Leo Pearlman is a London based producer and a loud and proud Zionist. His most recent film about the Oct 7 Nova Music Festival massacre, ‘We Will Dance Again’ has won the 2025 Emmy of the 46th Annual News & Documentary Awards for most ‘Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary’.
As we approach the end of Phase One of the current ceasefire framework and edge, somewhat blindly, into Phase Two, there is a truth that far too many diplomats, NGOs, and Western policymakers are desperate to avoid.
There is no future for Gaza and no security for Israel while the Islamic Republic of Iran remains the engine of this conflict.
Everything else is theatre.
This is not ideology, nor is it rhetoric, it is a clear eyed reading of the last three decades of Middle Eastern history, from Gaza to Beirut, from Sana’a to Damascus. Where Iran embeds itself, sovereignty collapses, extremism metastasises and civilians pay the price.
Security First, Because Without It, Nothing Else Exists
Let us begin with a premise that polite international forums prefer to dance around.
Israel’s security is not an obstacle to peace, but the precondition for it.
A Jewish state that is perpetually asked to accept genocidal actors on its borders is not being invited to compromise, it is being asked to commit suicide slowly and politely.
But the inverse is also true, and this is where intellectual honesty matters. Israel’s long-term security is inseparable from Palestinian Arabs having a life not chained to death cults, not financed by Tehran and not led by men who treat civilian suffering as a strategic asset.
Peace is impossible while Gaza is governed, openly or covertly, by Hamas, an organisation whose founding charter, military doctrine and political practice are explicitly genocidal.
Iran: The Head of the Hydra
If Hamas is the hand holding the knife, Iran is the arm directing it.
For decades, Tehran has deliberately fuelled instability across the region, not out of concern for Palestinian Arabs, but as part of a broader strategy designed to block Arab/Israeli normalisation, sabotage regional integration and most recently to prevent the success of the Abraham Accords, the single greatest threat to Iranian and indeed Qatari influence since the formation of the State of Israel.
Hamas was enabled, armed, trained, and financed for this purpose, just as Hezbollah was in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.
The pattern is identical, the outcomes are identical and the suffering is identical. Gaza, like southern Lebanon and Yemen, is not a beneficiary of Iranian involvement. It is its collateral, the price in blood it is so willing, eager even, to pay for it’s own demonic desires to be realised.
The “Board of Peace": A Dangerous Farce
Which brings us to the Phase Two proposal now being floated, an international framework for Gaza’s future governance, reportedly including a so-called “Board of Peace."
This idea is not naïve, it is worse than that. It is actively dangerous.
Any plan that proposes a future for Gaza while leaving Hamas intact, or laundering its power through “international oversight," is not a peace plan. It is a holding pattern for the next massacre and not one that I believe any Israeli government should be granting consent for.
If one needed real proof of the chances of success, or rather lack of, of such a plan, then the suggestion that such a body would include Qatar and Turkey makes a mockery of the entire exercise.
These are not neutral brokers and no one can pretend otherwise. Qatar provides sanctuary to Hamas leaders, men who planned October 7th while living in five-star hotels. It has financed and amplified Islamist propaganda networks that systematically demonise and dehumanise Jews worldwide, helping create the moral climate in which chants to “globalise the intifada" are shouted openly on Western streets and then actualised in Manchester, Bondi and beyond.
Turkey, under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has moved beyond rhetorical hostility to explicit threats against Israel, while styling itself as a would-be Islamist power broker.
To imagine that Israel would, or should, accept its enemies as stewards of Gaza’s future is not diplomacy, it is utter delusion.
October 7th Was Not an Accident of History
October 7th did not emerge from a vacuum, it was a strategic intervention.
The accelerating success of Arab-Israeli normalisation posed an existential threat to Tehran’s regional strategy. The Abraham Accords were reducing the Palestinian Arab cause from a permanent veto to a solvable problem. So Iran lit the fuse.
The result, thousands killed on both sides, served Tehran’s interests precisely. Normalisation was derailed, maximalist narratives were reignited. Jews were murdered, tortured, raped and kidnapped, and Gaza was once again reduced to rubble while its leadership remained untouched.
The West’s Moral Collapse: From Tehran to Gaza
Just as with Gaza, the West is abandoning the Iranian people, not through a lack of words, although even they took some time to materialse, but through a catastrophic lack of action.
When it came to Gaza, large parts of the mainstream media, useful idiots on social media and many Western governments, including our own, could not wait to demonise the world’s only Jewish state. In doing so, they stripped the Palestinian Arabs of all agency, refusing to acknowledge the most basic truth. That no Israeli will consider the war over while armed terrorists, murderers and rapists, whose founding charter explicitly calls for the death of Jews, are allowed to imprison their own population and continue plans to attack the Jewish state.
The insistence on treating Hamas not as the central obstacle but as an unfortunate inconvenience was not compassion, it was abdication.
In Iran, the pattern repeated, but more slowly, and more revealingly.
With no Jew to blame, many of the same commentators and political leaders took far longer to speak at all. The reality that Islamists were massacring their own people did not fit the narrative they had built their moral identities around, even though one only had to look to Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan or Iraq to see that this is hardly a new phenomenon. When the scale of the violence became impossible to ignore, they finally said the words, condemning the regime, promising solidarity, vowing support.
And then they did nothing.
Statements were issued, promises were made and the Iranian people were left to face bullets, prisons, and gallows alone. That inaction did not weaken the regime in Tehran, it emboldened it.
Now, astonishingly, we are preparing to repeat the same betrayal in Gaza, preserving the very power structures that guarantee future bloodshed, congratulating ourselves for restraint and calling it diplomacy.
The language has changed, the failure has not.
The Truth We Keep Refusing to Say and the Consequences of Doing So
Here is the truth that must finally be confronted.
As long as the Ayatollah remains in power in Iran, emboldened by the mass murder of his own people and strengthened by having stood up to a United States that talked loudly and acted weakly, and as long as Hamas remains an armed, genocidal terrorist force on Israel’s border, Israel has no luxury to think beyond its own survival.
This is not a failure of imagination on Israel’s part, nor is it a lack of compassion and it is not a rejection of regional peace. It is simply the necessity of self preservation and survival.
A state facing an openly declared intent to destroy it does not prioritise the “wider interests of the Middle East," it prioritises staying alive. Any nation would, all nations do.
And this is the crucial point, this is not a choice Israel has made, it is a choice imposed upon it.
It was imposed by those who signed off on a ceasefire and then failed, entirely predictably, to enforce its most basic terms. Hamas was meant to return all of the hostages, alive and dead, and disarm, neither has happened. To proceed regardless is not peacemaking; it is denial.
Responsibility also lies with those who acknowledge Iran as the central threat it is, yet kowtow to Qatari money, allowing themselves to be bought off rather than doing what is necessary. They speak the language of morality while outsourcing their courage.
In doing so, they have not only betrayed Israelis and Palestinian Arabs alike. They have betrayed millions of innocent Iranians, people who have risked everything to confront a regime that kills them in the thousands. There is a moral obligation there, one that Western governments acknowledge loudly in principle and abandon quietly in practice.
Ending the Illusion
Until the Iranian regime is dismantled rather than managed, until Hamas is removed entirely rather than accommodated, until ceasefires are enforced rather than aesthetic, there will be no peace, only pauses between wars.
Phase One was supposed to be clear, return the hostages, disarm, neither happened.
To move forward anyway is not diplomacy. It is countdown management to the next October 7th, the next massacre, slaughter, genocidal attempt by those who want to destroy our people and our country.
So Israel must do what any rational state would do in its position, it must put Israel first. Not because it wants to, there is no longterm peace under such a construct, but because once again the world has left it no alternative.
Gaza deserves better than this illusion, Israel demands better than this pretence and history will be unforgiving to those who mistook denial for diplomacy and called it peace.