A point against the Dutch side could keep Celtic in the hunt if Group A rivals Fenerbahce fail to beat Molde in Norway, but Deila feels his team must keep their fate in their own hands.
"I still see an opportunity to go through, and that's what we are going to fight for," Deila said.
"We have to go for winning the game."
Group winners Molde registered home and away victories over Celtic to leave the Scottish champions bottom of Group A with two points from their four matches.
Ajax are only a point better off, and Deila does not expect Frank de Boer's side to travel to Glasgow with great confidence.
"They have also struggled lately in Europe," the Norwegian commented.
"They haven't won away for a long time, so we have a very good opportunity. It's always very hard to come here to Celtic Park.
"We are going to do everything we can to make it even harder for them and get three points."
"I think that's the same for Ajax as well, they want to win. So it's going to be an interesting game and a big opportunity for us to get a good result and go down to Turkey and do everything for ourselves.
"I think we've been a little bit unlucky in some of the games. Last year I can say we were maybe a little bit lucky, but this year I think we have been a little bit unlucky.
"You can talk about being unlucky, but it's also about being good in the right moments. We have made some stupid mistakes and have lost some important points."
Celtic will be forced to field a makeshift midfield against Ajax, with injury ensuring Scott Brown will join the suspended pair of Nir Bitton and Stefan Johansen on the sidelines. Kris Commons is also a major doubt for the match.
"It is of course more tricky because a lot of the experience is out, but we have good players, players who can fill those roles," Deila continued.
"We have to put together a team that can bring a good performance."
"I really want to succeed in Europe. That's what everybody wants.
"It's nothing to fear. It's a football match that we have a big opportunity in."

They comprise new gravitational lensing experiments that have mapped dark matter on a range of scales.
These all use similar methods, but vary in terms of resolution and size. Similar to the art of making maps on Earth this "skotocartography" tells us different but complementary things about the nature of dark matter.
The skoto- prefix comes from the Ancient Greek word "skotos", meaning "darkness".
The dark energy survey study by Vinu Vikram et al. has made the largest of these maps. In this we see the general "lay of land", equivalent in a cartographic sense to finding where there is land, and where there is sea.
They find that galaxies tend to exist in environments where the general dark matter density is high.
The Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra study by David Harvey et al. focused in on galaxy clusters and looked at the mergers between these clusters. This is like making a road-map of the UK, marking out where the cities and large towns exist.
We can learn more about the dark matter properties in this way, but lose the large-scale correlations. We found that dark matter flits through itself, hardly interacting at all.
In the new European Southern Observatory study by Richard Massey et al. we found a single particularly interesting galaxy cluster, zoomed in, and made a map of very fine detail.
This is like creating an A-Z map of a single city or town. In doing this we learnt even more about how dark matter is behaving in that cluster; but traded this off against a larger statistical sample.
We found that dark matter might not flit through itself completely, but might be a very tiny bit sticky.
This art of dark matter map-making is in a golden age. As the data continues to accumulate we will map more and more of the cosmos.
Eventually as we complete our maps we hope that the mystery of dark matter will be solved.
Dr Thomas Kitching tweets at @tom_kitching.
Celtic manager Ronny Deila says his side must beat Ajax on Thursday to keep their hopes of advancing to the Europa League knockout stage alive.
[NEXT_CONCEPT]
In recent weeks there have been an unprecedented number of papers on dark matter in such a short time.