Not by Cyber Golem and Not by Autocorrect
Language as Weapon
Waging war gives the right words a special urgency. Political leaders, especially in moments of crisis, are expected to align language with military aims, to justify sacrifices, and to mark out the contours of any future peace. Words, in such moments, are not ornamental; they are essential tools of governance. Yet the pronouncements accompanying Israel’s war against Hamas often read less like strategy and more like scripted algorithms, as if composed by a digital “autocorrect” trained to summon the correct sequence of terms without regard for context or consequence.
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s recent order to seize Gaza City, delivered alongside his stated willingness to negotiate the return of hostages, illustrates this disjunction. What should have been a clarifying statement, instead, camouflaged policy in a haze of homage and appeasement. By affirming the national consensus around hostages while conciliating a coalition intent on Hamas’ unconditional surrender, the Prime Minister blurred the boundary between rhetorical gesture and operational plan. The effect was less to explain Israel’s direction than to perpetuate uncertainty about whether its government knows where it is heading.
The International Refrain
If Israel’s leaders have struggled to produce clarity, most of the world’s leading democracies—apart from America’s–have achieved only redundancy. One after another, of these governments has rushed to reaffirm the mantra of a “two-state solution,” and the rponouncements coming from all agencies affiliated with the United Nations as though the power of repetition might breathe life into words drained of practical meaning and organizations no longer fulfilling their foundational purposes. These declarations coming from political heads of state are framed as principled commitments, but they reveal an incapacity to acknowledge the collapse of the international infrastructure erected to secure peace. What operated effectively in the twentieth century no longer works in the twenty-first.
Institutions once designed to mediate conflicts now appear as podiums for staging grievances. Far from maintaining order, they often exacerbate instability, their bureaucratic processes more akin to financial pyramid schemes than to impartial systems of justice. By clinging to familiar templates, democratic nations, in particular, diminish their own influence, signaling to allies and adversaries alike that they can manage little beyond accruing “likes” on social media platforms. Official statements adorned with Marie Antoinette-like vibes may be fodder for digital platforms but not for forging a stance with a palpable impact on ending the hostilities.
Protest as Performance
One reason for such official paralysis comes from what has been allowed to occur on the university campus and spill on to the streets of cities and towns across the globe. Outside the halls of government, Israel has been transformed into a symbol of cosmic evil, the axis around which disparate progressive causes now revolve. Demonstrators chanting for “a free Palestine from the river to the sea” weave together environmental activism, labor agitation, and transgender rights in thrall to the idea of solidarity with Palestinians. The connection between these causes is not grounded in strategy or policy but in performance—a theatrical Marxism in which donning a keffiyeh substitutes for careful argument, and loathing Israel confers instant credibility as a cultural insurgent.
Such protests rarely grapple with the complexities of the Middle East. They function instead as stages for role-playing, offering participants the thrill of rebellion without risk. Digital denunciations masquerade as courageous dissent while providing little more than spectacle. Israel becomes less a state than a screen onto which global outrage is projected. Hatred, in this context, becomes a kind of cultural capital, its currency traded in slogans rather than in ideas.
Institutions and Terror
The war has revealed consequences far weightier than the frivolities of protest culture. It has exposed the entanglement of terrorist organizations and international relief agencies whose very budgets and legitimacy depend upon perpetuating Palestinian statelessness. UNRWA, established as a temporary body for aid in 1950, has grown into an institution whose mission sustains Hamas as much as it serves refugees. Teachers double as fighters, schools become military staging grounds, and aid distribution binds Gaza’s civilian life to its rulers’ militant aims.
Dismantling Hamas without dismantling the international structures that sustain it risks leaving the roots of conflict intact. Yet dismantling those structures is itself a herculean task: too many governments have staked their political capital on preserving UNRWA and similar agencies, and too many actors rely on their survival for influence and income. Unless Israel can suggest an outline for a political framework to supplant this order, its battlefield gains may prove as fleeting as past victories over Hamas.
Democratic powers might have behaved like masters of the universe in declaring their intention to recognize Palestine as a state. But the leading democracies have failed to take account of how the complexities of the Gaza War have not only outstripped their capacities to affect its outcome, they have also altered their own domestic threats. Globalizing the intifada is not a mere rhetorical device. These democracies cannot risk ignoring the newly energized perils without the risk of wagering their countries’ futures on a roll of a dice. While past policy statements may have fed hostility to Israel, defense needs will more than likely turn those now condemning Israel’s military actions back to the Jewish state if only for access to its technology and to its advanced cyber weapons systems.
Myths of Liberation
The October 7 atrocities must also be understood not only as acts of violence but as attempts to resurrect an archaic myth—that history’s errors can be undone through bloodshed. For Hamas, slaughtering Israeli civilians was not merely a military strategy but rather a redemptive ritual, a symbolic undoing of 1948. For their defenders in Western protest movements, the same acts were transubstantiated into performances of liberation.
This is the mimetic quality of today’s radical politics: one cause bleeds into another until all are absorbed into a single, protean faith. Less a doctrine than a style of believing, it provides what might be called a “religious or cultic experience,” binding together disparate grievances through the sheer energy of performance. In this sense, Palestine functions less as a political project than as a stage and pulpit upon which global discontents enact their fantasies of revolution.
Beyond Autocorrect
The lesson of this war is clear: autocorrect cannot end conflicts. Recycled words, ritualized slogans, and algorithmic gestures may satisfy coalitions and rallies, but they do not resolve wars or construct futures. For Israel, as for the international system itself, the task is not to summon the right words but to fashion the right policies—political arrangements capable of replacing systems and ideas that have long ceased to serve their stated purposes.
Until then, words will continue to drift free of deeds, and wars will be narrated in a language that obscures more than it reveals.
It would be hard to exaggerate what is at stake for Israelis and Palestinians in an honest reckoning when this war is ended. October 7’s brutality aimed to transfigure the future of the Middle East by bringing Palestinians a final redemption and by destroying the Jewish State, deleting Israel from the map of the world. That the savagery and initial success of the attack profoundly changed the lives of both peoples is unquestionable. In what ways it did so is still not clear. But what is self-evident is that the transformations required to meet Israel’s need for security and those necessary for the Palestinian desire for salvation cannot be clarified without a long and painful search for the tools to achieve these goals hurled into unstoppable motion on that fateful October 7.
