The war Hamas wanted and the war the world pretends to see

This war did not fall from the sky. On October 7, Hamas crossed the border into Israel and carried out mass murder. They went house to house, burned families alive, raped, tortured, dragged hostages away. More than one thousand Israelis were killed and hundreds were kidnapped in one day.

If you do that to any serious state, there will be consequences. If you do it to a Jewish state that was created on the ashes of the Holocaust, the idea that it will just absorb the blow and go back to business as usual belongs to a fantasy world. 

Hamas knew exactly what it was doing. It wanted a war. It wanted a huge reaction. It wanted pictures of ruins and dead civilians. That is the strategy.

The result is a catastrophe in Gaza. Gaza health authorities say more than seventy thousand people have been killed since the war began. 

Entire neighborhoods are gone. Families are wiped out. You do not have to like this Israeli government to say honestly that the human cost is terrible. Only someone who has never seen war can pretend otherwise.

But now look at the way the conflict is framed. Gaza is called the worst crime on earth. The word genocide is thrown on every wall, shouted in every march. The comparison is always the same. Israel is Nazi Germany. Palestinians are the new Jews.

It is simply not true, and anyone who can read numbers knows it.

The Syrian war has killed well over half a million people and possibly more than six hundred thousand over the last decade and a half. 

In Yemen the United Nations estimated around three hundred seventy seven thousand deaths by the end of 2021, most of them from hunger and disease caused by the war. 

In the Congo, wars and their consequences since the late nineteen nineties have taken well over five million lives, one of the deadliest crises on the planet since the Second World War. In Ethiopia the war in Tigray is estimated to have killed between three hundred thousand and eight hundred thousand people, including from famine and lack of medical care.

Where were the endless marches, the weekly global rallies, the permanent obsession with the word genocide for these people

They barely existed.

The message is clear. The world accepts mass death as long as it is far enough away and does not involve Jews. The moment Jews are part of the story, the moral volume goes to maximum and every protest movement on earth suddenly discovers its conscience. 

Gaza is horrifying, but it is not the only large scale slaughter in our era. It is the one that fits a certain political script.

Now add one more element. Hamas did not build a normal army. It built a fortress inside its own civilian population. It dug thousands of tunnels under homes, mosques, schools, hospitals. It launched rockets from crowded streets. It stored weapons inside civilian buildings. Its leaders hid under hospitals with command centers and prisoners. This is not an accident. This is the model.

When you adopt that model, your own people become your armor. Every civilian death becomes content. 

Every dead child becomes a ready made poster. Hamas uses Palestinian bodies as both shield and weapon. It gambled with its population and it keeps gambling, because every extra hundred dead makes the pressure on Israel bigger and the propaganda more effective.

There are consequences to that choice. When you choose to attack a country in that way and then hide behind your civilians, the battlefield becomes a slaughterhouse. Israel is blamed for every death. Hamas is treated as if it had no agency, no responsibility, as if it were just a spirit floating above events.

This is not how we talk about any other armed group in the world

In Europe, and especially in France, this conflict has become a grotesque theatre. Parties and movements that have nothing serious to offer on schools, hospitals, jobs or crime suddenly become passionate defenders of Gaza. 

The extreme left, the identity obsessed activists, the Islamist networks, parts of the far right, all understand the same thing. Screaming about Palestine is the cheapest way to buy attention and moral respect.

They do not talk about Syria. They do not talk about Yemen. They do not talk about Tigray. They do not talk about black Africans dying by the millions in Congo. 

They talk about the one conflict that allows them to point at Jews and shout. They use the Palestinian cause as a stage prop for their own sick politics. They turn the streets into permanent rallies where Jewish schools need extra protection and Jewish kids learn to keep their identity quiet.

Call it what it is. This is not solidarity. It is exploitation.

And in the middle of this circus stands a simple reality. A Jewish state, attacked in a brutal way, responded with huge force against a terror movement that openly calls for its destruction. The response is not pretty. War never is. Mistakes are made, terrible ones, and innocent people pay with their lives. Israelis should argue about this, and they do, loudly, every day. 

But the idea that Israel has no right to hit back, that it must answer mass murder with symbolic gestures and polite words, is another way of saying that Jewish lives are once again negotiable.

Hamas heard the world carefully. It heard years of talk about Israel being a colonial project with no right to defend itself. It tested the theory on October 7. It expected Israel to be trapped. If Israel reacts, it is called genocidal. If it does not react, it shows weakness and invites the next massacre.

This is the reality that many commentators in comfortable studios refuse to face.

You can care deeply about Palestinian civilians and still tell the truth about Hamas. You can oppose occupation, demand political change, push for a different future, and still say openly that taking the decision to slaughter civilians and kidnap children has a price. 

You can insist that Jewish history matters and that the memory of the Holocaust is not a toy that can be thrown from one side to another depending on the slogan of the week.

There are no clean hands in war, but there is a basic difference between a state, however imperfect, that is trying to defend its people, and a jihad movement that built its entire strategy on turning its own civilians into permanent human shields.

The dead of Gaza deserve more than to be used as props by Hamas and as slogans by activists in Paris and London. The Jews of Israel deserve more than to be told that they have no right to defend themselves or that doing so turns them into Nazis.

An honest conversation starts from two truths.

Hamas chose this war. And there are consequences.