Who Is Fighting for Israel?

Global Mercenaries, a Mother’s Displacement, and the Death of Fairy Tales in Gaza

If I ever had a wish -yaani something magical, guaranteed, something that could bend the world-it would be for the trauma of Palestinian children to vanish. To leave their stomachs full and their hearts safe. I make this wish with a profound disappointment in fairy tales. Not because I am an adult now, but because I wonder when did human rights become a fairy tale? Worse, when did fairy tales become a constant failure, a contradiction of what they were made up for? The only comfort I take is that when all wishful thinking fails, you are forced to turn to strategy. Which is what the people need.

For years, I mapped my blueprint. I had ninety-nine things I wanted to change about Gaza, tracing each failure to its source and sketching solutions like a corporate manifesto. I believed cold analysis could matter because looking away was never an option. My mother used to tell me I wasn’t realistic. In her words, “You hold the ladder horizontally instead of vertically,” trying to force a way up through sheer will and intellect (she said delusion but whatever). I thought she simply didn’t understand the suffocating reality of exile. I thought she wasn’t angry or desperate enough. Now she is displaced and her house was destroyed. At 65, she lost everything and was forced to start over in exile. She only speaks of Gaza and its beach. She dreams a fairy tale, daily. It doesn’t comfort me that she, too, now holds the ladder horizontally. It doesn’t comfort me at all.

She holds it horizontally because the vertical path was bombed out of existence. But to understand how the ladder broke, you have to know the ground it stood on.

I knew Gaza inside and out. Not as a place of fear, but of love. Too much love for a broken city. I breathed its sea breeze, its functional systems, and its broken structures. The ninety-nine problems and solutions I carried were proof of that breathing. When you love the land, you belong to it. And yet, you know so well that it might not belong to you anymore. Still, you long for the home you built on that land of love, not ownership. For better or worse, that is Gaza to me. The place I curse and pray for, even when I’m not sure anyone is listening, even when the prayers feel like they’re falling into sand.

When the world watches Gaza nearing its third year of escalating, ongoing genocide, many continue to count the bombs. They identify the makers, the type, and the weight. Fewer ask what kind of people step forward to drop them? What kind of machinery converts global desperation, poverty, and depravity into soldiers for the occupation? What system buys bodies to enforce a genocide that has killed, in conservative estimates, over 300,000 of us, with the majority still missing under the rubble? Since 2023, the state of Israel has called up over 360,000 reservists, draining its own population of settlers to sustain its ethnic cleansing campaign. Exhausted and drained, the occupation built an industrial recruitment apparatus that reaches into war-torn communities and says: *Hey, we will pay you to become the tool of our apartheid.*

This genocidal system functions globally. Through programs like “Mahal” and the lone soldier pipeline, the Israeli occupation imports its enforcers from across the world. Data published by the Israeli army itself reveals a staggering reality of 50,632 soldiers fighting in its ranks hold two or more nationalities. An army of mercenaries.

The United States leads with 12,135 soldiers. France follows with 6,127. Russia supplies 5,067, and Germany 3,901. Ukraine, fleeing one war to labor for the occupation, sends 3,210. Britain provides over 2,000 soldiers (including 1,686 British-Israelis and hundreds of triple nationals, alongside Romania) (1,675) and Poland (1,668). Ethiopia contributes 1,387, and Canada 1,185. The roster continues: Hungary (885), Italy (828), Argentina (609), the Netherlands (559), Brazil (505), Australia (502), South Africa (415), Belgium (406), Austria (390), Switzerland (373), Spain (372), and the Czech Republic (309).

In a dark testament to the occupation’s insidious reach, this data even includes dual nationals from Arab countries like Yemen, Tunisia, Lebanon, Syria, and Algeria. The apartheid state will buy anyone, fracturing the jewish commuities of the region it is actively colonizing.

Despite a so-called “defense” budget exceeding $24 billion, the state of Israel recruits with cold calculation. They offer housing stipends of $480 a month, rental subsidies of $280, total municipal tax exemptions, and cash grants up to $780 for couples. This is how they buy “soldiers.”

Don’t let this confuse you. These are not passive victims, not even close. They chose to answer the financial call and sell their humanity. They chose the uniform of the occupier, the checkpoints, the raids, and the destruction of families from Palestine to Lebanon. They chose to become enforcers of our displacement, mass killing, and annihilation. In doing so, they made the occupation’s calculus clear: it will pay anyone to do its work.

As for those who survive, the machinery offers abandonment. They return with severe PTSD, facing a housing crisis without a safety net. The trauma of comitting this genocide has led to dozens of soldier suicides. Yet the colonial state that bought their bodies offers them absolutely nothing, not even a gravestone to their name.

The occupation does not rely only on foreigners. The logic of apartheid is to turn the occupied into enforcers of their own oppression. Druze enlistment rates reach 85 percent, and Bedouin Palestinians serve at over 60 percent. Today, roughly 1,500 to 2,000 out of over two million Palestinian citizens of Israel serve on active duty. They are not bought with cash stipends, they are bought with the promise of survival. The Zionist state forces them into unrecognized villages in the Naqab without water or roads, offering military service as the only exit from engineered poverty. (Sounds familiar, America?)

Now the mercenaries who flew in to enforce this genocide are finding their escape routes closing. A 240-page dossier has been submitted to the Metropolitan Police’s war crimes unit in Britain, accusing ten specific British nationals of sniping civilians and aid workers in cold blood. Canadian and Belgian authorities have launched preliminary investigations into their own citizens serving in the Israeli Occupation Forces. Yet the British Foreign Office refuses to track how many of its citizens are pulling the triggers, claiming it “does not collect” the data. The mask of Western innocence is slipping as the empire is finally being forced to investigate its own children.

We the Palestinians will not forget the global machinery that funded our erasure, nor the mercenaries who took their coin to pull the triggers. When the phone rings, I listen to my mother describe the Gaza sea breeze she can no longer feel. At sixty-five, displaced and stripped of her home, she holds her ladder horizontally, dreaming of a beach the occupation turned to ash. There is no fairy tale left to save her. Some truths you can only know by surviving them. And some people will have to live with what they helped make.