As Israel brings its campaign in Gaza to a close, it will still have to overcome the threats that surround it, just as it has done with Hezbollah, Syria, and the influence of Iran. Nevertheless, the trajectory is unmistakable: Israel is moving steadily toward stability and deeper integration in the region. The Abraham Accords will widen. Israelis will travel freely for holidays in Riyadh and Damascus.
This is not naive optimism. It is the logical outcome of shifting alliances, pragmatic cooperation, and the recognition among many Arab states that coexistence is not only desirable but necessary. Slowly, painfully, the Middle East is inching toward coexistence and progress.
While the Middle East edges forward, Europe may be heading in the opposite direction. Modern, liberal Europe, so firmly bound to the creed of political correctness, finds itself entangled with radical Islam. Instead of responsibly bridging cultures, too many of its leaders choose blindness over clarity.
The danger is not Islam itself, but the radical elements that exploit the openness of democratic systems to erode them from within. As Samuel Huntington warned in his landmark book The Clash of Civilizations, the defining conflicts of our era will not be primarily over ideology or economics, but along cultural and civilizational lines.
What we are witnessing in Europe today is not an accident. It is precisely the pattern Huntington described: liberal societies, unwilling to defend their own values, becoming vulnerable to forces that do not share them.
Douglas Murray, in The Strange Death of Europe, opened with a blunt observation: “Europe is committing suicide.” Not because it is being defeated from the outside, but because it has lost the will to believe in its own worth. Migration, denial, and the refusal to defend cultural identity are accelerating that decline.
Europe doubts its right to exist as Europe
This is not only a demographic challenge, but also, as Murray argues, a psychological one: Europe doubts its right to exist as Europe.
The risk is real. Rivers of hatred and violence may yet sweep across Sweden, Austria, England, Belgium, and inevitably, France. And when that moment comes, Europe will have no one to blame but itself.
An old story attributed to Winston Churchill captures the dilemma. When accused in Parliament of being drunk, he replied: “Yes, and you are ugly. But tomorrow I will be sober, and you will still be ugly.”
The lesson is biting: tomorrow, Israel may stand calm and secure, while Europe may remain scarred, weakened, and consumed by its own contradictions.
Leaders like France’s President Emmanuel Macron or British Prime Minister Keir Starmer risk embodying the parable of the man who fed the crocodile, hoping it would devour him last. But when the food was gone, the crocodile remembered nothing of the years of feeding. It simply struck and devoured him. This is the peril of appeasement.
Barbara Tuchman, in The March of Folly, warned that history is often shaped not by ignorance, but by willful blindness – when leaders persist in policies “contrary to their own interests,” driven by momentum and the lust for power. Europe’s indulgence in illusions of harmony while ignoring radical threats is precisely this kind of folly. As Tuchman wrote, “Awful momentum makes carrying through easier than calling off folly.”
CONSIDER THIS: many Gulf states – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, explicitly prohibit organizations such as Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood from operating within their borders.
That is not an expression of bias against belief; it is a pragmatic judgment born of hard experience. Those governments recognize how extremist networks can exploit social institutions for political ends.
By contrast, some European legal and charitable frameworks, rooted in pluralism and open civil society, have at times been vulnerable to exploitation by actors who cloak political agendas in the language of charity. The result is not only strategic vulnerability but also a corrosive effect on civic values when oversight and enforcement lag.
And yet, as the world trains its gaze so intensely on Israel, vast humanitarian tragedies elsewhere remain largely ignored.
The ongoing wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the grinding conflict in Yemen, the devastation in Sudan, the ethnic violence in Myanmar, and the systematic violations of human rights in Iran – these crises claim hundreds of thousands of lives, but rarely dominate headlines or mobilize international institutions.
The selective outrage is not only hypocritical; it distorts moral clarity and undermines the credibility of those who claim to defend universal values.
Nowhere is this hypocrisy more visible than in the halls of the United Nations. The UN focuses almost exclusively on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while ignoring a host of other horrific crises around the globe.
By its inaction, it condemns the victims of those other conflicts to death, violence, and degrading poverty. As David Ben-Gurion once said, it is “um-shmum,” a body that was nothing and remains nothing; an empty, hypocritical institution, driven by money and power, directly responsible for the deaths of millions.
As US President Donald Trump remarked, the UN is not a problem solver, but a problem creator.
Consider the irony: the only democracy in the Middle East, where Muslim and Christian judges, police officers, hospital directors, and IDF officers serve alongside their Jewish colleagues, is under relentless attack.
Not only from terror groups, but also from states like Iran and Qatar, which finance and shield them. Meanwhile, on the international stage, those who defend freedom are vilified, while those who enable terror are too often protected.
This is the true madness of our time. For all its flaws, Israel remains a model of resilience, innovation, and coexistence under fire.
EUROPE MUST decide whether to learn from this strength and confront the clash of civilizations with courage, or continue down a path that may leave it vulnerable to the very forces it refuses to confront.
Huntington’s words echo today with striking clarity. Murray’s lament of Europe’s slow suicide feels prophetic. And Tuchman’s reminder of the “march of folly” should haunt every leader who chooses illusion over responsibility.
Israel, against all odds, seeks integration and coexistence. Yet Europe, blinded by its own illusions, risks becoming the very battlefield of the clash of civilizations foretold.
The choice is stark: to defend liberal values with clarity and courage, or surrender them, piece by piece, to those who exploit freedom to destroy it.
The writer is the dean of the School of Design and Innovation at the College of Management Academic Studies in Rishon Lezion, where he leads programs in design, entrepreneurship, and innovation.