It is tempting, in a time of war and fear and endless headlines about enemies gathering at the gates, to believe that civilizations fall because they are attacked, because they are outnumbered, because they are overpowered, but history, music, and moral clarity tell a far more unsettling truth: civilizations most often collapse because they fail themselves.
The British historian Arnold J. Toynbee argued that civilizations “die from suicide, not by murder.” It’s a line that cuts through slogans and propaganda with surgical precision.
It is also the intellectual backbone behind the haunting message in Ethiopian legend, famous artist and singer Teddy Afro’s new widely embraced album Ethiorica, a work born from Ethiopia’s own internal struggles but echoing far beyond it.
The dominant narrative in the Middle East, especially between Israel and Iran, is built on an external threat. Iran is seen as the aggressor, Israel as the defender, and the region as a battlefield of competing powers. This framing is not wrong, but it is dangerously incomplete. It ignores the internal fractures that weaken both societies from within.
Iran will not lose its civilization in a single night because of a dictator or a foreign strike. It risks losing it slowly through the systematic suffocation of its own people and through a refusal to pursue peace with its neighbors and the broader human family.
Israel, for all its strength, faces a different but equally serious internal test: whether it can sustain unity, equality, and shared responsibility among its profoundly diverse population while under constant external pressure. The greater danger for both nations is not the enemy they can see. It is the failure they refuse to confront.
The artist Teddy Afro’s song parable that captures this failure with brutal clarity: 12 sheep stand silently as a tiger approaches. Each waits. Each hopes. None acts.
One by one, they are devoured not because they lack strength, but because they lack collective courage. This is the moral force behind Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” The truth it expresses. When good people remain passive, decline becomes inevitable.
Iranians are constrained, its dissenters punished, its reformers marginalized. A civilization cannot renew itself if its people are not allowed to speak. If Iranians cannot demand justice within their own country, their civilization, rich, ancient, and intellectually profound, will not disappear overnight, but it will erode, gradually losing its vitality and its place in the world.
Israel unwilling to confront internal inequality
Israel’s silence is more complicated and therefore more dangerous. It is not the silence of oppression, but the silence of avoidance. The unwillingness to fully confront internal inequality, to ensure that all citizens share equally in both the burden of service and the benefits of citizenship, risks creating fractures that external enemies are eager to exploit.
As Jonathan Sacks repeatedly taught, a society survives not merely by power but by moral responsibility. He warned that when a nation loses its sense of collective covenant, its shared commitment to justice, dignity, and mutual obligation, it begins to weaken from within, no matter how strong it appears from the outside. Jewish history confirms this. The biblical narrative is not only a story of exile caused by foreign empires; it is also a story of internal division, and the covenant was neglected.
Israel’s enemies do not invent every accusation. Too often, they exploit real internal contradictions and amplify them into global narratives. The claim that Israel is a white European colonial project, but because Israel has not always demonstrated clearly and consistently the full diversity of its people.
Here lies a deeply uncomfortable question for Israeli leadership, global Jewish institutions, and advocacy organizations such as the Combat Antisemitism Movement and Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis: where, visibly and meaningfully, are Ethiopian Jews in positions of influence?
If Israel is the homeland of all Jews, and Jews from all parts of the map, then its public face must reflect that reality, not symbolically, but structurally. It is not enough that Ethiopian Israelis exist. They must be seen, heard, and empowered.
The path forward is neither rhetorical nor theoretical. It is practical. Iran must choose whether it will continue to define itself through resistance or whether it will rediscover its capacity for renewal through openness, reform, and peace.
Its civilization will rise or fall based on the courage of its people to demand justice and the willingness of its leaders to allow it. Israel must go further than defending its borders. It must defend its moral credibility.
That means insisting on shared national service, equal opportunity, and visible inclusion across all sectors of society, including the proud, ancient community of Ethiopian Jews.
It also means recognizing the extraordinary sacrifices already being made. The soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces, the reservists, and their families, the wives and children who carry the burden of absence and uncertainty, represent the best of Israel’s collective spirit. They fight not for conquest, but for life. They embody a principle that must guide the nation: we fight to live, not to destroy.
Leadership matters here. A new generation of leadership, potentially embodied in figures like Naftali Bennett, can translate these ideals into policy: to open pathways of inclusion, to elevate qualified Ethiopian Israelis into visible leadership roles, and to ensure that Israel’s internal reality matches its external promise. We are hearing, through the voice of Teddy Afro’s Ethiorica, a warning that refuses to be ignored.
The author is a former NYC Supreme Court detective, and an investigator and educator in conflict resolution, restorative peace, and moral diplomacy expert. His upcoming book, Moral Diplomacy for a Broken World, is inspired by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.