The West still doesn't understand why October 7th happened.
Too many Westerners won't quit believing the fantasy that peace creates security. Israelis know it's the other way around.
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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, a longtime journalist and commentator who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
The Roman saying Si vis pacem, para bellum (“If you want peace, prepare for war.”) emerged from a civilization that understood an elementary truth about human affairs: Security creates peace.
Israel understands this because it is in the Middle East. The West does not because it lives inside a therapeutic fantasy.
The central delusion underlying most Western commentary on Israel is the belief that peace is the highest political good.
It is not. Security is.
Peace is valuable only when it rests upon security. Otherwise, it is just an intermission between wars.
This misunderstanding has distorted Western thinking about Israel for decades. It is why diplomats, journalists, NGOs, academics, and professional “peace-process” enthusiasts continually misdiagnose the conflict. The analysis usually starts to go askew with the daft assumption that the conflict is fundamentally about territory.
Yet if land were the issue, October 7th would never have happened. Israel withdrew from Gaza completely in 2005. Every soldier departed. Every settlement was dismantled. The result was not reconciliation, but Hamas committing the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Likewise, Hezbollah’s missile empire in Lebanon was never about Palestinian statehood. Yemen’s Houthis are not firing missiles because they have opinions about municipal zoning regulations in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank). These movements are driven by ideological objectives that long predate modern Israel’s existence.
Western policymakers hate this because it means the conflict is harder to solve diplomatically than they would like to believe. The two-state solution remains the clearest example of this pathology — even after October 7th, even after Hamas turned Gaza into a jihadist fortress, even after Hezbollah transformed southern Lebanon into an Iranian missile base, even after Iran openly attacked Israel with ballistic missiles, drones, cruise missiles, and eventually found itself at war with Israel directly.
The world’s “solution” remains unchanged: Israel, a tiny country, should make itself smaller and more vulnerable, surrender strategic depth, and trust people who openly declare their intention to destroy it. This asininity is pristine, and the theory behind a Palestinian state remains astonishingly stupid. No serious person believes that if Taiwan surrendered half its territory to China, Beijing would suddenly abandon its objective of taking the entire island. Nor would any serious person believe that if Ukraine surrendered half its territory to Russia, Moscow would become satisfied and permanently peaceful.
Yet the orthodox view is somehow that Islamists dedicated to Israel’s destruction — who believe that the death of “infidels” and especially Jews is a passport to heaven — would suddenly moderate if given sovereign territory overlooking Israel’s population centres. The theory survives only because it is treated as a religious doctrine rather than a strategic proposition.
The events of the past few years have exposed this for the nonsense it is with extraordinary clarity. October 7th shattered the mythology that territorial withdrawals create moderation. Israel left Gaza completely, dismantled settlements, removed soldiers, handed over territory, and even exhumed the dead from cemeteries. The result was October 7th.
One might imagine this would have forced a serious reassessment of assumptions among the able-minded. Instead, much of the world concluded that Israel should repeat the experiment elsewhere. Excuse me, but it is tiring dealing with this level of stupidity.
The same delusion infected thinking about Hezbollah. Western governments lectured Israel about restraint, and still do, even as Israeli forces have pushed across the Litani River in southern Lebanon to combat Hezbollah’s drones and missiles indiscriminately attacking northern Israel. Israel is incessantly told to avoid escalation, that diplomacy would work, that Hezbollah could be managed
Just yesterday, the Iranian regime manipulated the U.S. by “threatening” to abandon negotiations “over Israel’s actions in Lebanon.” Hours later, during a call between U.S. President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump reportedly called Netanyahu “crazy” for Israel’s plan to strike Hezbollah’s stronghold in Beirut.1
“Everybody hates you now, everybody hates Israel because of this,” Trump reportedly said to Netanyahu. Another source said Trump was “pissed” and at one point yelled at Netanyahu: “What the f*ck are you doing?”
What the f*ck is Israel doing, merely defending itself against Hezbollah? Or what the f*ck is Hezbollah doing, accumulating an arsenal larger than that of many national armies — crucially stronger than the Lebanese one — as well as transforming entire Lebanese villages into military compounds and embedding launch sites inside civilian communities?
Diplomats do bloviate an endless stream of statements expressing “concern,” but superficial concern is not an air defence system. Then reality arrived. Hezbollah’s decision to attack Israel unprovoked on October 8th “in a show of solidarity with Palestinians” exposed what the Israelis had been saying all along: The problem was never Israeli aggression, it was the existence of an Iranian expeditionary army sitting on Israel’s border.
The subsequent conflict shattered much of Hezbollah’s command structure, devastated key military capabilities, eliminated senior leadership figures, and severely weakened the organisation’s standing inside Lebanon. Yet even now, Hezbollah remains in Lebanon attacking Israel’s northern residents because its purpose remains unchanged.
The same lesson emerged from the confrontation with Iran itself. For decades, Western leaders insisted diplomacy would contain Tehran. Every deadline in nuclear talks was extended, every enrichment violation rationalised, every warning dismissed as alarmist, and every red line quietly moved.
Meanwhile, Iran built an enormous ballistic missile arsenal, financed terror groups across the region and the globe, destabilised multiple countries, and advanced steadily toward nuclear weapons capability — culminating in direct military confrontation.
For years, Western policymakers behaved as though war with Iran represented the worst possible outcome. This was always a curious assumption. A regime openly calling for Israel’s destruction, enriching uranium, developing long-range ballistic missiles, building a regional network of terrorist armies, and funding attacks across multiple continents was apparently considered tolerable. Confronting that regime was considered dangerous and manageable at the same time. This logic was upside down.
The direct confrontation between Israel and Iran exposed just how much of Western policy had become detached from reality. For decades, analysts had spoken about Iran as though it were an untouchable regional superpower. Newspapers routinely described the Islamic Republic in language that bordered on mystical reverence. Any suggestion that Israel might directly challenge Tehran was dismissed as reckless fantasy.
Then the war happened. Iran launched enormous missile barrages at Israel, the Israelis struck back, and the Islamic Republic discovered something deeply unpleasant about modern warfare: Propaganda is not an air force.
The regime that had spent decades funding wars from the safety of proxies suddenly found itself exposed. Israeli aircraft had freedom of operation within Iranian airspace within two days. Strategic military sites were struck. Senior military commanders were eliminated. Critical infrastructure was damaged. Air defence systems that Tehran had spent years boasting about proved considerably less impressive when confronted by a technologically superior military.
The psychological damage may ultimately prove more significant than the physical damage. This battle is still playing out, with Washington as the lead protagonist against Iran and Israel fighting on in Lebanon. The most remarkable aspect of all this was watching many Western governments respond by demanding restraint from the side that had just demonstrated the threat was real. The lesson many leaders appeared to draw was not that Iran had been allowed to become too dangerous, but that confronting danger is dangerous.
The Iran war demonstrated something Western policymakers have spent years trying not to acknowledge: Threats do not disappear because leaders refuse to confront them. Reality does not care about diplomatic talking points, or read United Nations resolutions, or attend conferences in Geneva. Reality arrives when missiles begin landing.
The war inflicted substantial damage on Iran’s military infrastructure, degraded elements of its missile and air-defence networks, eliminated senior commanders, and punctured the carefully cultivated myth of Iranian invulnerability. Tehran’s regime has so far survived. Its ambitions survived. But so too did the evidence that the regime is far weaker than its admirers, apologists, and assorted Western enablers had spent years claiming.
Yet the response from much of the international community was depressingly familiar. The priority was not defeating the threat but ending the confrontation. These are not the same thing. A ceasefire can be useful, buy time, and create opportunities, but it is not victory.
The West repeatedly confuses pauses with solutions. It treats conflict like an unpleasant workplace disagreement that can be resolved through dialogue, facilitated discussion, and sufficient emotional validation. Unfortunately, Hezbollah does not appear interested. Nor did Hamas. Nor the Islamic Republic of Iran.
This brings us to the central strategic question facing Israel: What is the purpose of its military power?
The answer cannot be simply surviving attacks. Military power exists to create security. If threats repeatedly regenerate because wars end before strategic objectives are achieved, then those wars become enormously expensive exercises in postponement. That is precisely the mistake Israel has made repeatedly and is being pressured to make again. For years, it accepted violent exchanges with Hamas, tolerated Hezbollah’s military buildup, and relied on international promises regarding Iran. Every delay made the eventual confrontation larger and more dangerous.
The lesson should now be obvious: Israel cannot outsource its security to Washington and, therefore, certainly not to anyone else. Israel should welcome allies, value alliances, and cooperate wherever possible. However, it must think like a country that stands alone. The Jewish state was not established because international guarantees proved reliable. It was established because international guarantees repeatedly proved worthless.
That lesson remains as relevant now as it was in 1948. Perhaps more so. The region emerging from the wars against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran is different from the one that existed before October 7th. Hamas has been devastated, Hezbollah has been severely weakened, and Iran’s vulnerabilities have been exposed. Yet none of these threats have disappeared. Their sick ideology, hatred, and ambitions remain.
If the international community genuinely wants stability in the Middle East, it should stop obsessing over abstract “peace processes” and start focusing on the security realities that determine whether peace can even have a chance.
As for Israel, its responsibility is not to please its spinally evacuated critics. It is to ensure Jewish children can live safely in a Jewish state. Everything else is secondary, including peace itself.
“‘You’re fucking crazy’: Trump fumes at Netanyahu in call on Lebanon.” Axios.
Nachum, I think you're right, but I would take it one step further.
The people who refuse to learn the lesson about Israel often refuse to learn the lesson about their own countries as well.
The same worldview that believes peace automatically creates security is the worldview that believes multiculturalism automatically creates harmony, that every culture is compatible with every other culture, that borders don't matter, that ideology doesn't matter, and that if we are simply tolerant enough, everyone will eventually get along.
Look at what is happening in parts of Europe. Look at England. Look at the social tensions, the parallel communities, the growing polarization, and the fears many ordinary citizens now openly express about the future of their own countries.
Yet many of the same political leaders who failed to understand the threat facing Israel seem equally unable to recognize the problems developing in their own societies.
You would think October 7 would have been a wake-up call. You would think years of rising tensions in Europe would have been a wake-up call. But they don't seem to wake up.
Instead, they cling to the same assumptions, the same slogans, and the same comforting narratives.
What frustrates me is that reality keeps presenting them with evidence, and they keep looking away. At some point, it stops being a lack of information and starts becoming a refusal to confront unpleasant truths.
That may be the biggest problem of all.
On the money! And have you noticed how the news - even including FOX, which is generally fair in covering Israel - has omitted reporting that Israel's attacks on Lebanon are a RESPONSE to Hizbullah's attacks on Israel's northern communities? They report, "Israel attacked Beirut this afternoon..." with no explanation whatsoever.