Shabbat shalom!
Sadly, we have just passed day 700 of Israel’s war with Hamas. Seven hundred days since October 7, 2023, the day Hamas carried out the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Seven hundred days of tunnels and rockets, funerals and rubble, endless cease-fire talks that, lately, yield nothing but more stalling. And above all, seven hundred days of agony for the hostages and their families, who wake each morning not knowing if their loved ones are still alive in Hamas’s tunnels of cruelty.
The attempted genocide of that day did not end with its victims. It tore something open in the Israeli psyche. They live now with a rawness they cannot shake: the knowledge that their neighbors danced in the streets as Jews were slaughtered, that women were raped as trophies, that children were dragged screaming into Gaza and remain there still. The damage is not only physical but spiritual. Israelis carry both the grief of October 7 and the burden of a world that treats their self-defense as a crime.
It is against this backdrop that we must ask: how does one fight a war against an enemy like Hamas? Unlike the Nazis, who however diabolical, cloaked their genocide in euphemism and bureaucracy, Hamas aired their atrocities live. They paraded women through the streets, filmed themselves burning families alive, and posted the carnage online. Hitler said “resettlement”; Hamas says “resistance.” Evil once wore a mask. Now it boasts openly.
The Allies in World War II understood a fundamental truth: appeasement is suicide when your adversary’s ideology is extermination. Churchill warned, “You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth.” The Allies didn’t negotiate with Hitler; they demanded unconditional surrender. Berlin burned not out of cruelty but necessity.
Israel faces the same reality but under different rules. Hamas has perfected a trick Hitler never mastered: embedding themselves in hospitals, schools, and mosques so every bomb dropped becomes propaganda. Allied commanders never faced such a trap. Israel does, has fallen deep into that trap, and is now pilloried for daring to fight back.
The ongoing cease-fire negotiations illustrate the futility of compromise. Hamas refuses to surrender, disarm, or give up its rule in Gaza. What they demand is a “pause”, a cease-fire that would leave their power intact, their ideology unbroken, and their hostages still in chains. Imagine if Hitler had asked the Allies in 1945 for a cease-fire that left the Wehrmacht in Berlin and the SS in charge of the camps. It would have been absurd. Yet today, the world pressures Israel to accept precisely that.
This has left Israel in a position the Allies never faced: it has become a pariah. In 1945, the Allies emerged from the rubble of Europe as liberators. Civilian deaths in Dresden or Hamburg were tragic but accepted as the cost of ending tyranny. Israel, by contrast, is condemned not because its war is unjust, but because of the way it is forced to fight it. Images of destruction dominate global screens, blotting out the moral clarity of the cause. The mainstream media gobbles up and amplifies Palestinian propaganda turning it into social media click bait that not only feeds anti-Israel sentiment, but also ignites and fuels historic levels of antisemitism in the Jewish diaspora around the world.
And yet, what is the alternative? To fight with “restraint” against such zealotry is to guarantee stalemate, hostage deaths, and Hamas’s survival. To fight as the Allies once fought is to invite condemnation and isolation. Win the war and lose the world, or lose the war and invite another October 7.
This raises the uncomfortable question of complicity. Yes, there are children beneath the rubble, innocent in their suffering. But Hamas was elected in 2006 and never ousted. Crowds cheered on October 7. Schools teach martyrdom. Most damning of all, not a single Palestinian has risked themselves to provide information about the Israeli hostages. Even under Nazi terror, there were Europeans who defied the Gestapo to hide Jews. In Gaza? Silence. Where are the Schindlers? That absence of moral courage is itself an indictment.
But Israel’s struggle is not only about Israel. The world itself has a stake in the defeat of Hamas and the jihadist ideology it embodies. A movement that sanctifies terror, revels in atrocity, and brands genocide as “resistance” cannot be allowed to survive. Its vanquishing is not merely an Israeli imperative but a global one. Yet, astonishingly, the world flirts with rewarding this terrorism by granting Palestine statehood at the United Nations this September. To do so would be to hand Hamas a victory it could never achieve on the battlefield and signal that murder and hostage-taking pay. It would be like the Munich Agreement in 1938 that rewarded Hitler for his agression, dressed up in diplomatic language.
Military victory alone is not enough. The Allies understood this. Nuremberg was not just punishment, but education. German society was forced to confront its complicity. Schools were rebuilt, curricula rewritten, propaganda dismantled. Over time, Nazism went from proud ideology to global shame. Israel must insist on the same for Gaza: not just the destruction of Hamas’s tunnels and arsenals, but the dismantling of its ideology. Gaza’s textbooks must change. Its mosques must stop preaching martyrdom. Its political culture must learn that power flows from compromise, not jihad.
This is not fantasy. The Arab world itself has begun a process of de-radicalization. Saudi Arabia, once the prime exporter of Wahhabi jihad, has reined in clerics, rewritten textbooks, and turned toward modernization. The UAE has built a model of pragmatic Islam that tolerates Jews, hosts interfaith conferences, and prizes economic growth over holy war. Even Egypt and Jordan, once sworn enemies, have kept peace with Israel for decades. If Saudi Arabia can de-radicalize after 9/11, if the UAE can pivot from Salafi preachers to the Abraham Accords, why not Gaza?
This is why Richard Haass argues in Foreign Affairs that Israel cannot settle for permanent occupation. A two-state solution is not a gift but a necessity. It is Israel’s only chance to remain Jewish and democratic without being consumed by perpetual war. Just as the Allies rebuilt Germany with the Marshall Plan, Israel and its partners must rebuild Palestine with a program of de-radicalization and state-building. It will take time. It took decades for Germans to own their shame. But history shows it is possible, if reconstruction follows destruction.
So yes, Hamas earns the label “worse than Nazis.” Not in scale, but in shamelessness, in reveling in bloodshed, in the silence of those who cheer or stay quiet while atrocities are committed in their name. Israel must finish what the Allies once finished: the unconditional defeat of genocidal ideology. But the story cannot end there. Churchill warned in 1946 that “the empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”Victory without reconstruction is merely the prelude to another war.
It happened in Germany. It is happening in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. It can happen in Palestine. But only if the world insists on de-radicalization as surely as it once insisted on de-Nazification. And if today’s cease-fire negotiations teach us anything, it is this: peace cannot be built on Hamas’s terms. It can only begin once Hamas, like the Nazis before them, is stripped of both power and legitimacy, even if doing so leaves Israel condemned in the court of world opinion.
Stay safe everyone!
Brad out.
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