640 Days On: Israel/Hamas—The West’s Moral Reckoning

(essay)

The following is in response to an email I received last week. The person writing wasn’t hostile or inflammatory—just trying to make sense of things. Their concern was genuine. And because we live in a moment when so many people seem to speak past one another, I appreciated the tone. I’ve chosen to share both the question and my reply (in longer form here) in the hope that it might be helpful to others navigating these same questions.

With respect, Peter, can’t one protest the massive number of civilian deaths in Gaza without being “pro-Hamas”? Are you saying this level of death—including children, aid workers, and journalists—is justified because of what Hamas did? I’m not questioning your feelings or your love for the Jewish people, but can’t we hold grief for Gaza’s dead too?

Yes. Of course we can. And we must.

I want to start there. Everything that follows hinges on it. The death of innocent people—especially children—is an unspeakable tragedy. If we lose the ability to mourn for people simply because they were born on the other side of a border, or raised speaking another tongue, something inside us has already begun to decay.

And that’s only the beginning of the answer. Because compassion without clarity can quickly turn into confusion—and confusion, in wartime, can lead people to take positions that unwittingly support those who cause the suffering.

I’ll speak plainly.

Hamas is not a misunderstood political movement. It is not the inevitable result of occupation. It is a radical, Islamist terror organization built and sustained by the Iranian regime, with a singular purpose: the elimination of the State of Israel. Not its current administration or any other, not a territorial conflict—but an ideological wish to destroy the country and its seven million Jewish inhabitants. This is not politics. This is a religious edict among Hamas members and its supporters. The goal as stated in their charter is death. This is a quote directly from the original Hamas Charter of 1988. Article 7 is among the most chilling and revealing passages. It reads:

"The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say: O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him."
(Hamas Charter, Article 7 – quoting a hadith from Sahih Muslim)

The massacre they carried out on October 7, 2023—now 640 days ago—was not an act of resistance. It was a pogrom. They hunted Jews in their homes, murdered entire families, raped women beside the bodies of their children, and set human beings on fire. The overwhelming number of people they targeted weren’t soldiers. They were civilians. Infants. Grandparents. Holocaust survivors.

And still, Hamas holds hostages. Hostages have been—and are again—their lifeblood. From Hamas’s perspective, no matter what “deal” is struck, they will never give them all up. The hostages are leverage. Currency. As of now, around fifty remain in Gaza. Some are believed to be alive. Many are not. Some were murdered early on. Among them were Kfir Bibas, a nine-month-old baby; his four-year-old brother, Ariel; and their mother, Shiri.

For months, Hamas claimed they’d been killed in an Israeli airstrike. That was a lie. In February of this year, their bodies were returned to Israel. Forensic investigators found that the family had likely been strangled or beaten to death by an evil hand—their injuries staged to mimic the effects of an airstrike. A deception, manufactured to cover a most horrific, wanton murder. Their father, Yarden, was released alive. He buried his wife and two sons on February 26, 2025.

What words are there for that?

While your question comes from a place of moral concern—and I’m assuming here, putting words in your mouth, so forgive me—you may be wondering why Israel has become so violent. You may be asking whether the IDF still fights to protect the people of Israel, or whether it has crossed into something vengeful, perhaps even genocidal, as so many across the world now claim—in language that rings with ancient echoes of the blood libel. Not that you’ve used the word “genocide” in your note, and I appreciate that. But those who do must understand: to level such a charge against a nation—a charge that is both legally and morally the gravest possible—is the rhetorical equivalent of calling someone a mass murderer. And once that label sticks, once people begin to believe it, the “moral” response is no longer protest. It’s elimination. Violence becomes justified. Necessary. Even righteous. That’s what’s being invited when that word is used. It puts a target not only on the State of Israel, but on every Jew who supports it—including me.

These are serious questions. And they deserve real answers.

Here’s one I would pose to you in return: Why were there no great numbers of civilian deaths in Lebanon—even as they were roundly defeated?

The answer is this: because their civilians were not trapped in exposed buildings while their governments—or in Hezbollah’s case, their de facto government, along with their entire military wing—hid in a 350-kilometer-long underground fortress beneath their feet. In Gaza, that’s precisely what exists. A vast, nearly billion-dollar, Qatari-funded subterranean city, used not to protect civilians, but to shield those who use them as human shields. It’s one of the most cynical military arrangements in modern warfare—a strategy that not only exploits civilian suffering but directly violates the Geneva Convention’s laws of warfare.

And here’s the bitter irony: while Israel is a signatory to those conventions—and generally abides by their laws—Hamas is not. Hamas follows none of the internationally agreed-upon norms. Imagine you’re a boxer. You’ve come to the fight understanding and following the rules of the State Boxing Committee. But your opponent? Your opponent sees fit to bring a handgun and a hunting knife. No one stops him. No one points out the inequity of the fight. They even cheer him on.

There’s another key difference. Since Israel left Gaza in 2005, its human intelligence capabilities there have diminished significantly. Hamas has ruled the strip with an iron grip, executing collaborators, silencing dissent, and ensuring that nearly every move Israel makes comes with uncertainty. In contrast, in Lebanon, there are those—Christian, Druze, even Shiite—who actively wish to see Hezbollah destroyed. Some have aided Israel in its pinpoint operations, making possible a series of highly effective, targeted strikes that have badly degraded Hezbollah’s military infrastructure. This contrast matters. It’s not only about the terrain or the tunnels. It’s also about the cultural environment in which each war is being fought, along with the moral choices Israel is forced to make, often with tragically limited information.

Yes, of course, Israel is one of the most advanced and highly trained militaries in the world. But even the best-trained fighters bleed. And its soldiers—many of them still teenagers—die within these inequities. Five young Israeli soldiers were killed in Gaza just this week. Their parents grieve over them just the same. The fact that Israel possesses such military strength should be proof of its restraint. If there were none, the war would have been over in weeks or days. Where, I ask, is the world’s empathy for the Jewish people? Or does only being powerless, being "oppressed," qualify as reason to show support?

Thank God, Hezbollah—despite trying—did not succeed in taking hostages. That distinction is more than a technicality. The presence of Israeli hostages in Gaza radically alters the nature of the conflict and the way Israel is forced to fight. Not just operationally, but psychologically. Israel doesn’t bomb indiscriminately—not just because it wouldn’t, but because it can’t. Its own people are buried in the rubble, too. And unlike Hamas, Israelis care deeply for their people. If you need a reminder, recall that over one thousand terrorists, many with blood on their hands—including, astonishingly, Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of October 7—were released in exchange for a single Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, in 2011.

And yes, blame has been placed on Netanyahu. Some of it may be warranted. But let’s be honest—no one in the opposition has offered a categorically different plan. Because there is no clean plan. There’s no magical solution to a war in which one side values life and the other does not. Where one side grieves its dead, and the other glorifies them as martyrs—using their deaths in a highly successful propaganda war against Israel, all while its leaders hide underground among the very hostages they’ve kidnapped.

The question that lingers for me, alongside the civilian death toll, is what should Israel do? And furthermore, what would you do if this weren't hypothetical? If it were your family member kidnapped. Your cousin. Your mother. Your sister raped by gleeful adherents of a well-trained terror organization, in some cases only a few kilometers away. Would you let them remain? Would you give them carte blanche to regroup and use the very same formula—commit atrocities, hide in tunnels, and allow their own citizens to be killed for photo ops? All to manipulate a callow—and in many cases, Jew-hating or Jew-fearing—world into once again scorning not Hamas, not Iran, not the oppressive societies they themselves would never choose to live in, but Israel? The Middle East’s only democracy.

The cycle of violence so often mentioned must sometimes be broken by a simple rule: one side wins, the other side loses. Ambiguity is not the pathway to peace, but to endless war.

Think of where you live now. How is it that you are made safe? You and I, though we may be loath to admit it, are made safe from the barrel of a gun. Imagine someone comes to your home to do you or your family grave bodily harm. You pick up the phone and call 911. Not because the police sing carols or pass out cake to your pursuers, but because they have the ability to stop them. And they do this, when needed, with lethal force. No matter our pacifistic tendencies, we all know this.

And then there is Qatar—aside from Iran, the world’s primary address for the sponsorship and financing of Islamist terror.

The same Qatari regime that hosts Hamas’s senior leadership in five-star hotels is treated, absurdly, as a neutral intermediary in this war. Qatar has spent decades buying goodwill in the West—through elite universities, think tanks, lobbying, media outlets, and massive real estate deals. They’ve invested billions in the soft machinery of influence. And it’s worked. They are rarely scrutinized. Almost never named. And yet, there they are: Hamas’s banker, landlord, and mouthpiece.

A tacit slave-holding state, Qatar—radical Islamist in nature, openly supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood—is home to barely 300,000 Qatari citizens. A nation with the population of St. Louis has somehow managed to bribe its way into nearly every echelon of Western power. The scale of its influence is staggering. Few politicians will speak of it, and fewer still will oppose it.

In the United States, politicians from both major parties—Democrats and Republicans alike—have taken Qatari money, through legal and less-than-legal channels. Some have become, whether consciously or not, apologists for a regime that sponsors terror, represses its own labor force, silences dissent, and shelters the architects of the October 7 pogrom in luxury villas outside Doha. It is hard to say whether they are puppets or just useful tools—but the effect is the same.

And all the while, Qatar presents itself as the bridge to peace. The negotiator. The lifeline. It is a grotesque farce. And the world, mostly, plays along.

This isn’t a time for posturing. It’s a time for moral seriousness.

And despite the overwhelming darkness of the last 21 months, there may be reason to believe that the worst of it is behind us. Through a combination of technological genius, diplomatic acuity, covert brilliance, and unparalleled resolve, Israel has battered Hezbollah—until only months ago, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s deadliest proxy army. The Islamic Republic is not merely a state actor, but a theocratic regime fueled by an apocalyptic ideology and a genocidal hatred of the Jewish state.

Iran, in its most direct confrontation with Israel to date, suffered bitter losses in the recent 12-day war. And now, with Syria’s Assad out of the picture, the appetite for escalation among Israel’s enemies appears, at least for the moment, to have waned significantly.

Does that mean peace is near? In no way is that certain. But it means that for the first time since October 7, peace feels imaginable. The horizon isn’t clear, but it’s visible again. A crack has opened.

That doesn’t mean celebration. It doesn’t mean Israel and its allies let their guard down. But it does mean we can begin to speak—not about return to "normal," whatever that was—but about a future shaped by courage, restraint, and a willingness to speak the truth.

I know how distant that still feels.

But I also know this: if we are willing to name things for what they are, and to mourn what is lost without surrendering to those who caused it, then something of the human spirit remains intact.

With respect, and cautious hope,

Peter