Hamas thrives on victimhood—a narrative carefully manufactured and globally amplified. (Image: Politico)
Panaji, Goa: Let’s call it what it is—the problem in Gaza isn’t Hamas alone. Hamas is merely the fever, not the infection. The infection runs deeper—it’s the disease of Islamic radicalisation that has spread across societies, poisoned minds, and turned faith into a weapon. Israel is fighting a war not against an organisation, but against an ideology that refuses to coexist. And this war, brutal and unforgiving as it may seem, is the war of our times—between civilisation and the chaos of religious fanaticism.
For decades, the world has been told that peace in the Middle East depends on the two-state solution. But peace is not a document. Peace is a mindset. And the mindset within radical Islamism does not understand peace; it only understands dominance. When children are taught that martyrdom is glory, when textbooks glorify jihad, and when mosques echo with calls for annihilation of a people—what you are breeding is not a political movement, but a generation weaponised by hate. That is not resistance. That is indoctrination.
Hamas thrives on victimhood—a narrative carefully manufactured and globally amplified. Every Israeli missile strike becomes the headline. Every Hamas rocket aimed at civilians becomes a footnote. Western media, comfortably sitting in their editorial rooms, serve sympathy to terrorists and scrutiny to Israel. It’s the same old moral inversion: the terrorist becomes the victim, and the victim defending itself becomes the aggressor.
Hamas knows how to play this game. They hide behind civilians, operate from schools, mosques, and hospitals, knowing that every casualty feeds their propaganda. For them, Palestinian deaths are not tragedies; they are marketing material. The international outrage that follows is their currency, funding their relevance and recruiting their next generation of jihadists.
So let’s be blunt: Hamas doesn’t want a Palestinian state. They want an Islamic state—one free of Jews, Christians, and dissenters. Their charter doesn’t call for coexistence; it calls for extermination. And yet, the world keeps negotiating with them as if we are dealing with a political entity. You cannot negotiate with cancer. You can only remove it.
Israel’s reality is simple—it will always be at war. Not because it wants to be, but because it has no other choice. It is surrounded by enemies who do not want its borders adjusted—they want its existence erased. Every ceasefire is a pause for the enemy to reload. Every peace talk is a tactical deception.
Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Al-Qaeda, ISIS—different names, same ideology. The ideology that believes land once under Islamic rule must forever remain Islamic. That Jews have no right to exist on their ancestral homeland. That women, minorities, and modernity must all kneel before a 7th-century interpretation of faith.
Israel stands as a fortress of democracy in a desert of theocratic tyranny. It is the one place in the Middle East where Muslims can vote freely, where women can speak freely, and where the LGBTQ community is not executed for existing. And yet, it is Israel that gets demonised, sanctioned, and isolated. The irony would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous.
Hamas is not born in a vacuum. It’s born in sermons that preach supremacy. In madrassas that replace math with martyrdom. In clerics who twist verses into venom. Islamic radicalisation is not about poverty or politics—it’s about ideology.
For every young Muslim who wants peace, there are others misled by religious leaders who equate faith with violence. The disease of radicalisation spreads through the promise of paradise and the illusion of purity. It convinces the poor that killing brings glory and convinces the educated that silence is virtue.
This is the disease Israel is fighting—not in Gaza alone, but across the region. And make no mistake, the world is fighting it too. From the streets of Paris to the markets of Mumbai, from New York to Nairobi—the ideology of radical Islam has crossed borders and languages. It’s not a Middle Eastern problem. It’s a global one.
When Israel retaliates, the world cries foul. But when Hamas fires rockets, kidnaps civilians, or parades hostages, the same voices fall silent. The global Left has turned Palestinian terror into a romantic cause. The “Free Palestine” chants echo through campuses and protests, often by people who can’t even locate Gaza on a map.
But let’s ask: free Palestine from whom? From Hamas, or from Israel? Because the only entity oppressing Palestinians today is Hamas itself. They’ve turned Gaza into an open-air prison—not because of Israel’s blockades, but because of their own obsession with war. Every dollar of aid meant for food becomes a tunnel. Every shipment of cement meant for homes becomes a bunker.
And yet, the world blames Israel for defending itself. The hypocrisy is global, the bias institutional. The UN condemns Israel more than any other nation—even more than regimes that stone women or behead dissenters. Why? Because moral cowardice has become global diplomacy. It’s easier to condemn a democracy than to confront a radical ideology.
The war between Israel and Hamas is not about land—it’s about civilisation. One side builds, the other destroys. One side values life, the other glorifies death. One side uses missiles to protect its people; the other uses people to protect its missiles.
If Hamas were disarmed, there would be peace tomorrow. If Israel were disarmed, there would be no Israel tomorrow. That single sentence defines the moral compass of this conflict.
The disease of radical Islam doesn’t just want Israel gone. It wants every symbol of freedom gone—women’s rights, free speech, democracy, secularism, even rational thought. It’s an ideology allergic to modernity, and every generation that fails to confront it only ensures it mutates further.
After every terror attack, the world momentarily wakes up, mourns, and then forgets. But Israel doesn’t have that luxury. It cannot afford to forget—because forgetting is fatal. It fights every day for the right to exist, for the right to live without fear, for the right to remain free in a region that despises freedom.
The world must understand: Israel’s fight is not Israel’s alone. It is humanity’s fight against the ideology that turned 9/11 into ashes, Mumbai into a massacre, Paris into panic, and Gaza into a graveyard. The sooner the world realises this, the better prepared it will be for the battles ahead.
Hamas will fall one day. But unless the ideology that created it is dismantled, another Hamas will rise—under a different name, waving the same flag of hate. You cannot destroy an ideology with diplomacy. You destroy it by exposing it, confronting it, and refusing to appease it.
Israel’s war is eternal not because it wants it, but because the ideology opposing it demands it. And in that eternal war lies the truth of our age—that peace will only come when the disease of radicalisation is cured. Until then, Hamas will remain a symptom. The real battle is against the infection that created it.
And that, the world must finally have the courage to face.
* Savio Rodrigues is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Goa Chronicle
