For over twenty-five years, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research has tracked Palestinian political opinion. Through wars, peace talks, intifadas, and four American presidents, one pattern remains strikingly consistent:
Palestinians have never been broadly pro-American.
That may sound counterintuitive. The United States has spent decades mediating the conflict, funding Palestinian institutions, and pouring diplomatic capital into the region. If goodwill were built by investment alone, the polling should show it.
It does not.
PCPSR rarely asks, Do you like America? Instead, it asks the more revealing questions: Do you trust the United States as a mediator? Do you want American involvement? Do you believe Washington is fair?
Across twenty-five years, the answers tell the story.
Palestinians burn American and Israeli flags
After the collapse of the 2000 Camp David Summit and the violence of the Second Intifada, positive views of America’s political role sat around 20 to 35 percent. Negative views often exceeded 60 percent. America was seen less as a broker than as Israel’s protector.
That became the baseline.
The mid-2000s brought modest movement. After Mahmoud Abbas replaced Yasser Arafat, some Palestinians supported stronger American engagement. Yet the support was tactical hoping that Washington might pressure Israel. That did not translate into trust.
Then came the only real exception.
Barack Obama produced the highest pro-American opening in the polling record. In 2009, roughly 60 percent supported a stronger American role in negotiations.
Washington read that as goodwill. The polling suggests something narrower: hope that Obama would pressure Israel.
Even at that high point, majorities still believed America fundamentally favored Israel. The atmosphere improved. The structure did not.
By Obama’s second term, positive sentiment had fallen back into the 20 to 30 percent range.
Then Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and trust collapsed into single digits.
In some surveys, roughly 90 percent rejected American mediation. The illusion of neutrality disappeared. America was no longer seen as merely tilted toward Israel, but openly aligned with Israeli claims to Jerusalem.
Palestinian Arabs burn American flag in 1998
Joe Biden lowered the temperature but did not restore trust. The numbers recovered slightly, climbing back into the teens and twenties.
Then came the October 7 attacks and the war that followed. With Washington backing Israel militarily and diplomatically, Palestinian hostility surged again toward its floor: single-digit trust, overwhelming distrust.
The pattern is unmistakable.
When America pressures Israel, Palestinian approval rises. When America stands with Israel, it collapses.
For twenty-five years, Palestinians have periodically wanted America involved. They have never wanted America embraced.
Not under George W. Bush. Not under Obama. Not under Trump. Not under Biden.
The names changed. The percentages moved. The structure held.
America, in Palestinian political opinion, has never been a friend. Only a force—useful when applying pressure, hostile when withholding it.
After a quarter century of polling, that may be the clearest finding of all.
When Israel declared independence in 1948, it had roughly 717,000 Jews and roughly 156,000 Arab citizens and residents. Those numbers were small, but what they carried was enormous: the ambition to reverse two thousand years of Jewish dispersion and gather a scattered people back into sovereignty.
Yet the first demographic fact that emerges from Israel’s modern history cuts against so much of the political mythology surrounding it. Since 1948, Israel’s Arab minority expanded at a faster proportional rate than its Jewish majority. The Jewish population grew from 717,000 to nearly 8 million, roughly elevenfold. Israel’s Arab population grew from 156,000 to more than 2.1 million, more than thirteenfold.
That fact strips away one of the central distortions in the debate over Israel. The rise of the Jewish state did not require the disappearance of its Arab minority. Quite the opposite. Israel’s Arab population expanded dramatically under Israeli sovereignty. Two populations grew inside the same state, but through entirely different engines. The Jewish story was one of ingathering, especially during the early years.
Today, Israel stands at more than 10.2 million people, nearly 8 million Jews and more than 2.1 million Arabs. A state born in scarcity became a fully formed society. But the road from 1948 to 2026 can best be understood through four distinct demographic phases: ingathering, expansion, retention, and preservation.
The first phase was ingathering. At first, Israel was an immigration state, and its earliest years were powered by catastrophe. The survivors of Europe came first, the broken remnant of the Holocaust arriving in a country still fighting its first war. Then came the collapse of Jewish life across the Arab world. Ancient Jewish communities in Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Egypt, and Libya emptied under expulsion, violence, and state pressure. More than 800,000 Jews left the Arab world, many rebuilding their lives in Israel.
Then came the Soviet opening. The collapse of the Soviet Union released nearly one million Jews into the largest migration wave since the founding of the state. Europe’s destruction, the Arab world’s expulsion, and the Soviet opening formed the three great waves of Jewish ingathering. Three different historical ruptures, one destination. That is how Jewish Israel was built.
While Jewish Israel was growing through migration, Israel’s Arab population was growing through birth. Higher fertility and falling mortality created uninterrupted expansion over decades. That is why the proportional growth of Israel’s Arab population exceeded the proportional growth of the Jewish population.
Then the second phase began: expansion. At first, Jewish growth depended on aliyah. Over time, it depended increasingly on birth. The immigrants became citizens, the citizens became parents, and the children of refugees became the country itself. The engine of Jewish demographic growth shifted from the airport to the maternity ward. That is the deepest demographic transition in Israel’s history.
In 2025, Israel recorded approximately 177,000 births. Immigration that year stood at roughly 24,600. Births now outnumber immigration by more than seven to one. What would have been unimaginable in 1948 has become ordinary in 2026. Israel began as a refuge. It now reproduces itself.
That changes the meaning of the state. Political Israel started as the answer to Jewish vulnerability, a place Jews could flee to when the world closed. That remains true. But demographically, it is no longer Israel’s primary function. Israel is no longer merely where Jews go when exile fails. It is where Jewish continuity principally lives.
And here, another old assumption collapsed. For decades, Israeli politics was shaped by demographic anxiety: would Arab fertility permanently outpace Jewish fertility? Would a demographic clock eventually run down the Jewish majority? That fear shaped strategy, borders, and diplomacy. For years, the numbers seemed to support it.
Then the numbers changed. Arab fertility declined as Arab society modernized. Jewish fertility remained unusually strong for an advanced economy. Today, Jewish fertility has reached parity with, and in some years slightly exceeded, Arab fertility. The demographic trajectory shifted. A generation of political strategy was shaped by a demographic clock that slowed while everyone kept hearing it tick.
Fertility Shift
1990 Arab █████ Jewish ███ 2026 Arab ███ Jewish ████
But demographic success creates its own new challenge.
For most of Israeli history, migration remained positive. Even when aliyah slowed, more Jews came than left. That changed in the last two years. In 2022, Israel absorbed more than 74,000 immigrants, driven heavily by war in Ukraine and departures from Russia. That surge faded quickly. By 2024 and 2025, net migration turned negative – more Israelis left than new immigrants arrived.
This is not a demographic crisis. Births still overwhelm migration losses, and Israel continues to grow. But the Zionist test has changed. For decades, the question was how many Jews Israel could gather. Now the question is how many it can keep.
The founding generations came because they had to. Future generations stay because they choose to. That is a different kind of national test. And the retention question is not merely numerical. If those leaving are disproportionately engineers, doctors, founders, investors, and elite military talent, the demographic issue changes shape. A state can absorb numerical loss. It feels the loss of capability much faster.
Above all these numbers sits the larger civilizational shift. In 1948, around six percent of world Jewry lived in Israel. Today, around 45% does. Soon it may be the majority.
Share of World Jewry Living in Israel 1948 ██ 6% 1970 ████ 18% 1990 ███████ 30% 2010 ██████████ 42% 2026 ████████████ 45%
There is one more demographic question hanging over Israel in 2026, larger than fertility, migration, or retention. It sits beneath almost every diplomatic formula and every argument about the future of the conflict.
The question is the scale and meaning of the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) having a “right of return.”
For decades, the Palestinian Authority and the United Nations have insisted on a “right of return” for Palestinian “refugees” and their descendants. The number most commonly cited is roughly 5.9 million. That number matters because it clarifies what the argument actually means in demographic terms.
Israel today has roughly 10.2 million people. Add 5.9 million Palestinian Arabs to that number and the demographic map changes overnight. Israel would become a country of more than 16 million people. Its Arab population would jump from 2.1 million to more than 8 million. Its Jewish population would remain just under 8 million. The Jewish majority would collapse into parity or slightly minority status.
That is not a marginal adjustment. It is a structural transformation of the state itself.
Put into historical perspective, the scale becomes even sharper. In 1948, Israel’s Arab population stood at roughly 156,000. By 2026, it had already grown to more than 2.1 million, more than thirteenfold growth, already exceeding Jewish proportional growth over the same period. Add 5.9 million more, and that Arab population would stand at more than 8 million, representing more than fiftyfold growth since the founding of the state.
A “right of return” on this scale is not simply an immigration proposal, already stripping Israel a basic right of sovereignty to determine who to admit into the country. It further demands that the Jewish State cease to be one.
That is why this issue forms the fourth demographic challenge: preservation. Preservation of the demographic framework that allowed Jewish self-determination to return after two thousand years of dispersion and discrimination.
For most of Jewish history, survival meant enduring dispersion. In Israel, survival became concentration, then continuity, and now choice. The next phase may determine whether it remains preservation.
Very few countries have grown by over 10 times since 1948, and none in the developed “Global North”, with Australia and Canada leading the group at 2.5x and 1.9x, respectively (no European country even doubled its population). In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region which saw explosive growth due to the discovery of oil, no country has had the minority populations grow faster than the majority.
Israel is a true anomaly, a developed country with explosive growth, sitting in the MENA region which suppresses the growth of minority groups but the Jewish State still saw oversaw a faster growth of non-Jews. Despite the basic facts, the world still pressures the country to admit even more people adding to the population density, and with minorities who never lived in the country, in particular, undermining the demographic status quo.
As Israel considers its plans for the years ahead, retaining educated talent and ending the so-called SAP “right of return” rank as the leading causes to maintain a thriving democracy.
President Obama once derided those who warned of Iran’s nuclear ambitions as promoting a “drumbeat of war.” It was a curious charge, especially as his negotiated JCPOA deal paved Iran’s legal pathway to nuclear weapons within a decade—despite Tehran’s unabashed calls to utterly destroy an American ally, and referred to the United States as “Satan.”
The phrase “drumbeat of war” is worth pausing over, because its imagery is meant to point a damning finger at generals and war profiteers, when in fact it refers to a beating passion that comes from a variety of sources.
Music itself teaches us the power of the drumbeat. Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” begins as a whisper—a single snare tapping a faint rhythm—but its relentless pattern swells, layer by layer, into a rapturous explosion. Nothing changes except the intensity. It is a master class in how a simple beat, repeated without interruption, can inflame emotion, tighten resolve, and propel an entire orchestra toward an inevitable climax. Passion grows not from complexity but from persistence.
Cinema took that lesson to the battlefield. Ennio Morricone’s “L’Arena,” born from spaghetti-western duels and later carried into modern war films, shows how percussion can elevate tension into confrontation. Its pounding drums accompanied by trumpets push characters toward conflict; the beat does not merely accompany battle—it summons it. Morricone understood that rhythm can be a weapon, a psychological drumroll that makes violence feel fated long before the first shot is fired.
In American history, drummers were not symbolic ornaments—they were battlefield communicators. The famous “Spirit of ’76” painting captures a young boy and an old man beating time through the fog of revolution. In both the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, the drummer corps relayed commands, kept formation, and lifted morale. Soldiers needed to be adults to enlist, but drummer boys could be barely in their teens. They were not the policymakers of war; they were the ones whose youthful energy pushed men forward into battle.
“The Spirit of ’76” (1875) by Archibald Willard (1836-1918)
It is an uncomfortable truth: the drumbeat of war is often carried not by governments or generals but by the young.
We like to imagine youth as the innocent bystanders of conflict—swept up, exploited, or victimized by forces beyond their control. That is often tragically correct. But not always. In the Middle East, teenage Palestinian Arabs have repeatedly been at the center of anti-Jewish violence. During the knife intifada of 2015–2016, most of the attackers were adolescents. Arabic media even gave them a romanticized nickname: Ashbāl al-Quds—the lion cubs of Jerusalem.
On October 12, 2015, two Palestinian boys, 15-year-old Hassan Khalid Manasra and his cousin 13-year-old Ahmad Manasra, stabbed two Israeli civilians in Jerusalem
They were not pawns in someone else’s narrative. They were active participants in it.
While they were stabbing Israelis in the streets, new legions of drummer boys was forming. The Lions’ Den was inaugurated in the West Bank to unleash dozens of attacks. The United Arab Emirates named a school for children for these young murderers. In the United States, a group calling itself the Palestinian Youth Movement openly glorifies the murderers of October 7 and calls for an intifada on American soil. They harass Jews at universities, shut down bridges, disrupt traffic, and chant for “uprisings”—all under the pretext of activism, and often shielded by tax-exempt organizations like WESPAC.
In the immediate aftermath of the October 7, 2023 massacre by Gazans of Israelis, Cornel West marches with PYM calling for an “Intifada revolution”. West has taught at Princeton, Harvard and Yale, indoctrinating the next generation of American leaders on intifada.
The drumbeat is steady. It is disciplined. And it is aimed squarely at Jews.
Where does this beat begin? It is not in the Israeli cabinet rooms the media delights in blaming. It begins at UNRWA schools, where generations of children are taught that Jews are colonial invaders with no history in their homeland. It echoes through activist teacher unions in the United States, where “decolonization” rhetoric is repackaged into lesson plans that erase Jewish indigeneity. It thunders at the United Nations, where Muslim-majority blocs and their allies advance resolutions asserting that Jews must be removed from Judea, Samaria, and even parts of Jerusalem “by any means necessary.” The young Palestinian Arab terrorist are then shielded from blame and prosecution by the poorly named “UN Coordinator for Middle East Peace.” Laughable if not such a tragedy.
The young listen. And they march.
At Christmastime, the world hears “The Little Drummer Boy”—a melody of humility. A child with nothing to give but a simple rhythm of devotion for a newborn Jewish baby in Bethlehem. A beat based on innocence and purity.
But the modern Middle East and its Western echo chambers have perverted that image.
Today’s little drummer boys are not offering gentle hymns. They are being raised, trained, and celebrated for a beat of hatred—an indoctrinated cadence that valorizes “martyrs,” delegitimizes Jews, romanticizes violence, and promises glory for those who shed blood.
The world should hear the drumbeat. And it should finally ask: Who handed these children the drums? Who taught them that murder is heroism, that Jews are prey, that violence is virtue?
These teenagers did not invent the rhythm—they are marching to a score composed by UN agencies, radicalized teachers, political opportunists, and ideological arsonists who hide behind the language of “justice” while grooming minors for war.
UN Watch’s Hillel Neuer presents new report, “Schools in the Grip of Terror: How UNRWA Allowed Hamas Chiefs to Control its Education System,” to the Italian Senate in September 2025
At Christmas, we think of a young drummer offering a humble gift to a Jewish child in Bethlehem. Alas, today too many young drummers are taught to offer not devotion, but destruction—and the world nods along as if the rhythm were unavoidable. It isn’t.
The beat continues only because we refuse to silence the conductors who train the next generation of drummers to hate.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres crossed a moral line when he called Palestinian Arabs an “inspiration” and a model of “resilience” this week. Inspiring how? By the crowds who celebrated the October 7 massacre? By polls showing majorities still glorifying the murders of Israeli civilians? By a culture whose media, schools, and leaders reject coexistence and sanctify violence?
Guterres didn’t qualify his praise. He erased the difference between the paltry few who seek peace and the dominant culture that cheers attacks on Jews. He took a society steeped in martyrdom worship and Jew-hatred — a culture that teaches children to dream of a land without Jews — and wrapped it in moral language.
That isn’t nuance. It’s whitewashing.
And the moral preening about UNRWA, the “irreplaceable lifeline for millions of Palestinians, including Palestine refugees“, which by his own admission is not just about an agency for descendants of displaced people from 75 years ago, but for ALL ARABS? That agency which was intimately engaged in fighting a war against Israel? He insists that the international “stand firmly” with the agency which fosters the violence and perpetual state of war?
Guterres has dignified the ideology that drives repeated attacks on Israeli families. He has signaled to the world that Jewish suffering is incidental, and Palestinian rejectionism is to be emulated.
If the Secretary-General looks at a society that celebrates slaughter and sees “a testament to the human spirit”, what won’t he excuse next?
It’s time for moral clarity. If Hamas supporters chant, “There is only one solution! Intifada Revolution!’— then outside the UN, people should gather in front of the campus with the truth:
“There is only one response — eradication of Hamas!”
Peace will never come from praising a culture of violence. Only from defeating it.
To read the Western press, one might believe that the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) in Gaza and the West Bank are reluctantly resigned to the idea that Hamas must go. Headlines routinely imply a growing consensus that Hamas is the past and some renewed Palestinian Authority is the future.
It could not be further from the truth.
The October 2025 PCPSR poll shows — unambiguously — that the Palestinian public has not turned away from Hamas. The majority would elect Hamas. The majority still supports the October 7 massacre. The majority wants Hamas to never disarm. This isn’t a fringe view or a warped reading of the data; it is the mainstream sentiment of Palestinian society two years after the massacre. Western analysts may avert their eyes, but the numbers do not.
And the Palestinian Authority knows this. That is why it continues to shield Hamas — not confront it.
A perfect illustration can be found in WAFA, the PA’s official news agency. In reporting on a session held by Canada and the European Union calling for a renewed diplomatic push, WAFA framed the story as a call for a “two-state solution,” “Gaza reconstruction,” and vague Western support for Palestinian aspirations and condemnation of Israeli actions.
What it didn’t report is the crucial part: those same governments insisted that the Palestinian Authority must undergo significant “necessary reform” and that Hamas must have absolutely “no role” in the future of Gaza. This was not an afterthought in the meeting; it was a headline demand. Yet WAFA hid it from the Palestinian public.
Joint declaration from EU- Canada on November 12, 2025
Why? Because telling the truth would expose the central problem: Palestinian society is not being prepared for peace. It is being insulated from accountability.
A healthy political culture would confront the society’s own extremism. It would publish the poll numbers honestly and begin the painful process of restructuring education, media, and institutions. The PA instead chooses the opposite — suppressing outside criticism of Hamas and pretending that international actors want a Palestinian state under current conditions.
Deradicalization and re-education are not optional. They are essential. And it is unmistakably clear that Palestinian society is incapable of doing so on its own.
For decades the PA has relied on a strategy of deflection — blaming Israel, minimizing internal dysfunction, and shielding extremist factions to avoid backlash from the street. That strategy has produced a generation that celebrates massacre, rejects coexistence, and sees disarmament as betrayal.
The Western world may cling to the comforting fiction that Hamas is isolated and universally rejected by Palestinians. The data say otherwise. The PA’s deliberate omissions say otherwise. The very architecture of Palestinian political life says otherwise.
France may assuage the Muslim street when its Prime Minister has meetings and posts photos with PA President Mahmoud Abbas, but those actions make it complicit in promoting not only a fiction, but affirmatively dressing the wolf in sheep’s clothing.
French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the Elysée Palace in Paris, France November 11, 2025. Abbas told the west “We are committed to a culture of dialogue and peace, and we want a democratic, unarmed state committed to the rule of law, transparency, justice, pluralism and the rotation of power.” No such statement appeared about the meeting in Wafa.
Until the international community confronts this reality — and insists on genuine deradicalization rather than polite diplomatic euphemisms — there will be no meaningful change in Gaza, the West Bank, or the prospects for peace.
Much of the attention on the Balfour Declaration—issued on November 2, 1917—focuses on the United Kingdom’s pledge to “facilitate” “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Israel-haters rage at this clause, claiming that Jews had no historical connection to their ancestral homeland and that Britain had no right to “hand over” immigration rights from local Arabs to Jews.
Balfour Declaration
On the anniversary of the Declaration in 1943, Heinrich Himmler of Nazi Germany sent a telegram to the “Grand Mufti” of Jerusalem that Nazis and Arabs had the same enemies – Jewish invaders. In 2016, the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas demanded an apology and reparations from Britain for issuing the Balfour Declaration, having repeatedly failed to destroy the Jewish State.
Telegram from Heinrich Himmler to Amin al-Husseini on November 2, 1943
But there’s another part of that same document that antisemites also detest. The closing line reads:
“…nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
That final clause—protecting Jews’ rights around the world—is precisely what modern antisemitic movements are trying to undermine. Groups like Within Our Lifetime, CAIR, and the Democratic Socialists of America openly campaign to dismantle what they deride as “Jewish power” in America.
They smear Jews as self-serving “capitalists,” accuse them of exploiting “Black and Brown bodies” for profit (as Rep. Rashida Tlaib has said), and seek to push Jews to the margins of public life—all because Jews affirm that the land of Israel is their homeland.
A century after the Balfour Declaration, its promise remains under attack—not only in the Jewish homeland but wherever Jews dare to live proud and free.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, declares that it operates on four humanitarian principles — humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence. It is none of those things.
UNRWA is unlike any other UN agency. It is not the UNHCR, which manages refugees from every nation and conflict on earth. UNRWA is a creature of exception — created for a particular people, in a particular region, in a particular war.
The agency claims it was established to address the plight of refugees from Palestine following the 1948–49 Arab-Israeli War. But was that truly its purpose? When the fighting ended, thousands of Jews were also expelled from their homes east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49AL) — from Jerusalem’s Old City, from Hebron, and across Transjordan’s illegally occupied territory. They, too, were refugees from Palestine. Did UNRWA help any of them? No.
Jews expelled from the Old City of Jerusalem via the Zion Gate by the army of Transjordan
From its inception, UNRWA was built to serve Arabs alone. Even when those same Arabs became full Jordanian citizens, the agency continued to provide them with housing, food, education, and medical care — benefits that by any logical standard should have ended once citizenship was granted. Instead, UNRWA preserved refugeehood as an inheritance, not a temporary condition.
Over time, UNRWA’s mission has morphed from relief to perpetuation. It has shown itself highly partisan, politically entangled, and morally compromised. Its schools and clinics may operate under the UN flag, but the agency’s allegiance is often indistinguishable from the politics of rejectionism that dominate its host territories.
During the 2023 Gaza war, UNRWA boasted that only it had the infrastructure to provide food, education, and healthcare to the Gazan population. Yet when 250 Israelis were dragged into Gaza as hostages, where was this agency of “humanity”? Did it deliver a single bandage or calorie to the kidnapped Israelis held underground? Did it condemn their abduction, or even acknowledge their suffering? It did not. UNRWA’s humanity proved selective, its independence nonexistent.
Its operations in Gaza function only through integration with Hamas, the political-terrorist organization that rules the territory. Schools double as weapons depots; employees have been implicated in massacres; aid is distributed by political loyalty, not human need. Leaders at the OCHA, another UN “humanitarian” group, are not shy to say they view Hamas a legitimate political representatives of Palestinians, not as a terrorist group.
UNRWA now has additional offices outside of its field operations. It opened an office in Turkey to “expand its political and financial support base,” backed by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a political group. Very political. Neither independent nor neutral.
UNRWA is not a neutral humanitarian actor. It is a political instrument masquerading as one. It fails every principle it proclaims.
So long as UNRWA exists, it will preserve resentment, dependency and hatred. That agency founded in the shadow of war is the leading obstacle to peace.
The headline deal which everyone pretends is a simple human-rights triumph — hostages home in exchange for prisoners and a ceasefire — is, on its face, a moral imperative. Families and politicians, of course want the war to end and hostages back home. But if we treat this swap as merely a humanitarian ledger without thinking about incentives, strategy and deterrence, we invite a replay of October 7 — not because anyone wants it, but because the arithmetic of the deal makes another mass-carnage payoff seem rational to those who plan such crimes.
Palestinian Arabs wave Hamas flags atop the Red Cross truck bringing releases terrorists to the West Bank in November 2024
Here’s the cold calculus the bland statements miss.
Hostages for prisoners. Civilians for killers. A handful for hundreds. These trades have an immediate human relief value. The cost, however, is structural: they reset the reward function for terrorism. If a violent raid can reliably purchase the release of leadership, fighters, and political capital — and if the international response includes legal actions that delegitimize the responding state — then the net effect is to make mass atrocity an instrument of statecraft.
Celebrations for released Palestinian Arab terrorists in 2014
But the mathematics isn’t just – and must not be viewed as – the prisoner-to-hostage ratio. It includes the defensive response: the likely military, political, and territorial consequences of the assault. Hamas should be forced to accept that math too. If it contemplates another October 7-style operation as it has promised to do repeatedly, it must understand that the outcome will not be a tidy prisoner exchange and a televised victory lap. It will be the destruction of leadership and the decimation of military infrastructure, with broad international support for the defensive measures taken to prevent a repeat.
Which brings us to the international legal theater now playing out: the ICJ’s “genocide” accusations, the vociferous statements from states threatening arrest of Israeli officials, and the diplomatic embrace of Palestinian statehood in some quarters. These actions, however well intended by their proponents, have immediate strategic effects. They amplify Hamas’s narrative of global validation and, crucially, complicate the deterrent effect of defensive operations. If a state in self-defense risks being publicly criminalized or its leaders subject to arrest, the calculus of deterrence is altered – for the entire world.
So, what should sensible governments do if they insist on both protecting Palestinian rights and preventing another October 7? Two practical propositions:
If regional governments want backing for Palestinian statehood and avoid terrorism in their own countries, they should drop the ICJ case. the Arab and Muslim countries which backed the U.S. ceasefire plan should pressure South Africa and other countries which brought the case to drop the charges and let diplomacy take center stage. Law and diplomacy should be tools of stability, not absolution for terror strategies.
If the desired outcome is that populations on both sides live within range of cross-border terror and reprisals, then investing in defensive infrastructure as a bridge to a political solution is a rational step. The United Nations and donor states should be pressed to fund a replacement barrier between Gaza and Israel — walls and surveillance that reduce the risk of mass infiltrations, so that the question of where futures lie for Palestinians becomes a matter of state-building and safety inside Gaza, not a perpetual recruitment slogan for militancy.
Hamas breaks through security fence between Gaza and Israel on October 7, 2023, on way for mass murder and abductions
This is not a call to abandon human rights oversight or to whitewash abuses. Accountability and adherence to international law matter. But timing and incentives matter too. Legal actions taken in the heat of war — unmoored from a strategy to prevent recurrence — can harden positions and diminish the tools of deterrence. If the objective is to keep people alive and build a durable peace that allows Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) self-determination without repeated massacres, then international actors must think like engineers of stability, not moral prosecutors on a press release timetable.
If we are serious about both ending the war and preventing future acts of mass terrorism and barbarity, we must stop evaluating deals by immediate feel-good optics alone. The right measure of a deal includes whether it reduces the incentive to perpetrate mass atrocities, strengthens deterrence against their planners, and clears a path toward political arrangements that give civilians on all sides a future. Anything less is not a solution — it is an invitation.
Imagine someone telling the Jews of Europe in 1935: accept the butchering and burning of six million of your people, and in exchange, you will once more gain sovereignty in your promised land. Would world Jewry have accepted such a bargain? Unlikely. In Judaism, the value of life as supreme trumps all—perhaps even over the divine inheritance of the Land of Israel itself.
That is why Jews do not take pride in the defenseless millions murdered in the Holocaust. They mourn them, honor their memory, and vow “never again.” The lesson is not that Jewish blood must be spilled for redemption, but that Jewish life is sacred and must be protected at all costs.
This moral foundation has been a hallmark of Jewish thought for millennia. The Talmud (Sanhedrin 4:5) teaches that “whoever saves a life saves the world.” Zionism, too, was never about blood sacrifice but about safeguarding Jewish existence and ensuring dignity, freedom, and self-determination. The rebirth of Israel is framed as a triumph of survival, not of slaughter.
Yet for Palestinian Arabs, the moral calculus is inverted. Martyrdom is not mourned but celebrated. “Glory to the martyrs,” they shout, glorifying not only the dead but the genocidal jihadists of Hamas who carried out the October 7 massacre of unarmed Jews. Streets, schools, and summer camps are named for suicide bombers and killers. Death in the service of destroying Jews is not a tragedy but an achievement.
Columbia University placard of “Glory to the Martyrs”
This glorification of death is not limited to fringe radicals. The majority of Gazans have always supported slaughtering Jewish civilians in Israel. Yasser Arafat, the father of the Palestinian national movement, repeatedly praised the “martyrs” who died attacking Israelis, insisting that “our blood is cheap compared to the goal [Jerusalem].” His successor, Mahmoud Abbas, continues the same practice. He honors terrorists killed while attacking Israelis, declaring that “we bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem.” The Palestinian Authority, under Abbas, even pays stipends to the families of those who die murdering Jews—the so-called “martyrs’ fund.”
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas blesses blood “spilled for Jerusalem”
The same ethos echoed recently in the United States. At the People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit, Michigan in August 2025, the crowd erupted in cheers for Gaza. Lameess Mahanna, sporting a shirt of the Palestine Youth Movement—employed at Columbia University—declared that the end of Israel would be “justice.” (1:35:00) She closed her remarks by leading the audience in a chant: “Say it clear and say it loud: Gaza, you make us proud!”
If Gaza, in her telling, is suffering a “genocide,” how can its dead make her and the thousands who echoed her cry, “proud?” The answer is chilling: because human life is secondary. For her, for Hamas, for the Palestinian leadership stretching from Arafat to Abbas, and from Gaza to Detroit, “justice” is not measured in lives saved, but in Israel’s disappearance. Every dead body is not a tragedy but a step toward their perverted form of “justice:” erasing the Jewish state and replacing it with Arab Muslim rule.
This is the precise inverse of the Jewish ideal. Jews mourn their murdered; Palestinians exalt theirs. Jews sanctify life; Hamas sanctifies death. Jews seek peace with dignity; Palestinian leaders glorify death as the path to victory. The Jewish lesson of the Holocaust is the necessity of Jewish strength to prevent further massacres. The Palestinian lesson of their own history is that more massacres are required for them to have “dignity.”
Which brings us to the central question: can two peoples animated by such irreconcilable values ever truly coexist? One side views life as sacred above all else. The other views life as expendable, even desirable, when spent in the service of destroying its cohabitants.
Coexistence demands a shared commitment to life. Without that, “peace” is a dangerous mirage—a prelude to slaughter, the ultimate source of perverted pride.
In many societies around the world, the concepts of honor and dignity are considered sacred. They are meant to reflect integrity, courage, and the moral fabric of individuals and communities. But in some cultures, the language of honor has been twisted into a tool of control, oppression, and even justification for murder—particularly against women.
“Honor killings” represent one of the most brutal manifestations of this warped morality. These acts of violence—often carried out by family members—are meant to “restore” honor allegedly tarnished by a relative’s behavior. In this framework, dignity is no longer something inherent in the individual, but something projected onto them by a society steeped in twisted religious patriarchy and fear of shame.
Honor killing by West Bank Muslim man
Across the world, honor killings persist, especially in parts of Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Gaza regularly report killings tied to perceived slights like refusing an arranged marriage, or even being a victim of rape. In such societies, a woman’s body and choices are not her own. They are just tools in a selfish calculus.
It is especially revolting to note that some societies legally protect these “honor killings.” The Palestinian Authority still has the Jordanian Penal Code No. (16) of 1960, and the Palestinian Penal Code No. (74) of 1936 in the Gaza Strip which provide reduced sentences for such family murders of girls.
Unsurprisingly, societies that bless the murder of women and girls for “honor,” have no compunction about sacrificing them for the dignity of everyone. Gaza’s leaders send women and children into harm’s way while they hide underground. They have even less regard for female enemies: Gazan soldiers and civilians marched into Israel on October 7, 2023 and raped women in front of their families and burned girls alive.
The radical jihadists in Gaza have a vastly different definition about honor than people in the Global North. Insisting that a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict meet Gazan’s measure of dignity is a death sentence for women, girls and Jews in the Middle East.
First One Through 