The Gaza War: Why Israel Is Fighting and Why It Cannot Stop
The war in Gaza is the most morally misrepresented conflict of the 21st century. To read most international coverage, you would think two roughly equivalent parties are locked in a cycle of mutual violence with shared blame and murky origins. None of that is true.
Israel is a liberal democracy of nine million people, surrounded by neighbors a significant portion of whom have spent seventy-five years trying to destroy it. Gaza is governed — has been governed since 2007 — by Hamas, an Islamist organization whose founding covenant calls for the obliteration of the Jewish state and whose worldview is closer to seventh-century theocracy than to any recognizable modern political movement. This is not a territorial dispute between two nationalisms with competing but legitimate claims. It is a democracy defending its existence against an organization that regards Jewish life as something to be extinguished.
The events of October 7, 2023 made this unmistakable. Hamas sent thousands of fighters across the border to murder 1,200 people — burning families alive, executing children, committing systematic sexual violence, and taking 250 hostages back into Gaza. It was the largest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust. Hamas leaders did not deny it. They celebrated it on television.
The international response that followed — the immediate calls for Israeli restraint, the protests framing Israel as the aggressor, the United Nations resolutions — revealed something important: a significant portion of the world had already decided, before any Israeli soldier entered Gaza, that Jewish self-defense was the problem. This is not analysis. It is a very old prejudice in modern clothing.
Israel’s military campaign in Gaza is not collective punishment. It is the systematic dismantling of a military infrastructure that Hamas deliberately buried beneath a civilian population. Hamas built its tunnels under hospitals. It stored weapons in schools. It positioned rocket launchers in residential courtyards. This was not incidental — it was doctrine. Hamas understood that dead Palestinian civilians were more useful to its cause than living ones, because the cameras would follow the bodies and the world would blame Israel. It has largely been correct, which is one of the great moral failures of contemporary geopolitics.
The civilian toll in Gaza is tragic and real. Israel bears responsibility for the precision of its operations, and legitimate debate exists about specific strikes and decisions. But the architecture of Palestinian civilian suffering was designed and built by Hamas, not Israel. An army fighting an enemy that uses its own people as shields faces an impossible dilemma — and the blame for that dilemma belongs to the side that created it.
The deeper question the conflict forces is one the international community refuses to answer honestly: does Israel have the right to actually win? Not to manage, not to contain, not to de-escalate — but to defeat an enemy that attacked it? Every other democracy in the world would say yes without hesitation if the same thing happened to them. The standard applied to Israel is the only one of its kind.
Gaza did not have to become what it became. Israel withdrew every soldier and settler from the territory in 2005, a unilateral concession made in the hope that Palestinians would build something. Hamas used the space to build a war machine instead. The people of Gaza are the primary victims of that choice — but the choice was Hamas’s, not Israel’s.
The conflict will not end with a negotiated coexistence between Israel and Hamas. Organizations that define themselves by the destruction of their neighbor do not moderate over time — they calcify. It will end when Hamas is destroyed as a military and governing force, when Gaza is administered by something that does not regard murder as policy, and when the international community finally holds Palestinian leadership to the same standards it demands of everyone else.
That is not an Israeli fantasy. It is the only scenario in which Palestinian civilians and Israeli civilians both get to live normal lives. The obstacle to that future is not Israel.