The Double Invisibility of Hamas and inverted Morality

The whole thing is twisted—and in its way, ingeniously demonic.

This is a guest post by Anthropology PhD candidate Adam Louis-Klein. I read it before Gazans began to blatantly disobey the Hamas terrorists, deciding, perhaps, that it is more important to raise their children to adulthood than to let Hamas continue to use them as sitting ducks in their jihadist ideologically twisted game.

By the time you read this, there may be enough evidence that the tide is turning on Hamas. Maybe not. In any case, in this historically pivotal point of time, let us look at Hamas’ perfected strategy of manipulation—not only of its own people, but of global perception—the weaponization of suffering designed to trap Israel and deceive the world.

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In the war against Hamas, one truth remains almost entirely absent from the endless flood of headlines, viral images, and international condemnation: Hamas has perfected a strategy of double invisibility. It disappears physically into its civilian population and morally into the global narrative. In both cases, it uses the very suffering it deliberately produces as a shield. The society of the spectacle becomes its cover.

The Perfect Double Bind

On the ground, Hamas systematically erases the line between civilian and combatant. It embeds its forces in homes, hospitals, and schools. It launches rockets from playgrounds. It wears no uniforms. It stores weapons in mosques and clinics. It actively recruits civilians—children, aid workers, journalists—into its broader war effort. In doing so, it ensures that any military strike by Israel, no matter how precise, becomes indistinguishable from an attack on civilians.

And then it vanishes again—this time from the story itself. In media coverage, UN reports, and academic discourse, Hamas is barely mentioned. Its responsibility is obscured. Its strategy unexamined. Its very existence fades into the background. Meanwhile, the images of suffering that Hamas has engineered dominate the global imagination.

The result is a perfect double bind: either Israel holds back and loses, or it defends itself and is accused of genocide. And the more civilian suffering there is, the more effective the strategy becomes.

Recognizing the Trap

None of this means Israel is perfect. Israel can, and sometimes does, fall into the trap that Hamas has laid. But it is a trap—carefully engineered by Hamas—and we must have the clarity to recognize it for what it is, and to understand the extreme constraints it imposes on Israel’s military and moral decisions.

The world not only accepts this trap—but becomes its willing participant. The structure of antisemitism has become embedded into the machinery of mass hysteria and the production of the spectacle—where the global media–activist–NGO class becomes another front in the war against Jewish survival, never questioning its role or complicity in the suffering it claims to oppose, and never offering a practical solution beyond its own moral posturing.

Israel must win—not because it is flawless, but because surrendering to this strategy would mean legitimizing a form of warfare that destroys not only law, but truth. And because the world must not be allowed to reward those who hide behind the suffering they are complicit in producing.

The Inverted Morality of Modern Propaganda

The whole thing is twisted—and in its way, ingeniously demonic. What’s ingenious is the construction of a moral framework in which any act of self-defense by Israel is not merely labeled “disproportionate,” but condemned as genocide—the greatest crime. Within this inverted logic, the only morally acceptable path for Israel is to lay down its arms and die. Amazingly, the destruction of Israel becomes the only logical realization of "justice," and the only way to avoid an absolute evil.

Just as Nazism didn’t require everyone to personally hate Jews—only an endless barrage of propaganda to justify its perverse aims—and just as the Soviet Union didn’t need full belief in its utopia, only enough conformity to legitimize its atrocities under the banner of equality—neither does this.

All it needs is the herd instinct. The sense that “the many” must be right. And enough emotional saturation, hysteria, and moral performance to erode independent thought. As Hannah Arendt observed, ideology becomes most dangerous when anything that contradicts it is not only wrong, but unintelligible.

Surviving the New Totalitarianism

We are watching the emergence of totalitarianism in real time. It is terrifying—but the Jewish People have already survived far worse, and I know we will survive this too.

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Adam Louis-Klein is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at McGill University, researching antisemitism, peoplehood, and comparative struggles over indigeneity and historical belonging. He writes regularly on these topics on Facebook, where he explores the ideological structures driving modern anti-Jewish hostility and the global assault on Jewish peoplehood.

Follow Louis-Klein on Facebook, where I first met him.

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