Peace or Capitulation: The Moral Failure Behind the World’s Silence

As Rosh Hashanah draws near, a solemn question lingers over Israel and the Jewish people: Where is the world’s voice in demanding the return of our hostages? These innocents, dragged into Gaza’s labyrinthine tunnels, have been reduced to mere statistics in the perverse theatre of victimhood that Israel’s detractors have so masterfully engineered. For months, these men, women, and children have been hidden away in the darkness, their captors weaponizing their very existence to deflect accountability, stoke chaos, and most insidiously, feed the world’s voracious appetite for an anti-Israel narrative.

What has been the global response? Deafening silence. The hostages—human beings, not abstract bargaining chips—have been sidelined by those who craft the illusion that Israel’s defense is an act of aggression, while ignoring the unprovoked violence that spawned this grotesque hostage crisis. To the architects of this deceit, the hostages are expendable; they serve as tools in a much larger game that aims to cast Israel as the perpetual aggressor, a monolith of guilt for daring to defend itself. And those who shout loudest about “peace” and “justice” do so not in the name of the hostages, but as part of a long campaign to excuse and justify violence against Israel.

We live in a world where victimhood has been weaponized, turned into a narrative that grants those who inflict terror a shield from moral scrutiny. Hamas and their ilk do not care for the suffering of Palestinians—they care for power. The hostages, Israeli or otherwise, are collateral in a much larger scheme to avoid confronting their failure to build, to thrive, and to own their future despite the opportunities afforded to them, despite the endless stream of aid and diplomatic gestures. What’s worse is that this narrative—this grotesque inversion of truth—finds support, or at least complacency, in the West. For those who fail to denounce this hostage-taking, what excuse remains except their own willingness to avoid uncomfortable truths?

And then there is the West’s unending call for peace. It’s a familiar refrain, one we’ve heard for decades: calls for “calm,” for “stability,” for a ceasefire in which both sides are meant to lay down arms as though moral equivalency exists between those who defend their people and those who slaughter innocents. But let us make one thing perfectly clear: the West’s call for peace is not driven by a deep sense of morality. It is a coping mechanism, a way to avoid confronting the weakness that has festered in the heart of their foreign policy. Peace, in this sense, is not a virtue; it is an abdication. It is the West’s convenient means of sidestepping their own failures, their inability to enforce justice, and their desire to distance themselves from the hard truths of global instability.

The West, too comfortable in its own skin, calls for stability not because it believes in the righteousness of peace but because it is terrified of what true confrontation would demand. It prefers a weak peace, a hollow truce, because anything more robust would require the kind of moral clarity and action it is no longer willing to provide. It is easy to preach the virtues of dialogue and negotiations when you sit far from the border, when your family isn’t being held hostage by those who glorify death and chaos. It is easy to call for restraint when you are not facing an enemy whose very existence hinges on the destruction of yours.

But let us not mistake this paralysis for virtue. The mere pursuit of peace does not confer nobility, nor does the avoidance of conflict equate to strength. On the contrary, true strength lies in the ability to defend what is right, to stand firm when necessary, and to fight—not for the sake of violence, but for the sake of justice and survival. Peace and strength are not mutually exclusive, and neither are strength and morality. In Israel, we understand this. We have to.

Strength does not mean recklessness, nor does peace require submission. The Jewish people, in their long history, have never sought war, but they have also never surrendered to those who seek their annihilation. Rosh Hashanah this year serves as a reminder of this simple but profound truth: we can yearn for peace while standing ready to defend ourselves, our families, and our nation. Peace does not demand that we lay down our arms in the face of terror. It demands that we have the strength to maintain our moral compass in a world that often seems devoid of one.

The West could learn something from this. To seek peace while understanding that strength is not a synonym for violence, that the will to defend oneself is not incompatible with a desire for a better world. The hostages held in Gaza are the living embodiment of this contradiction. Their captors—cowardly, hiding in tunnels—understand only violence. And yet, Israel’s response, measured and deliberate, shows that strength and restraint can coexist. Israel’s mission is not to destroy for destruction’s sake, but to restore life, to reclaim its people with the same respect for humanity that its enemies so violently discard.

And yet, where is the outcry for their release? The global community that so loudly screams for ceasefires is eerily silent when it comes to these human beings, whose fates hang in the balance. It is as if they have been forgotten, their plight inconvenient for those who would rather see Israel blamed for its own suffering. The world loves to condemn Israel for its “disproportionate” response but remains indifferent to the fact that hostages—fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters—are hidden in the bowels of Gaza, their existence barely acknowledged by those who claim to champion human rights.

It is this very silence that exposes the moral bankruptcy of Israel’s detractors. They speak of occupation, of apartheid, of injustice, but they refuse to speak of the injustice of keeping civilians hostage, of the occupation of minds poisoned by hatred, and of a world so eager to cast Israel as the villain that it becomes blind to the real evil in the room. The hostages are not just a symbol of the ongoing conflict; they are a reminder of the world’s refusal to confront uncomfortable truths.

So as we enter Rosh Hashanah, the time of reflection and renewal, let us not forget those held captive. Let us not be swayed by those who claim that peace requires our submission, that strength is synonymous with aggression. Israel, and the Jewish people, have always known that peace is something to strive for—but not at the expense of our survival, not at the cost of our dignity. The hostages must return home, and it is our duty—Israel’s duty and the world’s duty—to ensure they do.

To stand for peace is to stand for justice, and justice demands strength. Peace without strength is merely capitulation. Strength without justice is mere violence. But together, they form the foundation of a future where Israel can flourish, where the Jewish people can thrive, and where hostages no longer languish in the shadows, forgotten by a world too preoccupied with its own excuses to remember the value of human life.