Canada is learning what Israel learned a long time ago.
"Middle powers" like Canada and others are waking up to a world Israel encountered beginning decades ago.
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This is a guest essay by Guy Goldstein, a third-generation Holocaust survivor.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week quickly went viral.
He started by talking about “the rupture in the world order, the end of a nice story, and the beginning of a brutal reality where geopolitics among the great powers is not subject to any constraints.”
“Let me be direct,” he doubled down. “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. … We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”
“But I also submit to you that other countries, particularly middle powers like Canada, are not powerless,” he added. “They have the capacity to build a new order that embodies our values, like respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of states.”
“The power of the less powerful,” he continued, “begins with honesty.”
And if we’re being honest, no country has lived inside this rupture longer, or more vulnerably, than Israel.
Israelis did not wake up one morning and decide to challenge a global system. They did something far simpler and far more dangerous: They stopped accepting the premise that their survival required permission from those who despised them.
That choice matters, because it reveals something Carney’s speech cannot fully admit: The order that is collapsing did not merely fail to protect Israel; it actively prevented Israel from ever resolving its conflict with hostile, genocidal actors in the Middle East and North Africa. And when Israel finally refused to comply with those rules, the illusion began to crack.
Carney said, “When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.” Israel learned that lesson decades ago. It learned it when ceasefires became staging grounds, when negotiations became shields for terror, when international law became a tool to constrain the defender while legitimizing the attacker.
Israel’s contribution to the collapse of the old order was not ideological; it was practical. For years, Israel tried to live within the system. It withdrew from territory. It signed agreements. It accepted asymmetric scrutiny. It tolerated armed non-state actors on its borders because the rules said sovereignty was negotiable and restraint was virtuous.
What it received in return was not peace, but a permanent state of managed conflict.
The rules-based order that Carney nostalgically describes contained several structural prohibitions that made resolution impossible: It prohibited decisive victory, it prohibited moral clarity, and it prohibited the disqualification of rejectionist actors.
Under that system, Israel was expected to negotiate endlessly with groups that denied its right to exist, while being condemned for defeating them too thoroughly. It was expected to accept militias as political stakeholders. It was expected to treat terror as grievance and survival as provocation.
This was not an accident; it was how the system functioned.
When Israel finally broke from this script, the reaction was immediate: condemnation, threats of being isolated, moral panic.
But something else happened too: The system could no longer pretend it was neutral. By refusing to be judged by those who celebrated October 7th, by those who arm Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis other terrorists, by those who turned civilian suffering into propaganda, Israel forced a reckoning. Not a comfortable one, but a real one.
Carney said, “Stop invoking rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised.” From Israel’s perspective, it never did. The rules that supposedly restrained violence did not restrain Israel’s enemies; they restrained Israel’s ability to end the violence.
The rules that claimed to promote peace froze a war in place for a century. That is why Israel’s war in Gaza mattered far beyond Gaza. It was not simply a military campaign. It was a rejection of a moral architecture that demanded Israeli death be contextualized and Israeli survival be justified.
By fighting without apology, Israel demonstrated something the old order could not tolerate: that peace oftentimes requires victory, not process. That legitimacy sometimes requires exclusion, not inclusion. That good faith cannot coexist indefinitely with armed rejectionism. This is where the opportunity now opens.
The collapse of the old order removes the very constraints that made the Arab-Israeli conflict permanent. The prohibition on decisive outcomes is gone. The fiction that militias can be political partners is dying. The idea that grievance confers legitimacy is weakening.
In its place is a simpler logic, one that already exists more quietly in the Middle East and North Africa: shared interests, shared threats, shared prosperity. The Abraham Accords did not emerge because the old system worked; they emerged because it stopped mattering. Arab states began aligning with Israel not because of Western lectures, but because the old rules no longer served their security, economic, and geopolitical futures.
That logic can now be extended. A new regional structure is possible — one that does not pretend universal agreement is necessary, one that rewards peace materially and excludes rejectionism structurally, one that treats sovereignty and monopoly on force as non negotiable. This is where Israel’s role shifts from disruptor to architect.
By surviving outside the old order, Israel has learned what a new one must require. No armed anarchy. No endless negotiations with those who profit from war. No moral equivalence between builders and destroyers. Prime Minister Carney believes the future belongs to middle powers coordinating resilience. From Israel’s perspective, the future belongs to blocs that are honest about good and evil.
Not everyone gets a seat. Not everyone gets veto power. Not everyone gets to claim victimhood as immunity. That is not cruelty; it is the precondition for peace.
Israel might be blamed for collapsing the old order, but it simply outlived it. And in doing so, Israelis revealed a truth the West is only beginning to confront. An order that prevents good actors from winning will eventually collapse under the weight of its own hypocrisy.
The question now is whether the new structure will be built around that truth, or whether the world will try once again to resurrect the same rules with a different vocabulary.
Israelis already knows the answer. They learned it the hard way.
I suspect that Carney, a globalist banker, unlike Israel, doesn't have a realistic understanding of where Canada stands in the world. He is moving towards Islamization and dependence on Qatar, which will be very happy to have a foothold in North America, along with China. Canada is no Israel.
I’m sure Carney was quite happy with that old order as it applied to Israel and would still enforce it there if he could.