Long before the current war began, prominent advocates for the Palestinian cause were describing Gaza as “hell on earth.”
In January 2009, Palestinian Queen Rania of Jordan released a video for UNRWA titled “Hell on Earth.” Eight months later, speaking at UNRWA’s 60th anniversary, she recalled that video and lamented that Gaza was still “Hell on Earth.”
Palestinian Queen of Jordan Rania called Gaza “Hell on Earth” in 2009
In May 2021, UN Secretary-General António Guterres declared, “If there is a hell on earth, it is the lives of children in Gaza today.”
When Israel began to respond to the war waged by Gazans in 2023, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said Gaza had become “a living hell.” In January 2024, UN humanitarian coordinator Sigrid Kaag told the Security Council, “Gaza is hell on earth.”
The description has been remarkably consistent. What has often been missing is the question: Why?
Hell is not merely a place of suffering. It is a place where evil reigns.
Hamas violently seized Gaza in 2007 after defeating Fatah in a brief but brutal civil war. Fighters executed political rivals, threw some from rooftops, publicly brutalized opponents, and dragged the bodies of alleged collaborators through the streets. Those who challenged Hamas risked imprisonment, torture, or death. Independent political life disappeared, and an entire generation grew up under the rule of an armed Islamist movement that prioritized rockets, tunnels, and perpetual conflict over building a prosperous society.
Hamas drags a disloyal Gazan through the streets to his death
And Hamas was a known entity, a political party which won 56% of Palestinian parliament in elections with the most antisemitic political charter ever written. It remains the most popular political group to this day, expected to win Palestinian elections in every poll.
Calling Gaza “hell on earth” without acknowledging who built that system leaves the story unfinished. Should people want to transform the region, they must work to end the evil rule and worldview that turned part of the holy land into such a place in the first place.
For more than fifteen years, Boko Haram has waged one of the world’s deadliest terrorist insurgencies. Since 2009, the group has been responsible for the deaths of more than 35,000 people, with some estimates placing the toll significantly higher when indirect deaths from the conflict are included. It has massacred civilians in villages, churches, mosques, schools, and marketplaces. It has bombed public places, murdered those who refused to submit to its rule, and driven millions from their homes across Nigeria and neighboring countries.
Kidnapping has been one of its defining tactics. The 2014 abduction of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok drew worldwide attention, but it was only one of thousands of kidnappings. Women and girls have been forced into marriage and been raped. Boys have been recruited as child soldiers. Entire communities have lived for years under the constant threat of murder, abduction, and terror.
Boko Haram rejects the legitimacy of Nigeria, a United Nations-member state. It seeks to replace it with its own extremist Islamist regime.
Yet almost no one argues that Boko Haram deserves its own country. No demonstrations demand that its leaders be rewarded with sovereignty. No governments argue that decades of massacres, hostage-taking, and terrorism should culminate in international legitimacy.
There are now 157 countries that recognize Palestine. That look at the war between Israel and Palestine as one between two sovereign states, one which invaded another, raped and burned people alive, and took 251 hostages. These nations didn’t pause to question whether Palestine has a right to exist, but got three more countries to join in their sadistic effort.
Perhaps it is time for the 36 countries which do not recognize Palestine to put a resolution before the UN to recognize Boko Haram as the legitimate government of Nigeria, or at least a breakaway state in the northeastern corner which they control.
For more than sixteen centuries, the Catholic Church has wrestled with one of humanity’s most difficult questions: When, if ever, is war morally justified?
St. Augustine laid the foundation by teaching that, “The purpose of all wars is peace.” War was never to be pursued for conquest, revenge, or hatred, but only to restore a just peace.
St. Thomas Aquinas refined that principle, writing that, “In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign… Secondly, a just cause… Thirdly… the belligerents should have a rightful intention, so that they intend the advancement of good, or the avoidance of evil.”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church later added that “The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration.” It identifies four additional requirements: the aggressor must inflict lasting, grave and certain damage; peaceful alternatives must have been exhausted; there must be a serious prospect of success; and the use of force must not create evils greater than those it seeks to eliminate.
These principles have recently been invoked by Catholics questioning Israel’s wars against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.
The first question is legitimate authority.
Israel is a sovereign state with an elected government entrusted with protecting its citizens. Hamas is a terrorist organization that seized control of Gaza by force. Hezbollah is an Iranian-backed militia that operates independently of the Lebanese government while maintaining its own army. Iran finances, arms, trains, and directs proxy organizations across the region while repeatedly calling for Israel’s destruction.
The Catholic tradition recognizes a government’s duty to defend those under its care. That responsibility belongs to Israel’s government. It does not belong to terrorist organizations.
The second question is just cause.
Israel did not manufacture this conflict. On October 7, Hamas crossed into Israel and deliberately massacred civilians, raped women, tortured families, burned people alive in their homes, and kidnapped more than 250 men, women, children, and elderly people. Hezbollah opened a northern front with sustained rocket attacks, while Iran’s regional proxy network joined the conflict.
Catholic teaching has long recognized that governments possess both the right and the obligation to defend innocent life against grave aggression.
The third question is right intention.
Israel has repeatedly stated that its objective is the dismantling of Hamas’s military capability, the removal of Hezbollah’s threat along its northern border, and the degradation of Iran’s ability to wage war through proxies. Those are military objectives directed toward restoring security.
Its enemies have declared something fundamentally different: that the Jewish state should be destroyed. One side seeks to eliminate a military threat. The other seeks to eliminate a nation.
The Catechism next asks whether war is truly the last resort.
Israel withdrew every soldier and civilian from Gaza in 2005. Instead of peace, Hamas transformed Gaza into an armed fortress, investing billions in rockets, tunnels, command centers, and military infrastructure embedded beneath civilian neighborhoods. Ceasefires repeatedly collapsed. Diplomatic initiatives failed to end the attacks. Every pause became an opportunity for Hamas and Hezbollah to rearm.
Hamas tunnels
Catholic teaching does not require a nation to absorb repeated massacres while endlessly hoping the next ceasefire will succeed where every previous one failed.
There must also be a reasonable chance of success.
Israel’s objectives have been difficult but attainable: dismantling terrorist command structures, destroying military infrastructure, rescuing hostages, degrading missile capabilities, and reducing Iran’s capacity to project violence through its proxies. Success doesn’t mean perfect peace. It means substantially reducing a continuing threat to innocent life.
Finally comes proportionality and discrimination.
These principles are often reduced to comparing casualty figures. That is not how Catholic teaching understands proportionality. The question is whether the military response is proportionate to removing the evil being confronted and whether civilians are intentionally protected.
Hamas deliberately embeds military assets beneath hospitals, schools, mosques, and residential neighborhoods. It stores weapons among civilians, fires rockets from civilian areas, steals humanitarian aid, and has long been accused of using civilians as shields. It refuses to let civilians enter the tunnels for shelter. Hezbollah has similarly embedded military infrastructure within Lebanese civilian communities.
Those realities fundamentally shape how Israel’s responsibilities must be judged.
The Catholic just war tradition was never intended to evaluate only one participant in a conflict. Every criterion applies equally to every combatant. A moral framework that scrutinizes Israel while ignoring Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran is no longer applying Catholic teaching consistently.
When the Church’s own criteria are applied carefully – legitimate authority, just cause, right intention, last resort, reasonable hope of success, proportionality, and discrimination – Israel’s campaign against Hamas and Iran’s proxy network presents a strong case for satisfying the classical requirements of a just war.
Every sports fan understands the pressure of an elimination game. One team takes the field knowing that a loss ends its season. There are no adjustments, no second chances. Everything rests on one contest.
The opposing team may desperately want to win, but the consequences of defeat are entirely different. It can return for another attempt with a new strategy, a new line up.
The scoreboard is the same. The stakes are not.
Now imagine a tournament where one team disappears forever if it loses, while its opponent simply waits for the next season. We would never describe that as an even contest. Yet that is remarkably close to the strategic reality Israel has faced throughout its history.
For Israel’s enemies, wars are not elimination games.
Egypt fought Israel repeatedly and lost. Egypt survived and eventually chose peace.
Syria launched major wars in 1948, 1967 and 1973. Each ended in defeat. Syria remained Syria.
Jordan lost territory but continued as a kingdom.
The pattern extends beyond states. Hamas has suffered repeated military defeats, lost senior leaders, and watched much of its military infrastructure destroyed. Yet after every conflict it has sought to rebuild. Hezbollah has absorbed devastating blows over decades while remaining a powerful force in Lebanon. Military defeat has never meant the end of either organization. They regroup, recruit, rearm and wait for another opportunity.
Hamas official stating that it will repeat the massacres of October 7 again and again
Israel has fought many opponents. Repeatedly.
That is because Israel’s war aims have been limited. Israel seeks to remove the military threat confronting its citizens. It has not sought the disappearance of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon or Iran. Even against terrorist organizations, its objective has been to dismantle military capabilities, not to eradicate an entire population.
Conversely, Israel’s adversaries have declared that the Jewish state should be destroyed. The objective was not merely to reverse a battlefield defeat or gain negotiating leverage. It was to eliminate Israel altogether.
That changes the meaning of every war.
Israel believes it cannot afford to lose an existential conflict because defeat would not simply mean surrendering territory, replacing a government, or rebuilding an army. Defeat would mean the destruction of the Jewish state.
Its adversaries have confronted a different calculation. If they fail, they survive. Their governments continue. Their organizations recruit new members. Their ideology remains intact. History gives them another chance.
Israel never assumes it will receive that luxury.
This asymmetry is one of the least understood aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Outside observers often judge each round of fighting as though both sides enter the contest with identical risks and identical objectives.
They do not.
One side has repeatedly demonstrated that it can lose wars and return years later to fight again. The other has long believed that losing an existential war would leave no opportunity for a comeback.
Israel has lived for nearly eight decades in what often feels like a permanent one-sided elimination game. Its opponents have repeatedly lost wars and returned for another season. Israel has never believed it would be granted that same privilege.
That is why Israelis often see war differently than much of the world. The debate is rarely about this season’s standings. It is about whether there will be another season at all.
In July 1980, the Knesset passed the Basic Law: Jerusalem, Capital of Israel. Its opening declaration remains one of the clearest statements of Zionist purpose ever enacted by the State of Israel:
“Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel.”
The law settled a question that had haunted Jewish history for centuries. Jerusalem would never again be divided by barbed wire, minefields, and sniper positions. The city reunited in 1967 would remain the political and spiritual heart of the Jewish state.
Forty-six years later, it is worth asking a simple question:
What does “united” mean?
The answer cannot be limited to municipal boundaries. It cannot be measured solely by roads, tax collection, or police jurisdiction. A united city is ultimately a civic reality. It is a city whose residents share a common framework of governance and belonging.
Image of man walking through Herod’s Gate in Old City of Jerusalem (FirstOneThrough with AI)
When Israel reunited Jerusalem in 1967, the decision to grant permanent residency rather than citizenship to the Arab residents made practical sense. The future of the broader Arab-Israeli conflict remained uncertain, and the status of Jerusalem itself was still contested internationally.
But those residents’ children are no longer children.
An Arab born in eastern Jerusalem in 1981 is now in his mid-forties. He has spent his entire life under Israeli administration. He attended schools in Jerusalem, received healthcare through Israeli institutions, worked in Jerusalem businesses, and raised a family in Jerusalem. For an entire generation born after the Jerusalem Law, the temporary arrangement has become a permanent condition.
An Arab born in Nazareth in 1981 became an Israeli citizen at birth. An Arab born in Jerusalem in 1981 generally remained a permanent resident. Both have lived under Israeli sovereignty their entire lives. One votes in national elections while the other does not.
If Jerusalem is truly united, how should that distinction be understood nearly half a century after the Basic Law was enacted?
The question is no longer theoretical. In recent years, thousands of eastern Jerusalem Arabs have applied for Israeli citizenship, reflecting a significant shift from earlier decades. The demand exists. What many applicants encounter instead is a cumbersome process that can stretch for years.
The issue has taken on added significance since October 7.
Hamas named its attack the “Al-Aqsa Flood” because it sought to seize sovereignty in Jerusalem. For decades, Hamas and other rejectionist movements have portrayed Jerusalem as a city temporarily under Jewish control and awaiting liberation.
A confident nation answers such claims by strengthening the institutions of sovereignty.
The ramifications would extend far beyond voting rights in Israel.
The Palestinian Authority presents “East Jerusalem” as the capital of a future Palestinian state. International organizations continue to describe “East Jerusalem” as occupied territory, while critics accuse Israel of apartheid and permanent disenfranchisement.
Yet what would happen if large numbers of Arabs born in Jerusalem after 1980 chose Israeli citizenship?
Hamas would struggle to explain why residents supposedly awaiting liberation had instead chosen participation in Israeli democracy. The Palestinian Authority would find it difficult to claim as its constituency citizens voting in Israeli elections. International institutions would confront a reality more complicated than diplomatic formulas unchanged since 1967. Critics would have to reconcile accusations of apartheid with a policy that expands citizenship and voting rights.
Jerusalem also offers a practical test for Israel’s broader sovereignty debate. Politicians who advocate annexing parts or all of Judea and Samaria should first explain their position regarding Arabs born after 1980 in Israel’s declared and united capital. If no consensus exists in Jerusalem, it is difficult to imagine one elsewhere.
Every party seeking to govern Israel should therefore answer a simple question: Do you support an expedited path to citizenship for Arabs born in eastern Jerusalem after the passage of the Jerusalem Law?
Such a program could include security screening, an oath of loyalty to the State of Israel and its laws, and a streamlined administrative process. Those who prefer permanent residency could retain it. Those seeking citizenship would no longer spend years navigating bureaucratic obstacles.
Jerusalem was reunited in 1967 and anchored in law in 1980. As the fiftieth anniversary of the Jerusalem Law approaches, Israelis should decide whether the next step is to complete the city’s civic integration.
The question is larger than citizenship. It is about the meaning of a united Jerusalem and the confidence of a sovereign nation in its eternal capital.
One of the most enduring images of the American Revolution is not a musket fired at Lexington or a cannon at Yorktown. It is a flag.
“Spirit of ’76” by Archibald Willard, 1875
In paintings celebrating the American Revolution, men advance carrying banners while drummer boys beat the cadence beside them. Often these figures are unarmed or lightly armed. To a modern observer, this seems irrational. Why would an army send men into battle carrying flags and drums instead of rifles?
Because they were not there to fight but to remind others why the fight mattered.
The flag represented the regiment, the cause, and the emerging nation. The drum provided rhythm and cohesion amid the chaos of battle. Neither was a weapon. Yet both were indispensable.
While tools like weapons help achieve an objective, symbols give meaning to the objective.
The Declaration of Independence was not a weapon. Neither was the America flag. Yet without them, the American Revolution would have been little more than a military rebellion. The cause and symbols transformed a collection of armed colonists into a people united by a common purpose.
The same lesson appeared thousands of years earlier in the Torah.
Moses’ staff began as an ordinary shepherd’s stick. In Egypt it became a symbol of divine authority. It was present during the plagues, at the splitting of the sea, and throughout Israel’s journey in the wilderness.
Similarly, during the battle against Amalek, Moses stood on a hill overlooking the fighting. When he raised his hands, Israel prevailed.
The rabbis famously ask whether Moses’ hands actually won the battle. Of course not. Joshua and the soldiers were the actual fighters. Like the flag carried by a Revolutionary soldier, the Moses’ raised arms pointed upwards. It reminded the warriors that victory depended not only on military strength but on the faith that united them.
Moses’ arms raised during fight with Amalek
Unfortunately, Moses later forgot the important distinction between symbol and tool. In Numbers 20, God instructs Moses to speak to a rock to make it produce water but instead Moses used the staff to hit the rock.
“And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, Take the tent and gather the congregation together, you and Aaron your brother, and speak to the rock before their eyes, and give them water from it,… And Moses lifted up his hand, and smote the rock with his rod, and there came out abundant water,… And the LORD said unto Moses and unto Aaron, Because ye believed me not, to sanctify me in the sight of the children of Israel, therefore ye shall not bring this congregation into the land which I have given them.”
Had Moses held the staff and spoken to the rock, it would have been clear that Moses was acting as an agent of God. However, by using the staff to hit the rock, the appearance to the congregation was that Moses produced the water through his physical actions. The important symbol was converted into a mere tool.
That temptation remains with every generation.
Today, neither America nor Israel doubts the superiority of its weapons. The United States and Israel possess military capabilities far beyond those of the jihadist movements that seek their destruction.
But this war is not only about weapons and short-term military victory.
The jihadists understand the power of symbols. They flew their flags over burned civilian homes and corpses of families. Their propaganda celebrates martyrdom of their own people. Their movements are built around vile narratives and identity.
So the engagement with the enemies must be beyond tools and include symbols.
The challenge facing America as it approaches its 250th birthday, and Israel as it continues its long war against jihadist movements sworn to its destruction, is not merely maintaining military superiority. It is ensuring that the superiority of their cause is just as visible.
For Israel, that means rebuilding the communities of the Gaza Envelope, returning families to their homes, raising the flag over places terrorists tried to erase, and celebrating Jewish life where jihadists sought death.
For America, it means reclaiming the language of the Declaration of Independence, speaking unapologetically about liberty and human rights, and using international forums not merely to condemn violence in general but to condemn noxious jihadist violence specifically.
The free world must repeatedly denounce genocidal jihadists like Hamas and Hezbollah and pass resolutions that celebrate democracy, defend religious freedom, and affirm the dignity of every human being.
The current fight matters more than military victory. It requires weapons, and also a proud display of enduring Jewish and Democratic values.
Tools win battles. Symbols sustain civilizations. They are both distinct and required at pivotal moments like today.
Jesus was a Jew, born to a Jewish family, living in the Jewish homeland, speaking to Jewish audiences, teaching from the Hebrew Bible, and making pilgrimages to the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. The word “Palestine” was not even the name of the province during His lifetime. The Roman renaming of Judea to Syria Palaestina occurred about a century after His death.
Yet the claim persists because it serves an ahistorical but political purpose: If Jesus can be transformed from a Jew into a Arab, then the central figure of Christianity can be detached from Jewish history and reinserted into a modern political narrative. Suddenly, Jews are no longer obvious indigenous people in the Holy Land, but Arabs – who did not arrive en masse to region for another six centuries – are the real Jews.
The article does not explicitly call Jesus a Palestinian. Instead, it wraps a Gazan narrative in the language of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection. Gaza becomes the tomb. The refugee becomes the suffering servant. The journey out becomes resurrection.
The symbolism is unmistakable.
For centuries, Christians looked to the suffering of Jesus as a uniquely sacred story. Increasingly, anti-Israel agitators are attempting to woo parts of the Christian world by recasting that story through the lens of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Palestinian Arabs occupying the role once reserved for Christ Himself.
The war in Gaza did not begin with suffering descending from heaven. It began with decisions made by thousands of Gazans. Hamas invaded Israel, murdered civilians and took hostages. Hamas launched a war that it knew would bring devastating consequences to Gaza as it hid it tunnels and refused to let women and children enter the shelters.
Does that resemble Jesus?
Genocidal psychopaths are being transformed into the innocent sufferer. The political and military context disappears from view. Agency gives way to symbolism.
What makes this especially troubling for many Jews is that the institution promoting this narrative is no longer just fringe anti-Israel groups or university protest movements.
It is the Vatican itself.
For two thousand years, the Church has wrestled with the consequences of separating Christianity from its Jewish roots. In recent decades, Catholic-Jewish relations made enormous progress by reaffirming the Jewishness of Jesus and Christianity’s historical connection to the Jewish people.
That progress is undermined when contemporary narratives replace Jesus the Jew with a new symbolic figure: the Palestinian sufferer who cheered Jews being burned alive.
This week, Palestinian officials accused Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich of making a “terrorist decision” after he announced that Israel would assume planning authority around Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs.
Cave of the Jewish Patriarchs and Matriarchs
The rhetoric was explosive. Yet the dispute reaches far beyond construction permits or municipal authority. It touches one of Judaism’s holiest sites, one of the most complicated agreements of the Oslo era, and one of Hamas’s strongest bastions in the West Bank.
If you read Palestinian official state media, the story sounds straightforward: Israel has seized Palestinian powers and is annexing another piece of the West Bank. If you read Israeli nationalist media, the story sounds equally straightforward: Israel is finally correcting a decades-old mistake and restoring authority over one of Judaism’s holiest sites.
Neither version tells readers what is actually happening. To understand the dispute, you first need to understand Hebron.
Hebron is not just another city in the West Bank. According to the Bible, it is where Abraham purchased the Cave of Machpelah as a burial place for Sarah. Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah are buried there. Long before Jerusalem became the capital of King David, Hebron was David’s first capital.
For Jews, it is one of the holiest places on earth. For Muslims, the same structure is known as the Ibrahimi Mosque and is among Islam’s revered sites in the region.
Unlike most cities in the West Bank, Hebron is also home to a small Jewish community living amid a much larger Palestinian population. That unique reality led negotiators in the Oslo era to treat Hebron differently from every other Palestinian city.
In 1997, Israel and the Palestinian Authority signed the Hebron Protocol. The agreement divided the city into two sectors: H1, roughly 80 percent of the city, was placed under Palestinian Authority control. H2, roughly 20 percent of the city, remained under Israeli security control and included the Jewish neighborhoods and the Cave of the Patriarchs.
What many people do not realize is that the Protocol never clearly settled who would ultimately govern Hebron. It created temporary arrangements and postponed the hardest questions to future negotiations that never happened.
Yet today’s argument is unfolding against a backdrop far different than the one envisioned by Oslo.
Hebron has become one of Hamas’s strongest centers in the West Bank. In 2025, Israeli security forces announced the dismantling of one of the largest Hamas networks uncovered in E49 (east of the 1949 Armistice Lines)/ “West Bank” in years, centered in the Hebron area. Authorities alleged the network included dozens of operatives, weapons caches, financing channels, recruitment efforts, and plans for future attacks.
The threat remains active. This week Hamas claimed responsibility for the shooting attack near Hebron that killed an Israeli officer.
For many Israelis, the debate over Hebron is therefore inseparable from a larger question: if authority shifts in the city, who ultimately benefits from that shift?
That brings us to the current controversy.
For years, Israeli officials sought approval for maintenance, accessibility, and infrastructure projects at the Cave of the Patriarchs, including an elevator for elderly and disabled worshippers and improvements to covered prayer areas. Palestinian municipal authorities and the Islamic Waqf opposed those projects, arguing that such decisions belonged to Palestinian institutions under the Hebron Protocol.
To Israelis, the arrangement had become unworkable. To Palestinians, it represented one of the few remaining authorities preserved under the Oslo framework.
Over time, courts, administrators, and politicians became entangled in disputes that were ostensibly about construction but were really about governance. Now they have exploded.
The argument unfolding in Hebron sits atop three unresolved realities: the ancient claim of Abraham’s burial place, the unfinished compromises of Oslo, and the persistent presence of Hamas in and around the city.
Nearly thirty years after negotiators divided Hebron into H1 and H2, the questions they postponed have returned. Not as diplomatic clauses on paper, but as arguments over sovereignty, security, and history.
They are Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze, Bedouin, and others. They are children going to school, parents going to work, soldiers defending their country, and grandparents hoping to see their families thrive. Like people everywhere, they seek safety, opportunity, dignity, and peace.
Those aspirations should not be controversial.
Yet few nations are asked to justify their existence as frequently as Israel.
That is why the phrase “Let Israel Live” matters.
At its most basic level, it is an affirmation of a simple principle: a people has the right to live in security in its homeland. Israeli children should not grow up under the threat of rockets, missiles, terrorism, kidnappings, or calls for their destruction. Families should not have to wonder whether a bus ride, a concert, or a holiday celebration will become the target of violence.
In October 2003 – well before there was a blockade of Gaza – 89% of Palestinian Arabs supported killing Jewish civilians in the West Bank and Gaza; 54% supported killing Jewish civilians inside of Israel. Gazans were much more blood-thirsty than West Bank Arabs.
Security is not a privilege. It is a right.
To say “Let Israel Live” is to recognize that Israelis are human beings rather than symbols in a political debate. Discussions about Israel often revolve around governments, borders, diplomacy, and conflict. Lost in those discussions are the millions of ordinary people whose lives are directly affected by them.
The phrase carries an even deeper meaning for the Jewish people.
For centuries, Jews lived at the mercy of rulers, empires, and majorities. Again and again they were expelled, persecuted, or denied the ability to determine their own future. Israel represents the restoration of Jewish self-determination in the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people.
To say “Let Israel Live” is therefore not merely a statement about physical security. It is an affirmation that the Jewish people, like all peoples, possess the right to govern themselves and shape their own destiny.
The phrase “Let Israel Live” asks for nothing extraordinary.
It asks that Israel be granted what every people seeks for itself: the right to live, the right to flourish, and the right to exist in peace.
On the evening of June 16, 2017, 23-year-old Border Police officer Hadas Malka was standing guard near Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate, one of the busiest entrances to the Old City.
Before the night was over, she would be dead.
Border Police officer Hadas Malka, who was killed on June 16, 2017, in a stabbing attack near Damascus Gate in Jerusalem
Three Palestinian terrorists from villages near Ramallah launched coordinated attacks using knives and firearms. As officers responded, one of the attackers rushed Malka and stabbed her repeatedly. Four others were wounded before security forces killed the terrorists.
Malka, from Ashdod, died of her injuries shortly afterward.
What followed made the attack unusual even by the standards of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
ISIS claimed responsibility.
“lions of the caliphate carried out a blessed operation in the city of Jerusalem.” –ISIS
“The three hero martyrs who executed the Jerusalem operation have no connection to Daesh [ISIS], they are affiliated with the [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] and Hamas,” Hamas official Izzat El-Reshiq tweeted.
The argument was never about the murder itself. It was about who deserved recognition for carrying it out.
For many outside the Middle East, ISIS represents a uniquely dangerous form of extremism. Yet in Jerusalem that night, the distinction mattered little to the victim. Whether carried out in the name of ISIS, Hamas, or the PFLP, the result was the same: a young policewoman was murdered while protecting the public.
The attack came years before October 7, but it reflected a pattern that long predates both events. Terrorist groups may differ in ideology, tactics, and leadership. Their rivalry often centers on who can claim the mantle of “resistance” and the vile prestige that follows a successful attack.
On June 16, 2017, that competition played out in plain sight.
A young Israeli officer lay dead. Three terrorist organizations wanted the world to know the attack belonged to them.
