Israeli world musician Idan Raichel recently revealed a story that should shake anyone still clinging to illusions about the war in the Gaza Strip.
Seventeen years ago, through the extraordinary Save a Child’s Heart program, he helped save the life of a child from the Hamas-run coastal enclave. It was a story of humanity that transcended borders. But this year, Raichel learned that the child whose life he helped save grew up, joined Hamas and took part in murdering Jews.
For many, the story is incomprehensible. How does a boy, given life by Israeli compassion, repay that gift by pledging allegiance to those who burn babies alive, rape women and kidnap Holocaust survivors?
The answer is simple: Compassion is no match for indoctrination.
The hard truth is that almost every child raised under Palestinian Authority or Hamas control grows up immersed in lies and propaganda. Textbooks erase Jewish history, summer camps drill children in military formations, and TV programs glorify martyrdom. Even a child whose life was saved by Israelis is taught that Jews are usurpers and monsters.
This isn’t an aberration. It is the system. Humanitarian acts, however noble, cannot overcome an education built on Jew-hatred.
Raichel is no right-wing ideologue. He is a cultural bridge-builder. The Israeli charity Save a Child’s Heart is praised worldwide for saving thousands of children, including many from Israel’s enemies. For Western progressives, this should have been the perfect story: Israeli compassion overcomes politics.
Instead, it became a story of betrayal. If even this child, rescued from death by Israelis, became a Hamas terrorist, then what does that say about the depth of hatred cultivated in Gaza?
It shatters the illusion that peace can come from giving Palestinians more “recognition” or more Israeli concessions. The problem is not a lack of Israeli compassion, but a Palestinian culture of rejection and radicalization.
Raichel’s truth reminds us that the conflict is more about culture and identity than borders. You can issue U.N. resolutions forever, but if children are taught that Jews are thieves with no right to the land, no political deal will bring peace.
It is clear that education matters. After the Holocaust and the expulsion of nearly a million Jews from Arab lands, Israel built itself up by teaching resilience and promoting hope and democratic values. By contrast, Palestinian leaders—from the Nazi collaborator Haj Amin al-Husseini to the PLO and Hamas—have cultivated grievance and conspiracy theories as national identity.
The Gazan boy turned Hamas terrorist is not an outlier. He is the predictable outcome of a movement built not on state-building but on destroying the Jewish state. It is a movement that, since 1937, has rejected at least six different opportunities to create the first independent Arab state west of the Jordan River.
Despite this, history shows a way forward. After World War II, peace did not come from symbolic gestures. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were first defeated, and then their people were deradicalized and re-educated. Germany was forced to confront its crimes through de-Nazification and Holocaust education. Japan dismantled its imperial militarism through years of American occupation. Only then could they rejoin the community of nations.
No amount of humanitarian aid, not even the Marshall Plan, would have succeeded if those societies had continued to teach their children that their “enemies” were subhuman. The Allies understood that compassion would mean nothing if it was poured into a culture committed to hate.
It is painfully clear that when it comes to Gaza, there can be no peace, no matter how many good deeds Israel does, so long as Palestinian society indoctrinates its youth with lies and hatred. The international community’s obsession with pressuring Israel while ignoring Palestinian indoctrination is not just misguided; it is dangerous. It rewards the forces that perpetuate conflict and ensures that stories like Raichel’s will repeat, as they did on Oct. 7, when Hamas butchered Israel’s most peace-minded communities.
Peace will not come from Western celebrities like Benedict Cumberbatch reciting Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry about a land “forever Palestine.” It will not come from U.N. resolutions that libelously equate Israeli self-defense with “genocide.” And it will not come from gestures of “recognition” while Hamas rules Gaza and Palestinian Authority schools teach that Jews are monsters with no history in the Land of Israel.
Peace will only come when Palestinians undergo what postwar Germany and Japan did: A total defeat of an ideology of extermination, followed by deradicalization and honest education rooted in history, not fabricated “narratives.”
Raichel’s heartbreak is a warning. Israelis do not lack compassion; they have shown it in abundance. Nor do they lack the willingness to make concessions for peace, as they have done so repeatedly. What is lacking is a Palestinian culture willing to free itself from indoctrination and its obsession with destroying a Jewish state, as opposed to building a Palestinian one.
Compassion without deradicalization cannot succeed when children are taught to despise even those who saved their lives. Until Palestinian society is liberated not only from Hamas’s rockets but from Hamas’s worldview and until the world stops romanticizing that worldview as “resistance,” there will be no peace.
