasp by walking through silent cemeteries. The absence alone cannot speak the full horror.

To stand where synagogues were razed, where schools once taught Torah and arithmetic, where playgrounds once rang with Yiddish laughter, is to feel the emptiness press against your chest. It forces the imagination to repopulate the void — to summon the Jewish ghosts who linger, waiting for conscience to remember them.

It is easier to look at the living.
Many Poles today are the grandchildren of those who watched as their Jewish neighbors were rounded up — and sometimes finished the work themselves when survivors returned seeking their homes. They became stand-ins for the killers of yesteryear, heirs to silence, envy, and complicity.

Now another people walks amid ruins.
In Gaza, millions return to their shattered neighborhoods under a ceasefire, and we are told they have survived a “genocide” at the hands of Jews. Yet the number of Palestinian Arabs has grown, not diminished — a population larger than before the war they themselves began. They tread among the skeletons of broken buildings built atop their army’s tunnels, while ghosts — Israeli civilians burned alive in their kibbutzim and those taken hostage and murdered in Gaza — cry out from the ashes.

The Bibas family from Israel was taken hostage by Gazans on October 7, 2023. The mother and two children were murdered in captivity

I ponder the ghosts of genocide:
the murdered and the murderers;
the societies that spawned the slaughter;
the peaceful towns that became infernos.

Infrastructure shelters ghosts. Societies are haunted by the ones they create, both killer and killed. The unseen dead can no longer showcase their dancing on the one hand, or lust to murder, on the other.

There are scarcely any Jews left in Poland; their ghosts appear only to those who seek them.
In Gaza, the ghosts are not gone. They walk the streets, armed and unrepentant — not spirits of victims, but kinsmen of murderers, now turning on one another.

Poland’s haunting is one of silence — an absence so total it chills the air. The ghosts there do not cry out; they wait to be remembered. Gaza’s haunting is the opposite: a cacophony of rage that refuses reflection. Its ghosts are not silent but screaming — not victims unburied, but hatreds unrepented.

Poland’s soil holds the murdered; Gaza’s streets still host the spirit of the murderers.
One ghost asks to be mourned; the other demands to be judged.

The haunting does not end with time.
It lingers wherever truth is buried,
and it deepens each time the living deny the past that shaped them.

Only when a people can face its ghosts —
naming both the murdered and the murderers —
can it begin to live freely again.

How Many Palestinian Prisoners Returned Are Israeli Plants?

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In Lebanon and Syria, senior terror leaders keep disappearing. Israel’s intelligence services have shown that even far from home, their reach is absolute. Hezbollah commanders vanish without warning. Iranian coordinators meet “accidents” in Damascus. Israel’s eyes are everywhere — east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49AL / “West Bank”) and far beyond.

Inside Israel and the territories under its vigilance, that network of informants has kept the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) from unleashing the kind of barbarism seen under Hamas. The true security barrier is not made of concrete or wire — it is people: HUMINT, human intelligence, the whispers that prevent slaughter.

But Gaza became a black hole the moment Israel withdrew in 2005. Every soldier, every Jew, every Israeli presence was uprooted — and with them went the eyes and ears that had kept the region stable. Hamas seized power through blood, executing its rivals and every suspected collaborator. What followed since 2007 was not liberation but suffocation. Gaza became a fortress of fanaticism, sealed off and armed to the teeth.

Hamas interrogates suspected informants in 2014

The legal Israeli blockade was not enough. While Israel and Egypt controlled the borders, Hamas tunneled beneath them — smuggling Iranian rockets, explosives, and even the raw materials to build new weapons. Gaza transformed from a strip of land into a terrorist enclave. By 2023, it was not just armed — it was indoctrinated, radicalized, and ready for mass murder.

Israel will not make that mistake again.

Among the newly released SAP prisoners, there are almost certainly Israeli plants — men and women turned during interrogations or cultivated long before. They will slip back into Gaza’s shattered neighborhoods, listening, watching, feeding intelligence. Every conversation, every weapons cache, every hint of reorganization could be the thread that prevents the next October 7.

Hamas knows this. Its paranoia will turn inward. Accusations will fly, confessions will be forced, and public executions will become commonplace to the shouts of “Allahu Akhbar.” The group will again devour its own, because it cannot rule without fear.

Hamas executes suspected informants in front of crowd of children

Any new ruling authority that replaces Hamas will need to coordinate with Israel. There can be no “independent Gaza” left to rot in secrecy. Deradicalization cannot be trusted to glossy NGOs or “neutral” foreign agencies alone. It must be verified — by intelligence, by informants, by those who know the difference between reform and camouflage.

[As for the Arab propaganda outlets, none of the public executions are discussed on Qatari-owned Al Jazeera. It is busy selling Gaza and Hamas as peace-loving.]

The intelligence war has already begun. The question is not whether Israel has plants among the returnees — it is how many will live long enough to stop Gaza from sinking back into the darkness it dug for itself.