Not Aid, But Aiding and Abetting: The Insane Calculus of Feeding One’s Enemies

Victor Satya | TOI Blogs | Jan 3, 2025

Modern wars don’t end; they are managed, moralized, and endlessly subsidized by their victims. When feeding your enemy becomes a moral requirement, something has gone very wrong.

The Crime of Treating Enemies Like Enemies

Israel bars 37 international aid groups from operating in Gaza and the West Bank. Their “crime”? Failing to comply with basic security and transparency requirements — including sharing detailed information about their staff — rules any ordinary country would see as self-preservation 101. The response is… theatrical. Foreign ministers clutch their pearls, NGOs issue solemn statements, UN officials gasp in unison. The moral outrage is instantaneous, universal, and entirely performative. Israel isn’t enforcing rules; it’s failing its audition for the role of perfect global moral actor.

Pause for a moment. Think about this. A sovereign state — one under attack, one surrounded by actors openly hostile to its existence — is being lectured for attempting to manage who enters its territory. And not just any territory: one governed, de facto, by people whose political leadership actively celebrates violence. Yet the world gasps as if Israel has committed sacrilege. Self-preservation has become a form of insolence. Caution is criminalized. And the absurd calculus is now canon: enemies must be pampered, their moral conversion assumed possible through NGOs, aid convoys, and carefully worded press releases.

Welcome to the 21st century: a place where war has been replaced by moral theater, and sanity is optional.

The Obsession — Feeding the Enemy as a Moral Commandment

Modern humanitarianism has achieved something remarkable: it has turned feeding your enemy into a moral imperative, and Israel into a kind of penitent for refusing. Consider the facts: Gaza’s political reality is dominated by Hamas, a group whose charter openly celebrates the murder of Israeli civilians, with their leaders making no secret of their strategic and ideological goals. Polling consistently shows that a significant portion of the population support attacks — not abstractly, but enthusiastically.

And yet, the international chorus insists that Israel provide uninterrupted aid. Food, medicine, electricity, water — all must flow freely, no questions asked, lest Israel incur the wrath of foreign capitals, the UN, and the usual humanitarian NGOs who now seem to believe they are conducting a celestial moral audit. Here’s the kicker: aid is treated as a sacred ritual, regardless of who benefits or how it is diverted. It is simultaneously administered to civilians and expropriated by Hamas, yet any attempt to audit, condition, or restrict its use earns global condemnation. Israel isn’t just expected to defend its citizens — it must do so while providing its adversaries with the very lifelines that enable attacks, as if a carefully calibrated moral sermon could convert ideologues into pacifists.

Let’s be clear: this is not theoretical. Multiple UN investigations and watchdog reports have documented cases where aid channels, schools, and even shelters have been co-opted by hostile actors. Civilians receive assistance — yes — but so do the armed operatives orchestrating mass attacks, often in the same facilities funded by Western governments. The world responds not by fixing the structural failure, but by insisting that Israel maintain the supply lines anyway.

The absurdity is almost Shakespearean. Imagine a state under siege being told: “Yes, your enemy wants to kill you, yes, they are feeding off your generosity, but you must continue, or the moral universe collapses.” The logic is perfect if your goal is perpetual guilt, moral theater, and strategic self-sabotage — and utterly incompatible with survival. In short, feeding the enemy is no longer humanitarian. It is a global commandment, enforced with speeches, resolutions, and moral outrage, and Israel is the only congregation being chastised for its failure to comply. The stage is set: aid becomes ritual, civilians become props, and self-preservation is the ultimate sin.

The Lecture Hall of Modern War

Modern war has become a bizarre moral theater where enemies are no longer enemies. They are parishioners, seminar attendees, or participants in a global moral experiment orchestrated by diplomats, foreign ministers, and NGOs with a flair for self-righteousness. Violence is reframed as grievance, terror becomes a miscommunication problem, and the state under attack is expected to act like a benevolent Sunday school teacher rather than a defender of its citizens. Meanwhile, the lecture hall is alive. Foreign capitals, the UN, and humanitarian networks assume the authority to dictate Israel’s every move. Israel enforces basic rules on hostile actors, and suddenly it is the naughty child being scolded for daring to assert sovereignty. Paris lectures, London pontificates, and Brussels issues a statement — all while ignoring the glaring fact that no one else is subjected to this moral inquisition in their own backyards.

The absurdity reaches comic proportions when you consider some agencies and organizations. Institutions like UNRWA, which are supposed to provide relief, often act as both shield and enabler for hostile forces. Their staff are occasionally implicated in violence. Their infrastructure is sometimes co-opted for military purposes. And yet, criticizing them is immediately treated as sacrilege — as if questioning their neutrality is morally equivalent to heresy. The world’s logic is perfect if your goal is perpetual moral theater: enemies must be moral projects, aid must be administered as a sermon, and the state defending itself is automatically guilty of sin. Israel must feed, facilitate, and morally educate its attackers — all while the global audience applauds, critiques, and threatens it for not being sufficiently compassionate.

In short: the modern battlefield is less about defeating foes and more about performing an endless morality play. The enemy is a congregant. Israel, the sovereign defender, is the penitent parishioner. And the rest of the world? The self-appointed clergy lecturing from afar, armed with speeches, resolutions, and a conviction that compassion for the enemy trumps logic, survival, and common sense.

“Aid” Becomes Untouchable

If you want a masterclass in moral absurdity, look no further than UNRWA. For decades, it has been the gilded poster child of humanitarianism in Gaza — untouchable, sanctified, and funded by Western taxpayers who assume it is providing neutral relief. Yet reality has a nasty habit of intruding on narrative: at least nine UNRWA staff members actively participated in the October?7 massacre, raping, killing, and helping abduct Israeli civilians, according to the UN’s own Office of Internal Oversight Services.

Pause and let that sink in: educators and humanitarian workers — the people whose job is ostensibly to protect children and civilians — joined a mass slaughter. Their uniforms, their offices, their classrooms — all ostensibly “neutral” — became vectors of terror. And yet, the global reaction? A polite cough and a reminder that UNRWA is essential to civilian life. Criticism is carefully muted; accountability is slow; the narrative of neutrality remains untouchable.

The institution publicly acknowledges the misconduct, fires the implicated staff, and the world continues to treat it as sacrosanct. Infrastructure funded by Western governments is simultaneously praised for its humanitarian value and quietly used to advance the very forces committing atrocities. Aid is delivered. Civilians are helped. But so are the perpetrators. And nobody wants to say it out loud, because to do so would violate the unwritten rule: never let inconvenient facts tarnish the holy narrative of humanitarianism.

In short, UNRWA illustrates a critical truth of modern conflict: when “aid” is untouchable, it can also be strategically blind. Institutions meant to relieve suffering become moral shields, political tools, and, occasionally, accomplices. The global consensus doesn’t require impartiality, it requires the appearance of virtue, even when the reality undermines survival itself.

This is why Israel’s insistence on accountability, transparency, and sovereignty is not just reasonable — it is radically sane. And in a world gone mad, sanity is exactly what provokes the outrage.

The Return of Sanity

Let’s strip away the pretense: the world has spent decades insisting that Israel perform moral gymnastics in a war zone. Feed the enemy. Subsidize the infrastructure of those celebrating your civilian deaths. Be endlessly patient, endlessly audited, endlessly lectured — and never, ever defend yourself without global condemnation. Israel’s ban on 37 aid groups, its scrutiny of UNRWA, and its insistence on basic accountability are not acts of cruelty. They are acts of clarity, logic, and — dare we say — sanity. For the first time in a long while, a defender is being allowed to defend rather than audition for moral sainthood in front of a global jury that has never faced the bullets and tunnels it pontificates about.

The absurd moral calculus is being reversed: enemies are once again recognized as enemies. Aid is conditioned on compliance, neutrality, and transparency. Sovereignty is reasserted. And the world, of course, is apoplectic. Because nothing terrifies a bureaucracy more than a little common sense. If there is a lesson here, it is painfully simple: sanity is not cruelty, and accountability is not inhumanity. Treat the innocent with compassion, treat the hostile with clarity, and stop pretending that endless moral lectures can substitute for decisive action. Israel’s actions are not a break from morality; they are a return to it — a recognition that the first rule of survival is acknowledging the enemy exists, and then acting accordingly.

The world insists Israel feed its enemies. Fine — but let’s be honest: morality without survival is just performance art, and if anyone still thinks feeding enemies makes you virtuous, congratulations — you’re morally bankrupt and strategically useless. In a theater of absurdities, perhaps the most radical act today is simply to stop applauding the enemy and start defending the people you are meant to protect. And for once, sanity might just make a comeback.