(JNS) After four heroically victorious wars in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973, Israel has now twice, in quick succession, fallen into the trap of its enemies, who are also the enemies of the free civilization.

It was likely only thanks to United States President Donald Trump’s decisive support that the military strike against Iran from June 13 to 24 did not escalate into a major war. Trump’s decision to deliver a short, hard strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities restored the long-overdue respect of the Islamists, who had been defeated in horribly protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, among others.

The first trap for Israel was the temptation to try to eliminate Hamas by military means after the massacre of Oct. 7, 2023. This grave error was made because the media criticism of Israel’s airstrikes at the time of the Hamas rocket attacks in May 2021 was not identified as a perfidious dress rehearsal. It was a rehearsal for the propaganda war that has erupted since the outbreak of the Gaza war—not against the aggressors, but against the defenders.

The adversaries have thus come closer to their dual goal of dissolving Israel and Islamizing the Western world in three ways. First, European politicians are accepting refugees from Gaza. Second, the ongoing propaganda against Israel is eroding the already weakened solidarity within the Judeo-Christian cultural sphere. In addition to the divisions between left and right, there is now a division between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli. Third, blatant antisemitism is spreading, particularly on the left and in Islamist camps.

The sacrifice of its own civilian population to serve anti-Israel propaganda is Hamas’s main strategy. The current situation requires an immediate change in Israel’s Gaza strategy. This necessity is underlined by the fact that the Jewish state has no future prospects with an Islamized Europe.

A core principle for course correction is responsibility. Alongside Great Britain, which never authentically fulfilled the 1922 Mandate Treaty for Palestine and the United Nations, it is the Arab states that are responsible for the unresolved Middle East conflict.

After six Arab states attacked Israel in 1948, the United Nations enabled them to subsequently evade their responsibility for the refugees of that war. This was achieved through the construction of around 50 refugee camps. The UN’s dispensation of the Arabs from the consequences of their aggression was repeated in 1956, 1967, and 1973, with numerous resolutions preventing long-overdue border adjustments.

The alleged justification for this was a fundamentally incorrect interpretation of Article 2 of the 1945 Charter. This article protects states from becoming victims of violence, namely from “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity.” However, the UN transformed this into a protection of the aggressors from the consequences of their actions, thereby distorting the spirit of the 1945 founding assembly of the United Nations into its opposite.

The right to survival and thus to self-defense under Article 51 takes far greater precedence than what remains of the aggressors’ right to territorial integrity after incessant aggression against a neighbouring state.

The massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, was the inevitable consequence of this absurd insurance policy for the Arab side against all the consequences of its violence in wars and terrorist attacks.

The UN’s “moral” assistance today, as in 1948, is based on a partisan, truth-distorting perception and presentation of historical facts.

Thus, Israel and the rest of the Western world are facing the consequences of their uncritically enduring a subtle, fact-and-principle-distorting brainwashing for decades. This disorientation is progressively programming liberal civilization to become the losers in the current propaganda war if the course is not corrected. Thus, without catching up on learning from the accumulated historical and recent mistakes, this war leads through media fog to the graveyard of history.

For decades, Hamas, the UN, its affiliate UNRWA, as well as thousands of NGOs and media outlets have cultivated the artificial image of the Palestinians as victims. This image has become an extremely dangerous psychological weapon that transforms Israel’s self-defense into a suicide program. In the propaganda environment, citizens are manipulated to perceive the military success of Israel, the victim of aggression, as the “moral” defeat of an aggressor who kills civilians.

This false blame is constantly reinforcing itself and provokes ever more radical “solutions.” Ignorance, trivialization and denial of the Holocaust are already becoming increasingly widespread in the Islamic world. On this basis, the step toward a “morally justified” repetition of the genocide is dangerously short-circuited. The massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, would then have been merely one of the dress rehearsals from which lessons were not learned in time.

The media’s reversal of perpetrators and victims has brought Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah closer to state recognition. This is in stark contradiction to the definition of those countries eligible for UN membership, as outlined in Article 4 of the United Nations Charter—”peace-loving states that accept the obligations contained in the present Charter.”

While the UN Charter, in Article 1, Paragraph 3, and Article 13, Paragraph 2, calls for the granting of “fundamental freedoms for all,” that is, individual freedoms, Islamists—diametrically opposed to the spirit of the Charter—refer to the concept of freedom solely in terms of the group. Thus, the “liberation” of all of Palestine, including Israel, is proclaimed for the benefit of an Islamic state, while individuals are either condoned or even deliberately endangered for propaganda purposes to cultivate the Palestinian victim role in urban warfare.

The proclaimed “liberation” of Palestine from Israeli “occupation” is thus a revanchist aggression against the Jewish state, violating Charter principles, and against a world order that is to be “freed from the hostage of war,” in accordance with the preamble to the UN Charter.

It is the duty of all three historically responsible parties to immediately call on Hamas to cease all aggression against Israel, in accordance with Article 2 of the UN Charter. In the event of non-compliance, it is the sole obligation of the Arab states to accept all civilians from Gaza. Short of an Israeli surrender, which would reward terror, this is the only way to keep these people out of the fighting waged by Hamas from combat positions in the middle of residential areas. Their accommodation in neighboring countries must, therefore, continue until Hamas surrenders and reconstruction is advanced.

The longer these necessary measures are denied or delayed, the more liberated territory in the Gaza Strip becomes available for the separation of security buffers and as habitable Israeli territory as a measure of self-protection and war reparations.

The justification under international law is that the UN and its Security Council have for decades shirked their “responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security” under Article 24 of the UN Charter. Since the Arab side largely refused to negotiate, Israel was left to deal with its serious security problems alone and was therefore forced to take measures for its self-defense under Article 51 of the Charter.