Peloni: While the main Islamist war front lies against Israel today, the insidious movement of Islamist assets into the West is taking place to recklessly undermine the any opposition from inside the wire, as I have noted before. Dealing with threats as threatening is how national tragedies might be avoided, and how the Western heritage might survive to be passed down to successive generations, but it requires the current generations to do the heavy lifting in facing a challenge which only they can face. The question remains to be determined if the relative publics of the West will be able to survive their relative govt’s willingness to submit when they should repel the Islamists invading their countries.
Victor Satya | Aug 29, 2026
Pro Hamas rally in England, May 16, 2026. Screengrab via Youtube.
If the sirens are in Tel Aviv rather than Paris, if the rockets are falling on Israel rather than Berlin, if Hezbollah is threatening Haifa rather than London, and if Iran is promising to destroy Jerusalem rather than Brussels, everything must be fine.
This is perhaps the West and Europe’s greatest delusions: mistaking geographical distance for strategic immunity.
Israel has lived for decades with the unpleasant experience of discovering that declarations, ideologies, terrorist organizations and missiles have a tendency to become rather more serious than Europeans initially imagine. Europe, meanwhile, has often responded to Israel’s security predicament as though it were an unfortunate disagreement that could be solved if only Israel would sit down, compromise, make a few concessions and perhaps stop being so alarmingly difficult.
The West sees Israel fighting Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis or Iran’s wider proxy network and often asks the same question: Why doesn’t Israel simply stop fighting? Perhaps, the European suggestion goes, if Israel would simply negotiate more enthusiastically, everyone could go home. The underlying assumption is that Israel’s security environment is somehow uniquely Israeli—that terrorism, radical Islamism, Iranian expansionism and ideological warfare are unfortunate features of the Middle East, but fundamentally somebody else’s problem.
Israel’s problem.
Not Europe’s.
Not America’s.
Not ours.
Except that the people Israel is fighting have never actually said that.
The great Western misunderstanding is to assume that because Israel is the first battlefield, Israel is the entire battlefield. Radical Islamist movements have repeatedly articulated ambitions that extend far beyond Israel’s borders.
Hamas does not define its ideological struggle merely as a dispute over boundaries. Iran’s revolutionary regime has built a transnational network of armed proxies extending across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Sunni jihadist movements have likewise declared hostility toward Western political, cultural and social systems.
The ideological vocabulary differs between organizations, but the broader lesson is difficult to miss:
Israel is not necessarily the destination of the war. It is the frontline.
And frontline countries have an unfortunate habit of discovering threats before countries behind them do.
That is why Israel’s security environment is so often misunderstood in European capitals. Israel is not necessarily more threatened because Israelis are uniquely incapable of getting along with their neighbors.
Israel is more threatened because Israel is first in line.
Europe is simply farther back in the queue.
And being second in line can feel remarkably similar to being safe—right up until the first person in front of you disappears.
There is a particularly revealing pattern in the history of Israel’s security policy.
Israel identifies a threat.
Israel acts against it.
Western governments condemn Israel for acting.
Years later, the same governments discover that the threat was, in fact, rather serious. The 1981 Israeli strike on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor is the classic example. At the time, Israel’s destruction of the reactor was treated in much of the international community as a dangerous act of aggression. The United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 487, condemning the strike. Western governments expressed outrage.
Israel, apparently, was the dangerous one.
Then came the 1991 Gulf War.
And suddenly Saddam Hussein’s clandestine nuclear ambitions looked considerably less theoretical.
The uncomfortable historical irony was that Israel had destroyed an Iraqi nuclear facility years before much of the West fully appreciated what Saddam’s regime was attempting to build.
The lesson should have been obvious. Yet the lesson has been remarkably difficult for Western diplomacy to learn.
There is another illusion at work here.
Europe sees its streets functioning.
Trains arrive.
People complain about taxes and football.
Therefore, Europe concludes, Europe is peaceful. But peace and security are not identical. A country can experience relative calm without having eliminated the forces capable of destroying that calm.
The absence of an attack is not proof that no enemy exists.
This distinction is particularly important when dealing with movements and regimes that openly reject the political and cultural assumptions on which Western liberal societies are built. The West has sometimes behaved as though radical Islamism were a localized Middle Eastern pathology.
But ideologies do not respect customs checkpoints.
Neither do terrorist networks.
Neither do missiles.
Neither do radical ideologies.
And certainly not nuclear technology.
The distance between Tehran and Paris may be thousands of kilometres. The distance between an ideology and its target is considerably shorter. The Iranian question makes the Western delusion even more dangerous. The Islamic Republic has spent decades cultivating an extensive network of armed proxies and advancing an ideological project that reaches beyond Iran’s own borders.
And Israel has been confronting that network because Israel has had little choice.
For Europe, this can look like Israeli belligerence.
For Israel, it looks like Tuesday.
There is a reason Israel cannot afford the luxury of waiting until every threat becomes universally acknowledged. By the time European governments reach consensus that a threat exists, Israel may already be dealing with the consequences. Israel therefore has a profoundly different relationship with the word “preemption.”
For Europe, preemption can look reckless.
For a country on the frontline, sometimes preemption is simply what remains when deterrence fails. Europe still has the luxury of debating it from a distance. But history has a rather unpleasant habit of eventually removing the distance.
Israel will defend itself because it must.
And, whether Europe appreciates it or not, every time Israel prevents a hostile regime or terrorist network from becoming stronger, more capable or more dangerous, the consequences are not confined to Israel. Europe may believe it is enjoying peace because it has chosen a more enlightened path than Israel.
Perhaps.
Or perhaps it is enjoying peace because somebody else has been standing between it and the storm.
Israel is first.
Europe and America come after that.
The only question is whether the West and Europe will help Israel hold the line—or wait until the line reaches its own doorstep.
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