If you want to see the future of the West, look at Israel.

Israelis still believe in something. Westerners ought to, too.

photo: Taylor Brandon/Unsplash

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This is an excerpt from Jake Wallis Simons’ new book, “Never Again: How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself,” available on Amazon.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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When it comes to national service, recent polling has shown a sharp divide between the comfort democracies and the rest of the world.

In the event of war, 41 per cent of Americans, 34 per cent of Canadians and 32 per cent of Europeans say they would take up arms to defend their people. More than a third of Britons under forty say they would refuse to serve their country. By contrast, 77 per cent of those in west Asia, 76 per cent of Indians and 73 per cent of people in the Middle East would fight.

As the world enters a period of greater instability than it has seen for generations, this cultural gulf between ourselves and our potential enemies is obviously of grave concern for the security of the West. It also speaks of the broader malaise affecting our societies, reflecting not just the complacency and indolence that has been permitted to develop since the end of the Cold War but also the diminution of our sense of national pride, moral character and social bonds.

“Our sense of history, we lost that,” French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy told me on my podcast, The Brink. “We are sleeping in a strange dream of what the twentieth-century philosopher Alexandre Kojève called an ‘eternal Sunday.’ We believe that it’s Sunday every day. We are living in a week of seven Sundays. Kojève said that this was the definition of the end of history, and that this was the result of the animalisation of human society. When we become like farm animals, as in Orwell’s novel, we lose our sense of history. We lose the very conception that our world, our values, our way of life can be destroyed, so we don’t resist.”

This epochal languor has created two additional gulfs of understanding in the West. The first lies between the citizens of democracies and the generation of their grandparents, for whom the values of wartime fortitude, pride and national sacrifice were deeply instilled. The second divides us from Israel, a democratic outpost that has drifted from the West over time by virtue of constant enemy pressure, meaning that citizens are still called upon to endure hardships for their people and if necessary sacrifice their lives in defence of their homeland.

Israel has never had an alternative to living in the real world. While the comfort democracies have enjoyed the luxury of relaxing their borders in line with their “open society” ideals, if Israel did so, the ensuing carnage would make October 7th look like a cake walk.

Similarly, while Westerners have had the luxury of being able to believe that deep down, Middle Eastern rulers were the same as us, who if shown enough love would embrace democracy — the “Wykehamist fallacy” — Israel has been disabused of this illusion by repeated collisions with reality.

As I described in my book “Israelophobia,” corrupt Palestinian leaders have repeatedly turned down offers of statehood which would have delivered 100 per cent of their demands, from a Palestinian state with a capital in East Jerusalem to an internationally administered Old City. So much is a matter of historical record.

Why?

Because their goal was not peaceful coexistence with Israel but the eradication of the Jewish state as a matter of Muslim honour. Speaking to me on “The Brink,” the former Islamist turned intellectual Ed Husain described how the history of the Middle East in recent centuries has bequeathed such neuroses to many Muslims:

“They have a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder after their ancestors lost global power. The old Islamic empire subjugated hundreds of millions of people, from Asia to the borders of France. In the nineteenth century, all of this was lost amid the unstoppable might of the West.”

Once again, the Jews were viewed as the most potent expression of the enemy. During the centuries they had spent under Islamic rule, they had been seen as weaklings, living as dhimmi, or second-class citizens. In Muslim eyes, the idea that they could now carve out and defend part of the Middle East, even just the 0.2 per cent of the region to which they have an ancestral claim, compounded the humiliation of history.

As the late historian of the Middle East Bernard Lewis observed, for centuries, Jews living in Arab lands had been expected to keep their place, and the rare outbreaks of Muslim violence against them had almost always resulted from a belief that they had resisted doing so. He drily concluded: “They have conspicuously failed to do so in recent years.”

This has informed the development of a Palestinian Arab identity based upon the rejection of the Jewish state as a point of Muslim pride, rather than a desire for state-building on behalf of its own people. Yet as the dove of peace choked in blood and tears, the blinkered comfort democracies could only scold Israel for the plight of the Palestinians. Opening their eyes to reality and defending freedom and democracy was clearly too unfashionable.

Ironically, by preserving what the West has jettisoned, Israel has been remarkably successful. Without wishing to downplay its problems, by retaining a fidelity towards the old values of tradition, shared identity and devotion to a greater good, its social bonds are enduring, with close-knit, multi-generational families and a keen sense of national duty. Universal military service lies at the heart of this solidarity, contributing towards a high-trust society with exceptionally low crime rates.

As countries get richer, citizens typically have fewer children, leading to an ageing population that falls below the replacement level of fertility. Israel has certainly been getting richer. The Jewish state’s GDP per capita surpassed that of Britain — its former colonial ruler — in 2020; two years later, The Economist ranked it fourth best performing economy in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, while Britain came in twentieth.

In spite of the most recent Israel-Hamas war, in March 2025, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, bought the Israeli cybersecurity startup Wiz for a record-breaking $32 billion. But this remarkable economic success has been accompanied by a sustained baby boom, from religious Jerusalem to secular Tel Aviv, creating a nation that is affluent, young and growing. At 2.9 children per woman, Israel’s birthrate is easily the highest in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, where the average is just 1.5.

Moreover, in the final months of 2024, newborn numbers jumped by 10 per cent, making Israel probably the only country in history to have increased its birthrate during a war rather than afterwards.

The strength of the Israeli family is apparent from the briefest visit to the country. Both government and company policies are child-centric, grandparents are typically very involved in bringing up younger generations, strangers naturally look out for children in public and the traditional Friday night dinner provides a generous social glue. This is reflected on a national level, as the spirit of patriotic self-sacrifice runs deep.

In an interview with podcaster Dan Senor, the Israeli civil servant and veteran peace negotiator Tal Becker described how one morning, in the days after the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit had been kidnapped by Hamas in 2006, his young son came into his room. “Dad, I’ve made a big decision,” he said. “I’ve decided to swap myself for Gilad Shalit. Gilad is a soldier and we need him. I’m already seven, I’ll be fine.”

This attitude came to the fore after October 7th, when men and women in their late teens and twenties — the “TikTok generation” — rose as one to face down evil with exceptional fortitude.

While reporting from Israel in September 2024, I met ordinary soldiers the same age as British university students who had spent months entering the claustrophobic tunnels under Gaza to do battle with Hamas in the dark. These were narrow catacombs with arched ceilings built to a standard height of five and a half feet, meaning that troops could not even stand up straight underground. One cannot imagine the horrors these youngsters encountered. Here were men produced on the Israeli conveyor belt of heroes.

Here were people who truly understood the lessons of “Never Again.” One phrase I have heard many times from Israeli servicemen is “this is our shift.” This spirit, which resembles that of “the Few” who won the Battle of Britain in 1940, is now alien to many in the West. Yet it continues to radiate throughout Israeli society.

In May 2025, 96-year-old Magda Baratz, who had survived the notorious Auschwitz death march in 1945, attended a Holocaust memorial ceremony at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany. While she was being honoured at the event, 2,400 miles away in Gaza, her great-grandson, Asaf Cafri, a plump, 26-year-old reservist with a ginger beard and an easy smile, was shot dead by a jihadi sniper when serving in Beit Hanoun. Two weeks later, a heartbroken Magda also passed away.

This tragic vignette embodies how in a very real way, citizens of the Jewish state are brought up within the bond of duty between “the dead, the living and those who are to be born.” The country’s former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, summed the ethos up in a separate conversation with Dan Senor:

“A lot of things are more important than your life: your people, your nation, your country, your family and your unit. In those dramatic days [after October 7th], you saw the unity, the willingness to sacrifice of Israeli society. People walk empty- handed into the fire. … You wake up in the morning, you drink coffee, or you go to play sport at six o’clock, and by six thirty, you hear the news. By 7:30, these people, reservists and civilians, are on the battlefield fighting for their lives and others’ lives.”

The results of such a culture — one that we used to recognise — speak for themselves. Whereas the West struggles with an ageing demographic and low birth rates, Israel’s average age is more than a decade lower than in Europe. Whereas levels of addiction and mental illness are soaring across the West, Israel’s levels of alcoholism, drug abuse, suicide and loneliness are negligible; the ultra-Orthodox, among the poorest in society, suffer from almost zero crime, substance addiction, broken families or unhappiness, which accompanies poverty in every other country on earth.

In Israel, men spend three years in the armed forces, often seeing combat, and women serve for 18 months. In Britain, however, just 10 per cent of those aged between 18 and 24 would risk their lives for their country, or even support a year of mandatory national service, amid plummeting levels of patriotism.

Ironically, however, devotion to your people forms the bedrock of a happy life. Before October 7th, the United Nations world rankings placed Israel as the fourth happiest country in the world. After the atrocities, the trauma, bereavements and multi-front conflict had caused the country to slip just one place to fifth, behind only Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden. Following a further year of war, Israel had descended to eighth; by comparison, Australia was eleventh, Canada 18th, Britain 23rd and the United States 24th. France, meanwhile, was 33rd, Spain 38th, and Italy languished at 40. Interestingly, all these Western countries had joined Israel in sliding down the rankings in 2025 (aside from poor old Italy, which managed to climb one place).

The Blitz of 1940 and 1941 has become a symbol for a rosy past in which working-class Londoners “pulled together” in the face of adversity. Our affection for it hints at our hidden craving to feel a sense of belonging within a national family. Study after study has shown that regardless of race, class, or sexuality, the more people feel a meaningful part of a nation, the less alienation, disenfranchisement, discrimination, and resentment there will be. Deaths of despair from drug abuse or suicide will reduce, as will poverty, depression and family breakdown. Productivity, optimism and wellbeing will increase.

Different countries have different historical and demographic challenges, but from South Korea, where researchers found that “national pride is positively associated with happiness,” to the United Kingdom, where the Office of National Statistics concluded that “perceptions of unity within Britain are associated with higher average life satisfaction, happiness, and feelings that things done in life are worthwhile,” strong social bonds are essential to the health of the body politic. Yet a recent study found that just 15 per cent of British people between the ages of 18 and 24 felt that the country was united.

Research into “common ground and division” by the More in Common think tank, responding to the worldwide social divisions that followed the death of George Floyd, concluded that we faced a choice:

“One path leads to the deepening polarisation that is being experienced in other countries, where ‘us-versus-them’ dynamics shape national debates, causing distrust and even hate between people on either side of the divide. The other path leads to a more cohesive society where we build on common ground and focus on the issues that we agree are more important than anything else.”

If we wish to undo the deep betrayal to which we have been subjected and heal our fractured communities, the remarkable social cohesion of Israel — a country that so many blindly deplore, and that is undergoing such physical and spiritual turbulence — should be a source of inspiration. This national spirit used to be familiar across the West.

In recent decades, however, with the fading of our own memories of wartime, we have been engaged on a project of self-sabotage. We now find ourselves more complacent, miserable, atomised and confused than ever before, surrounded by funhouse mirror replacements of things we formerly cherished, in countries that are ageing fast, having fewer babies, and losing themselves amid soaring levels of immigration.

On top of all this, we are facing an ideological assault on multiple fronts which, either explicitly or subliminally, aims to undermine the very foundations of our way of life.

We must wake up.

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