Israel, Hamas, and the Dangerous Distortion of “Palestinians”.

Modern war frequently presents itself as rational. Governments speak of security, deterrence, defense, retaliation, strategic necessity, and the restoration of order. Armed organizations invoke resistance, liberation, revenge, survival, and historical justice. Each actor builds an explanation that makes its own conduct appear necessary.

Yet a system can be internally consistent and still be profoundly wrong.

This is the central danger of the False Coherence Loop of War: violence produces consequences that are subsequently interpreted as proof that the violence was necessary. The conflict manufactures the very hostility later used to justify its continuation.

The loop follows a familiar structure:

A threat is identified. Force is used against that threat. The force produces death, fear, humiliation, displacement, trauma, and resentment. Those consequences generate retaliation, radicalization, political hardening, or renewed violence. The resulting hostility is then presented as evidence that the original assessment was correct.

The system concludes:

“We were right to use force because they responded with hostility.”

What it refuses to ask is:

“How much of that hostility did our own use of force help create?”

The war between Israel and Hamas is one of the clearest contemporary examples of this loop. Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, including attacks against civilians and hostage-taking, inflicted enormous trauma on Israeli society. Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza produced mass death, displacement, physical destruction, economic collapse, and profound trauma among the civilian population. International humanitarian organizations have repeatedly emphasized that all parties must distinguish between civilians and combatants, that hostage-taking is prohibited, and that civilians and civilian infrastructure must be protected.

But the False Coherence Loop is not maintained by weapons alone. It is also maintained by language.

The words used to describe a war determine who is considered responsible, who is considered innocent, whose suffering is recognized, and whose death is treated as politically acceptable. In the Israel–Hamas conflict, one of the most consequential distortions is the tendency to use the word “Palestinians” as though it were interchangeable with “Hamas.”

It is not.

Hamas Is Not a Synonym for Palestinians

Hamas is an organized political and armed movement. Palestinians are a people.

Those categories may overlap in particular political, geographic, ideological, or organizational contexts, but they are not identical. A Palestinian civilian does not become a Hamas member merely because Hamas operates within Palestinian society. A Palestinian child is not a combatant because of where that child was born. A Palestinian doctor, teacher, journalist, laborer, business owner, political dissident, religious leader, or aid worker cannot be assigned responsibility for Hamas’s decisions merely through national identity.

The term Palestinian describes a national, cultural, familial, historical, and political identity. It does not describe a military status.

International humanitarian law is built upon precisely this distinction. Parties to a conflict must distinguish between combatants and civilians and between military objectives and civilian objects. Civilians do not lose protection merely because an armed organization operates among the broader population to which they belong.

When Hamas is replaced linguistically by the word Palestinians, responsibility is silently transferred from an organization to an entire people.

The sentence:

“Hamas attacked Israel”

identifies an organized actor.

The sentence:

“The Palestinians attacked Israel”

assigns the action to a population.

That substitution may appear minor, but politically it is enormous. It transforms individual and organizational responsibility into collective guilt. Once collective guilt has been established, collective suffering becomes easier to defend.

Civilian deaths can then be dismissed as the consequences of what “they” did. Destroyed neighborhoods can be described as the natural result of what “they” chose. Restrictions affecting an entire population can be rationalized as necessary because “they” cannot be trusted.

The identity of millions of people becomes compressed into the conduct of one organization.

That is false coherence.

Palestinians Must Still Be Discussed

Correcting this distortion does not mean removing Palestinians from the discussion. That would create a different distortion.

The war may be described as a conflict between Israel and Hamas at the level of its principal organized belligerents, but Palestinian civilians are among those experiencing its direct consequences. Palestinians must therefore be discussed when the subject is civilian death, displacement, destroyed homes, interrupted education, healthcare failure, poverty, political rights, national identity, reconstruction, or the wider historical conflict.

The necessary distinction is between saying:

“Palestinians are affected by the Israel–Hamas war”

and saying:

“Palestinians are Hamas.”

The first statement recognizes reality. The second erases it.

According to the World Bank, the Gaza economy contracted by approximately 83 percent in 2024. Although measured economic activity increased in 2025, the Bank describes that increase largely as a statistical effect following the previous collapse rather than a meaningful recovery. It reported unemployment in Gaza at approximately 78 percent in 2025 and estimated recovery and reconstruction needs at roughly $71.5 billion.

These are Palestinian economic and humanitarian realities. Discussing them is not the same as inserting Palestinians into the role of Hamas. It means accurately identifying the civilian population and society bearing much of the war’s destruction.

Even after a ceasefire framework took effect in October 2025, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported in June 2026 that most of Gaza’s approximately 2.1 million people remained displaced, without sufficient access to essential services or minimum living standards, while casualties and new displacement continued to be reported.

Therefore, the word Palestinians is not itself the distortion. The distortion occurs when Palestinians are treated as a substitute for Hamas, when their civilian identity is erased, or when their suffering is considered evidence of organizational guilt.

Israel Is Not Synonymous with Every Israeli

The same discipline must be applied in the other direction.

The word Israel can refer to several different things: the State of Israel, the Israeli government, a governing coalition, the Israeli military, particular military units, state institutions, the country’s territory, or the Israeli population.

These are not interchangeable.

A decision made by the Israeli cabinet is not automatically the decision of every Israeli citizen. A military operation is not personally authored by every Israeli civilian. Israelis who oppose government policy, protest the war, advocate negotiations, criticize military conduct, demand the return of hostages, or support Palestinian rights do not cease to exist merely because the government acts in the name of the state.

When criticism of Israeli policy becomes an accusation against Israelis as a people, institutional responsibility is transformed into collective guilt.

This becomes even more dangerous when the words Israel, Israeli, and Jewish are treated as synonyms.

They are not.

Israel is a state. Israeli is a nationality. Jewish identity is religious, ethnic, cultural, ancestral, or some combination of those categories. Jewish communities exist throughout the world, hold widely differing political views, and cannot be assigned responsibility for the decisions of an Israeli government simply because Israel defines itself as a Jewish state.

When Israeli state policy is attributed to Jews collectively, political criticism can mutate into anti-Jewish hate. Synagogues, Jewish schools, Jewish businesses, students, families, and individuals outside Israel may then be targeted for decisions over which they exercise no governmental authority.

The parallel false equations are therefore:

Hamas = Palestinians

and

Israeli government = Israelis = Jews

Both equations are intellectually false and socially dangerous.

They are parallel category errors, although that does not mean every use of them has equal political power, military effect, or historical consequence. Accuracy does not require pretending that all actors possess equivalent capabilities. It requires refusing to assign organizational conduct to whole populations.

How Both Camps Reinforce the Distortion

Voices aligned with the Israeli government or its military strategy may speak of Palestinians, Gazans, Hamas, militants, and terrorists as though the categories naturally merge into one another.

Within this framework, civilian grievances can be interpreted as evidence of extremist sympathy. Civilian infrastructure may be viewed primarily through its possible connection to Hamas. A population living under war conditions may be treated as politically responsible for the armed group operating within its territory.

The result is a dangerous logic:

Hamas emerges from Palestinian society; therefore Palestinian society is Hamas; therefore broad harm to Palestinian society is part of defeating Hamas.

This is precisely where a military objective can expand into a war against a social environment.

Hamas and voices aligned with its ideology can commit a corresponding distortion by treating the Israeli state, Israeli military personnel, Israeli civilians, Zionists, and Jews as a single undifferentiated enemy.

Within that logic, an Israeli civilian may be denied meaningful civilian status because the person lives within Israel, pays taxes, served in the military in the past, or belongs to the society Hamas defines as its adversary. Violence against civilians may then be rationalized as resistance against the state.

The reasoning becomes:

Israel is a militarized state; therefore Israeli society is part of the military system; therefore Israeli civilians are legitimate extensions of that system.

Once again, the civilian disappears inside the institution.

These distortions reinforce one another. Hamas’s attacks against Israeli civilians strengthen claims that no Palestinian-associated actor can be trusted. Broad Israeli military destruction strengthens claims that Israel is at war not merely with Hamas but with Palestinians as a people. Each side’s category error becomes evidence supporting the category error of the other.

That is the False Coherence Loop operating through identity.

The Seven Stages of the False Coherence Loop

The Israel–Hamas war demonstrates seven recurring stages.

1. Identity Compression

A complex population is compressed into a single enemy identity.

Palestinians become Hamas. Israelis become the Israeli military. Jews become Israel. Gazans become militants. Civilian distinctions are treated as technical obstacles rather than moral and legal necessities.

2. Moral Generalization

The actions of a government, military unit, armed organization, or individual attacker are assigned to the larger group.

One person’s guilt becomes evidence of collective guilt. One organization’s ideology becomes the presumed ideology of an entire population.

3. Collective Response

Force, restrictions, deprivation, hostage-taking, indiscriminate attacks, or punitive policies are justified against a broader group than the group directly responsible.

The punishment expands beyond decision-makers and fighters.

4. Civilian Trauma

Families experience death, injury, displacement, hunger, captivity, humiliation, economic loss, interrupted education, psychological damage, or destruction of their homes.

The political system may describe these outcomes as collateral, unavoidable, accidental, necessary, or strategically regrettable. To the affected family, however, the loss is not theoretical.

5. Resentment and Radicalization

Trauma produces grief. Grief can become anger. Anger can become political hardening, support for retaliation, distrust of negotiation, or recruitment into militant movements.

Not every traumatized person becomes violent, but prolonged collective trauma creates an environment in which absolutist narratives become easier to spread.

6. Confirmation

The resulting anger is presented as proof that the original population was inherently hostile.

Israeli hardliners may point to Palestinian rage as evidence that Palestinians never wanted peace. Hamas and other militant actors may point to Israeli military conduct as evidence that coexistence was always impossible.

Neither side adequately confronts the possibility that its own behavior helped manufacture the hostility it now cites.

7. Repetition

Another attack occurs. Another military response follows. Another generation inherits the grief.

The loop restarts with more evidence, more graves, more destroyed trust, and fewer political leaders willing to appear conciliatory.

The Economic Consequences of False Coherence

War is often evaluated through battlefield objectives, but prolonged conflict restructures entire economies.

The Bank of Israel reported that the war’s consequences continued to weigh on Israel’s economy through labor shortages, fiscal costs, lower output relative to the prewar trend, reduced per-capita income, increased debt, reserve mobilization, and long-term rehabilitation costs associated with physical and psychological harm. Its 2025 annual report estimated the cumulative loss of output from the beginning of the war through the end of 2025 at approximately 8.6 percent of annual gross domestic product, or about NIS 177 billion. It also estimated war-related fiscal costs for 2023–2026 at approximately NIS 350 billion, excluding later decisions connected with subsequent regional military operations.

Those costs ultimately reach households. Public money directed toward prolonged war cannot simultaneously fund civilian healthcare, housing, education, transportation, wage growth, mental-health treatment, scientific research, or social development.

Reserve mobilization removes workers from businesses. Labor shortages raise operating costs. Security risks discourage investment and tourism. Increased debt produces future interest obligations. Taxes may rise, public-sector wages may be restrained, civilian programs may be delayed, and younger generations inherit the financial consequences.

For Gaza, the economic consequences are far more severe. Businesses, homes, utilities, transportation networks, schools, healthcare facilities, and productive assets have been damaged or destroyed on a vast scale. Employment cannot recover normally when the physical environment required for economic activity no longer functions.

The economic loop mirrors the military loop:

War destroys economic security. Economic collapse produces desperation. Desperation strengthens extremism and political instability. That instability is then used to justify further security measures and military action.

War creates the conditions later cited as evidence that war must continue.

The Psychological Inheritance of War

The most enduring battlefield is human memory.

Israeli families carry the trauma of October 7, the deaths of loved ones, hostage-taking, displacement, military service, rocket attacks, and the fear that another large-scale attack may occur.

Palestinian families in Gaza carry the trauma of bombardment, death, injury, displacement, hunger, destroyed neighborhoods, lost relatives, damaged institutions, and uncertainty over whether ordinary life can be rebuilt.

These experiences do not cancel one another. Recognizing one population’s trauma does not require denying the other’s.

The danger begins when trauma is converted into hereditary political guilt.

An Israeli child did not design government policy. A Palestinian child did not design Hamas strategy. Neither child should inherit the moral liability of armed actors operating under the child’s national identity.

Yet war teaches children through absence. An empty chair, a missing parent, a destroyed home, a permanent injury, or years spent displaced becomes part of their understanding of the opposing group.

Without deliberate reconciliation, grief becomes historical instruction.

Institutional and Democratic Decay

Endless war also changes political institutions.

Emergency powers become normalized. Surveillance expands. Criticism is treated as disloyalty. Journalists, protesters, peace advocates, and dissenters face pressure to conform to wartime narratives. Political leaders gain incentives to depict compromise as weakness because fear consolidates support more effectively than complexity.

Moderates are placed in an impossible position. When they call for restraint, hardliners accuse them of ignoring security. When they recognize the suffering of the other population, they may be accused of betraying their own.

As a result, war does not merely destroy infrastructure. It destroys the political space required to end war.

The False Coherence Loop selects for leaders who are skilled at managing conflict, not resolving it.

The International Distortion

Outside observers frequently reproduce the same category confusion.

The conflict is sometimes described as Jews versus Palestinians, Muslims versus Jews, or Israel versus the Palestinian people. These formulations can transform a conflict involving states, governments, armed organizations, territorial claims, security policies, national aspirations, and historical grievances into an allegedly timeless ethnic or religious struggle.

That framing encourages people around the world to assign local responsibility to unrelated individuals.

Jewish people outside Israel may be pressured to answer for Israeli military policy. Palestinians and Arabs abroad may be treated as suspected supporters of Hamas. Muslims may be asked to condemn actions they did not commit. Israeli students may be held personally responsible for their government. Palestinian students may be required to prove that they reject violence before their civilian humanity is acknowledged.

The war is exported into workplaces, universities, religious institutions, political parties, social media, and personal relationships.

Language that began by confusing armed actors with populations ends by turning global communities against one another.

Ending the Loop Is Not the Same as Surrender

A mature political position is often misrepresented as weakness.

Stopping the loop does not require denying Hamas’s attack, abandoning Israeli civilian security, ignoring hostages, overlooking Palestinian civilian suffering, erasing political rights, or pretending that accumulated grievances do not exist.

It requires rejecting the idea that another generation of destruction will finally produce what previous destruction failed to achieve.

A mature interruption would require several principles operating together: protection of civilians, rejection of hostage-taking, release and humane treatment of captives and detainees in accordance with law, sustained humanitarian access, precise identification of combatants and decision-makers, accountability for violations, economic reconstruction, credible security arrangements, political representation, and a durable process capable of addressing competing national claims.

Most importantly, it requires a return to linguistic and moral precision.

Say Hamas when discussing Hamas.

Say the Israeli government when discussing the Israeli government.

Say the Israeli military when discussing military conduct.

Say Palestinian civilians when discussing Palestinian civilians.

Say Israeli civilians when discussing Israeli civilians.

Say Jews only when Jewish identity is actually the subject.

Do not use the conduct of an organization to indict a people.

Do not use the suffering of a people to excuse an organization.

Do not use one population’s trauma to erase another population’s humanity.

The Royal Standard of Political Maturity

True political strength is not the ability to continue a war indefinitely. Nearly any government or armed organization can maintain hostility as long as it can obtain weapons, recruit the grieving, and convince its population that the next round of violence will be different.

Political maturity is the ability to recognize when a system is feeding itself.

The False Coherence Loop survives because every consequence is absorbed into the justification for the next action. Fear becomes proof. Resentment becomes proof. Radicalization becomes proof. Retaliation becomes proof. Civilian anger becomes proof. Even the failure of war becomes an argument for more war.

The loop ends only when someone refuses to interpret every wound as permission to create another wound.

Israel cannot achieve permanent security by treating Palestinians as Hamas.

Hamas cannot establish justice or liberation by treating Israeli civilians as extensions of the Israeli state.

The international community cannot contribute to peace while confusing Jews with the Israeli government or Palestinians with an armed organization.

Precision is not merely a matter of vocabulary. It is the beginning of accountability. Accountability is the beginning of political maturity. Political maturity is the beginning of peace.

The future will not be secured by determining which population can suffer the longest.

It will be secured when institutions, leaders, and societies become mature enough to distinguish the guilty from the innocent, security from revenge, accountability from collective punishment, and genuine coherence from a self-perpetuating cycle of destruction.

That is how the loop is broken.

And until the loop is broken, neither side is truly winning. Both are merely inheriting the consequences.

Royal Politics examines power beyond the political performance.