Self-Defence or Genocide?

My Stand on Israel & Gaza

It has taken me a long time to write this article. The situation in Israel and Gaza is so complex, so emotionally charged, and so difficult to see clearly through the fog of war and propaganda, that to write with any integrity requires immense care. I have hesitated, wanting to ensure every detail is right. The foundation for this post was laid in the weeks immediately following the horrors of October 7th, 2023, when I researched and produced a German-language YouTube video to make sense of the unfolding tragedy. Much of that historical research forms the basis of the arguments I will lay out here.

The petitions land in my inbox with a relentless, dull thud. Sign here, they implore, to punish Israel. To boycott. To divest. To condemn. From the UK to Australia, a chorus rises, demanding the recognition of a Palestinian state, a gesture they believe will somehow wash away the blood and the rubble of the past two years. I feel the pull, the societal pressure to join the righteous chant. But I cannot.

As a German and a Catholic, a silence has been broken in me, a seal cracked. The ancient, ugly whispers of antisemitism have become respectable again, dressed up in the fashionable garb of anti-Zionism. "It’s not the Jews we hate," they say, these intelligent, progressive people on my social media feeds, "it’s the Zionists." It’s a distinction without a difference, a semantic game that provides cover for an old poison. It’s like saying you’re not anti-Catholic, you just despise the Vatican. It’s a lie. A convenient, soul-soothing lie that allows them to comport the worst stereotypes—that a shadowy Jewish elite rules the world, manipulates finance, and pulls the strings of power.

Let me be unequivocally clear: I am not neutral in this debate. I have never been. I have always been pro-Israel.

This does not mean my heart doesn’t break. It does. It shatters when I see the images from Gaza—the destruction, the devastating loss of life, the hollowed eyes of starving children. I don’t hesitate to say that it is obvious to me that Israel and the IDF have made grave mistakes in this long and brutal war. It is fair and necessary to debate whether their response has always been proportional. I can even entertain the cynical thought that dark political motives are at play, that Bibi Netanyahu might have prolonged this agony to evade his own legal reckoning.

But that is where my concessions end.

Beyond that, it feels as though the world has unsheathed its long knives for Israel. Listening to the vicious, frothing condemnations, it’s impossible not to feel the glee, the thinly veiled delight that people can finally, finally indulge their antisemitic impulses and get away with it, cloaked in the righteous mantle of social justice.

Because let’s be honest: for many in our modern, secular world, the very existence of Israel is a provocation. A people chosen by God? An ancient claim to a sliver of land they "occupy"? The sheer, unapologetic success of the Jewish people sticks in the craw of an ideology obsessed with manufactured equity. Jews, a mere 0.2% of the global population, have won over 20% of all Nobel Prizes. They have excelled in finance, in film, in science, in business.

The woke are outraged. How can this be? How is this fair?

The narrative writes itself: this success must be ill-gotten. This chosen people must be ruthless, prepared to kill to achieve their goals. And Gaza, they cry, is the perfect, bloody proof.

And just like that, we are back in the fetid trenches of the 1930s, debating the very same arguments Hitler laid out in Mein Kampf.

A Foundation of Law, Not Theft

Before we litigate the present, we must understand the past. The accusation that Israel is an illegitimate, colonial entity occupying stolen land is a foundational lie of the anti-Israel movement. The historical record is clear.

Jews have lived in the land of Israel for over 3,000 years. It is their ancestral, cultural, and religious cradle. After centuries of foreign rule, the land fell to the Ottoman Empire. In World War I, the Ottomans made the fatal mistake of siding with Germany and became an aggressor state. They lost. As a consequence, their empire was dismantled by the victorious Allies.

Under the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, the Ottoman Empire legally ceded the territory of Palestine to the British. This was not a theft; it was a internationally recognized transfer of sovereignty, a spoil of war. This treaty explicitly upheld the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which promised a "national home for the Jewish people." To deny the legality of this would be to deny that Alsace-Lorraine is French or that Germany lost its eastern territories after WWII. Painful? Yes. A consequence of losing a war you helped start? Absolutely. That is how international law works. It is not the fault of those who won the war, but of those who started it.

A History Written in Blood and Survival

From the moment of its birth in 1948, Israel was forced to fight for its life. Five Arab armies invaded, vowing to annihilate the nascent state. Miraculously, Israel survived, but the war created a tragic refugee crisis on both sides—one that the Arab world has cynically cultivated for decades, while Israel absorbed nearly a million Jewish refugees expelled from those same Arab lands.

In 1967, the Arab states again massed for the kill. In a stunning act of pre-emptive self-defence, Israel won the Six-Day War, capturing the West Bank from Jordan (which had annexed it illegally) and Gaza from Egypt. This is the origin of the "occupation." But one cannot legally occupy territory that has no sovereign owner, and these lands were captured in a defensive war, held as a buffer against future annihilation. Their status was meant to be resolved by negotiation.

But negotiation requires a partner for peace. The Palestinian leadership, under Yasser Arafat, chose terror instead. And yet, even against this backdrop, brave Israelis reached for peace. The Oslo Accords in the 1990s represented a profound, hopeful leap, earning leaders on both sides the Nobel Peace Prize. But this hope was assassinated along with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was murdered not by a Palestinian, but by a Jewish extremist who could not accept peace. This painful truth shows the complex and often tragic sacrifices Israel has made internally in its quest for a resolution that its neighbours have consistently rejected.

The Gaza Experiment: A Paradise Lost to Hate

Still, the dream of "land for peace" never died in Israel. In 2005, in a gesture of profound hope, Israel unilaterally withdrew every soldier and civilian from the Gaza Strip. 8,000 settlers were forcibly uprooted from their homes. The world watched, hoping for the birth of a Mediterranean Singapore.

The hope did not survive the week.

Within hours of the Israeli withdrawal, the first rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel. The terror group Hamas remained true to its principles. In 2005 alone, they fired over 800 rockets and mortars. In 2008, it was over 3,000. On and on it went, year after bloody year, a relentless campaign of terror against Israeli civilians, only mitigated in 2011 by the deployment of the Iron Dome missile defence system.

To put this in perspective for a European, imagine Switzerland firing thousands of rockets across the Rhine into German villages, year after year. The idea is grotesque, but that was the daily, terror-filled reality for southern Israel.

In 2006, the Palestinians held their first, and to this day, their only, legislative election. Hamas won. And their first act was not to build a state, but to dismantle democracy itself, before staging a violent coup in 2007 to seize absolute power.

Hamas’s 1988 charter states, "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it," and quotes a call to "fight the Jews and kill them" until the very stones and trees cry out to betray a hiding Jew.

How do you negotiate with that? How do you make peace with an entity whose entire reason for being is your annihilation?

After this takeover, both Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade to stop the flow of weapons. The media calls Gaza an "open-air prison," but they conveniently ignore the Egyptian border crossing at Rafah. Egypt, a fellow Muslim Arab nation, refuses to open its border to Palestinian refugees. Why? Because not even they want the Hamas problem on their soil, nor does any other Arab state. Isn't this lack of solidarity from so-called Muslim brother states shocking? Imagine if Germany, in 2015, had refused to open its borders to refugees. The misery in Gaza is real, but it has been engineered by Hamas and enabled by the cynical hypocrisy of its neighbours.

October 7th and the Abyss

This brings us to October 7, 2023.

Behind the scenes, something remarkable was happening. Driven by the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia were on the brink of a historic peace deal, a normalization that would have reshaped the Middle East. The Saudis confirmed it themselves. This was the Abraham Accords on steroids.

This was a death sentence for Hamas. A peace deal between the custodian of Islam’s holiest sites and the Jewish state would have rendered the Palestinian cause, as defined by rejectionism and terror, utterly irrelevant. Hamas, and its patron Iran, could not allow it. They needed to burn it all down.

And so they did. The atrocities of that day were not acts of war; they were acts of pure, unadulterated evil. They were not attacks on military targets; they were a sadistic rampage against civilians. Babies were beheaded. Young women were gang-raped next to the bodies of their friends, their agony filmed and broadcast. The dead were desecrated and paraded as trophies. It was a pogrom, live-streamed for the world to see.

In the aftermath of this barbarism, Israel was faced with an existential choice. The nation was traumatized, its sense of security shattered. The government declared its objectives were clear and non-negotiable: to dismantle Hamas completely so that such an atrocity could never happen again, and to bring home the hundreds of men, women, and children dragged into captivity in Gaza. This was not a war of choice; it was a war for survival.

A Terrible Swift Sword: The War in Gaza

Israel's response, when it came, was a torrent of fire and steel. Fueled by a nation's collective trauma and a primal scream of "Never Again!", the IDF launched a military campaign of a scale and intensity not seen in this century. Entire neighborhoods in Gaza, once dense urban landscapes, were systematically flattened, their skylines erased and replaced with fields of grey rubble. The bombing was relentless. The advance of ground troops left a trail of immense destruction.

And here, we must be brutally honest with ourselves, even as we support Israel's right to exist. The sheer ferocity of this response has been shocking. It is fair, and indeed necessary, to question if this strategy is wise. Is it possible to destroy Hamas without destroying Gaza itself? Is every measure taken truly proportional to the immediate military threat?

I honestly don't know the answers. I am not a military expert. I don't live there. I am just an armchair strategist from thousands of miles away. I do find the images disturbing—who wouldn't? But so far, I have not heard anybody come up with credible alternatives. In my analysis, most commentators ultimately propose "solutions" where Israel would be forced to just put up with it all—with Hamas, with the constant threat, with the terror. Which sovereign state in the world would ever accept that?

The world has reacted with predictable outrage. Night after night, our screens have filled with these images of devastation, fueling mass protests on the streets and igniting ideological firestorms on university campuses. And how could it be otherwise? To see a child pulled from the rubble, to see a family huddling in a makeshift tent, and not feel a profound ache of empathy is to have lost a piece of one's own humanity. It is of course right to feel with those who suffer so terribly. But to feel empathy is one thing. To channel that emotion into a political verdict is another entirely. And it is in this gap between human compassion and political judgment that the most dangerous accusation of our time has taken root.

Self-Defence is Not Genocide

This brings us to the monstrous accusation of our time: genocide. It is a charge so grave it should be used with the utmost precision, yet it is now hurled with reckless abandon to criminalize Israel’s right to self-defence.

Let’s be brutally specific. Genocide is the intent to destroy a people. Israel’s intent is to destroy Hamas. Even if you trust the figures from the Hamas-run health ministry—some 60,000 killed over nearly two years—it is a tragic toll of war, but it is not genocide in a population of over two million. The civilian casualty ratio, while heartbreaking, is by all accounts lower than in other modern urban conflicts like the American-led Battle for Fallujah.

This isn't the permanent, forcible transfer of ethnic cleansing. The IDF consistently warns civilians, asking them to move temporarily from active combat zones. This is the very opposite of an intent to kill them.

The intent, the mens rea, of genocide belongs solely to Hamas. They embed their entire military infrastructure within and beneath civilian sites—in tunnels burrowed under schools, mosques, and hospitals. They use their people as human shields, a double war crime: they target Israeli civilians while hiding behind their own. They compound this by refusing to wear uniforms. They dress as civilians, fight from among civilians, and flout every international law and rule of war. This cynical tactic deliberately blurs the line between combatant and civilian, maximizing Palestinian casualties for their propaganda cameras. So I ask again: what is Israel supposed to do when its enemy refuses to identify itself and uses its own population as a battlefield?

The Propaganda of Pain: A Famine of Truth

As this war grinds on, the most insidious front is the one fought with images and lies. The latest and most vicious propaganda campaign, detailed just last month in the Wall Street Journal, accuses Israel of deliberately starving Gaza’s children.

The face of this campaign was a fragile, gaunt boy named Mohammed al-Mutawaaq. His photo was on the front page of the New York Times and the BBC, presented as definitive proof of Israeli-induced famine. The truth? Mohammed suffers from cerebral palsy, a pre-existing condition that causes his frailty. The media either didn't know or didn't care to mention it until they were called out, after the global outrage had been successfully ignited. Nor did they show the photos of his healthy, well-fed mother and brother standing beside him.

Then there was Osama al-Raqab, another emaciated child paraded as a victim of starvation. In reality, he suffers from cystic fibrosis. Not only was he not starved by Israel, but Israel actually coordinated his medical evacuation to Italy for treatment. This didn't stop the director of the Hamas-run health ministry from insisting it was a "real famine" and that claims of other illnesses were Israeli tricks.

This propaganda has a devastating real-world effect. Journalist Eitan Fischberger, embedding with the IDF in Gaza in late July, reported seeing "thousands upon thousands of pounds of baby food, baking under the Middle Eastern sun." This and nearly 600 truckloads of other aid sat undistributed because the UN refused to deliver it with IDF protection, demanding security be provided by Hamas-linked police forces instead—the very forces the UN has accused of stealing aid.

The facts are staggering. Since the war began, Israel has facilitated the entry of over 1.86 million tons of humanitarian aid into Gaza. As John Spencer of the Modern War Institute at West Point notes, this is a quantity comparable only to the Berlin Airlift. He writes, "There is no historical precedent for a military providing the level of direct aid to an enemy population that Israel has provided to Gaza."

But these facts are drowned out by a single, decontextualized photo of a sick child. Real suffering is being cruelly exploited by Hamas, and Western institutions are complicit, paralyzing the aid system and hurting the most vulnerable.

A Future Beyond Victimhood

There is no moral equivalence here. Israel is a flawed democracy, and when its soldiers commit crimes, they are investigated and can be jailed. Hamas celebrates its murderers as heroes. Israel builds bomb shelters to protect its people. Hamas builds terror tunnels to attack its neighbours. To equate the two is a sign of a profound moral rot.

The war would end tomorrow if Hamas would surrender, release its hostages, and lay down its arms. If Israel were to lay down its arms, it would be exterminated. That is the fundamental, unassailable difference.

The suffering of the Palestinian people is undeniable. And let me be clear: none of this political analysis absolves any of us of the moral duty to help those most in need. Everything possible must be done to alleviate the suffering of innocent people caught in this nightmare.

But the tragedy is compounded by the reality on the ground. It is a true dystopian hellscape. Public order has completely broken down. Armed gangs, many with ties to Hamas, block roads and loot the very aid convoys meant to save lives. The civil institutions that could manage distribution have been systematically dismantled or co-opted by Hamas over the years, replaced by a vacuum of power filled only by the gun. This is the hell Hamas has wrought—not just through war, but through nearly two decades of prioritizing terror over governance. Aid sits rotting just miles away not only because of UN paralysis, as mentioned earlier, but because there is no functioning, peaceful civil society left to distribute it.

This is why a solution will never be found as long as the world encourages Palestinians to cling to a narrative of perpetual victimhood, which absolves them of all agency and responsibility.

Just as the German people had to face the consequences of their choice to empower a genocidal madman, so too must the Palestinian people be held accountable for their choices. The choice to elect Hamas. The choice to celebrate terror. The choice to teach their children to hate.

This is not to justify their suffering. It is to say that the only path to a future of dignity and prosperity is to reject the death cult of Hamas, reject the rejectionism of the past, and build a society that values life more than it values the destruction of its neighbour. The West must stop infantilizing them and start demanding this of them.

Peace will not come from boycotts or one-sided condemnations. It will come when the world finally musters the moral clarity to distinguish between a democratic nation fighting for its survival and a genocidal terror organization fighting for its annihilation. It will come when the world finally understands that a people’s refusal to be victims is not a provocation, and their will to live is not a war crime.