The Long Brief: Holiday From History [Part 1]
The peace dividend was a vacation. The bill came due.
Through February, Israel Brief’s Long Briefs will run a four-part serialization of Holiday From History: The West’s Delusion of Peace and the Return of War. Each week we’ll send out one installment—built to be evergreen, reference-grade. If you’d rather read the full book now you can get a copy of Holiday From History on Amazon.
Shalom, friends.
This first installment lays down the diagnostic. How the West talked itself into believing war was obsolete—and built a culture that treats process as protection.
You’ll see the doctrine (End-of-History thinking), the rituals (paper promises), the structural fog (maps that lie), the ideological blindfold (multicultural complacency), and the elite echo chamber that enforces euphemism as virtue.
Holiday From History:
The West’s Delusion of Peace and the Return of War
Preface: The Idol of Peace
The West treated 1989 as if history itself had surrendered. The Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet empire folded, and pundits announced “the end of history.” Liberal democracy and free markets, they insisted, had triumphed forever.
That confidence hardened into dogma. Peace stopped being understood as a fragile achievement. It was declared the natural state of mankind. Leaders rushed to cash a “peace dividend,” cutting defense budgets and boasting of new spending on welfare schemes. NATO expanded on paper, but its armies withered in practice. Between 1990 and 2000, Europe’s average defense spending dropped from roughly 2.5 percent of GDP to 1.8 percent, and it kept sinking. Germany fell from 2.6 to 1.4. Italy slipped to 1.6. Canada shrank to almost nothing, around one percent. Politicians congratulated themselves while their militaries hollowed out.
Strategy documents of the 1990s read like sermons to this new idol. Great-power conflict was declared “unthinkable.” Treaties multiplied. Conferences bloomed in a “spirit of partnership.” Globalization was the buzzword. Geopolitics was considered passé. Security services relaxed, convinced that fascism and communism had been buried for good.
But peace had not become normal. The West only convinced itself it had. And the West prayed to its idol of peace while much of the world lived inside borders drawn in imperial sand.
Old empires collapsed, and what remained was a wreckage of maps. Diplomats in Washington and Brussels treated those lines as sacred. On the ground, tribes and sects remembered their ancestors long before any “nation-state” was imposed on them.
Look at the Middle East. Sykes–Picot in 1916 carved the Ottoman corpse into Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. The rulers ignored every ethnic and religious fault line. For a time, colonial officers and later dictators held the lid down. Once the grip loosened, the fractures split wide. Iraq was always an arranged marriage of Sunni, Shia, and Kurds. When the strongmen weakened, civil war erupted. Syria’s “mosaic” of Alawites, Sunnis, Kurds, and Christians did not melt together. It shattered. Empires draw maps. Tribes wait.
The pattern is not confined to Arabs. In 1947, Britain fled India. Partition left rivers of blood, millions displaced, and a permanent duel between India and Pakistan, now nuclear. The border was drawn in haste; the hostility has lasted three generations.
And in the Holy Land: the British Mandate ended with a “partition” that satisfied no one. Israel came into being and fought for survival. Its enemies have never accepted it. The borders changed; the war did not.
The lesson is brutal. Maps can be redrawn in a night. Tribes endure for centuries. Western officials congratulated themselves on diplomacy while ignoring the fires left to smolder. When colonial officers and Soviet commissars withdrew, they left behind frozen wars that thawed quickly. From the Balkans to Judea and Samaria to the Caucasus, the years after 1989 were not an age of peace. They were the return of history through the ruins of empire.
Islam’s Long War
The West’s blindness shows most clearly in how it misunderstands Islamism. For Muslims, history has always been both inward and outward struggle. The Arab conquests of the 7th century built empires that lasted for centuries. The last caliphate, the Ottomans, collapsed only a hundred years ago. The institution died. The dream never did.
Modern Islamism is not a novelty. It is the continuation of a civilizational ambition: restore power, impose sharia, wage jihad against infidels and against Muslims judged insufficiently pure. The Muslim Brotherhood founded in 1928 preached revival through discipline and political power. Khomeini’s revolution in 1979 gave that dream a state, an army, and oil revenues.
Today’s Islamists see the world in binary terms: the ummah—the Muslim community—against the unbelievers. They prosecute this war on five fronts. Terror: violence as spectacle and intimidation. Demographics: migration and fertility as tools of conquest. Lawfare: bending Western courts and the UN to hobble their enemies. Propaganda: networks from Al Jazeera to TikTok pouring poison into public debate. Diplomacy: deals and “dialogues” that mask the same goal of civilizational dominance.
Hamas declares it openly. Hezbollah boasts of it. Tehran funds it. The West, still worshipping peace as normal, refuses to believe them.
Great Powers Did Not Retire
Russia looked finished in the 1990s. Western Europe imagined Moscow might become a partner, even a democracy. Instead, Russia brooded. Putin rebuilt the army and the will to dominate. In 2014, he seized Crimea. The West muttered. By 2022, tanks rolled into Ukraine in the first open conquest of European land since 1945. Cities shelled. Trenches dug. The illusion collapsed. History was back in blood and rubble.
China never stopped playing the long game. While Western pundits praised “peaceful development,” Beijing studied Western wars and prepared its own. It built missiles, fleets, cyber units. It strangled freedom in Hong Kong. It points at Taiwan. It builds islands in the South China Sea and dares neighbors to object. Through Belt and Road it ties Asia, Africa, and Europe into economic chains. Engagement did not liberalize China. It fortified the Party. Beijing never declared the Cold War over because it never believed it was.
South Asia stayed hot. Partition’s wound still bleeds. India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in 1998 and turned every skirmish into a nuclear gamble. Kashmir smolders. The 2008 Mumbai massacre proved the fuse is always lit. Western leaders offered “confidence-building measures.” Nothing built confidence. The frozen war remains one misstep from catastrophe.
Then North Korea. The dynasty chose famine over surrender and fed its people to missiles. Western aid talks bought time for nuclear tests. By the 2010s, Pyongyang had nukes and rockets that could hit continents away. A starving cult with ICBMs—yet Western elites still spoke of peace as the human norm.
Russia. China. South Asia. North Korea. Different stories, one pattern. When the West stopped guarding, others seized the field. Old empires and new tyrants didn’t retire. They regrouped, rearmed, and stepped back onto the stage.
If the West wants to endure, it must relearn something old: goodness requires defense. Jewish life expresses this through two paired ideas. Tikkun olam means repairing the world. Shmirah means guardianship. The one without the other is hollow.
For decades, Western elites clung to a secular tikkun olam stripped of shmirah. They preached about abolishing war, dismantling borders, banning nuclear weapons. Noble slogans, useless without defense. Jews never had the luxury of such illusions. We pray for peace but hire guards at the synagogue door. After the Holocaust, Israel absorbed millions of refugees and built a flourishing society, but it also built an army.
Christian traditions once spoke with clarity about just war and spiritual struggle. Many of their institutions now confuse “love your enemy” with “pretend you have none.” This rot produces compassion without protection. Wolves are indulged as lambs. An ethical spine holds both compassion and strength. Feed the poor, but lock your doors. Forgetting Auschwitz, forgetting 9/11, forgetting October 7 invites repetition. Evil waits for amnesia (and flourishes, relishes in it).
After the Cold War, the West convinced itself that peace was permanent and required no effort. That fantasy disarmed minds and militaries. It left us blind to the rise of Islamism, to Moscow’s revanchism, to Beijing’s ambitions.
The chapters ahead move from diagnosis to action. First, how the peace delusion took hold in the 1990s. Then, the forces that advanced while we slept: jihadists, authoritarian regimes, the collapse of empires and the return of tribes. Next, how our own institutions—media, universities, governments—helped these enemies by denying they exist. From there, case studies of war’s return: rockets out of Gaza, trenches in Donbas, threats in the Taiwan Strait. And finally, a path forward: how to rebuild the ethic of shmirah, strengthen our defenses, and form alliances rooted in clarity instead of wishful thinking.
This is not a chronicle of terror. It is not a lament. It is a rallying cry. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Hamas’s pogrom in 2023 were not “incidents.” They were thunderclaps warning us that history has returned. My promise is blunt: no euphemisms, no hedging. We have enough of that already. What follows is evidence, argument, and solutions, guided by the belief that free societies are worth defending.
We are at a civilizational crossroads. Either we shatter the idol of false peace or history will shatter us. The time for illusions is over. The time for guardianship has come.
Introduction: October 7, 2023
At dawn the sky over southern Israel was clear and still. It was Simchat Torah, the last day of the harvest festival. On the kibbutzim near Gaza, families lingered in holiday calm. In the desert fields by Re’im, thousands of young people were wrapping up a night of music at the Nova festival. Then the sirens wailed.
At 6:30 a.m. Hamas launched thousands of rockets at towns from Ashkelon to Sderot. For locals, rockets meant a sprint to shelters—ugly, but routine. This time, the rockets were cover. Minutes later came the sound Israelis never expected to hear inside their own communities: automatic gunfire.
Dozens of Hamas squads breached the border in trucks, motorcycles, even paragliders. They blew holes in the fence with explosives and bulldozers, then poured through. At Be’eri and other kibbutzim, men in fatigues kicked in doors, firing grenades and rifles into homes. People drinking morning coffee were executed in kitchens. Holocaust survivors were murdered in their beds. Parents tried to hide children in closets and baskets. Some were saved. Many were not. Houses were torched with families trapped inside. Terrorists shot pets, cars, even water tanks to leave only wreckage.
At Nova, paragliders landed near the stage and gunmen opened fire on the crowd. Panic swept through the fields. Hundreds ran; many fell. The attackers hunted among the cars and tents, dragging women away, finishing off the wounded, laughing as they did it. By the time the killing stopped, 260 festival-goers were dead.
That morning stripped away every illusion of safety. Israel had not faced a pogrom of this scale since 1948. The West could pretend history was over. Hamas proved it was not.
The Hamas assault was no riot. It was a planned military operation aimed at civilians. Hamas called it Operation al-Aqsa Flood. Iran bankrolled and trained it. Israel’s complacency made it possible.
It began with rockets—over 3,000 in an hour—meant less to kill than to saturate Iron Dome and drive Israelis into shelters. While people ducked for cover, Hamas moved to its real objectives at the border.
Small drones dropped explosives on Israeli cameras and gun positions. Surveillance towers went dark. Communications were jammed. For the first crucial hour, many communities could not even call for help.
Then came the breaches. Teams blew holes in the fence with explosives. Bulldozers shoved gaps wider. Convoys of trucks and motorcycles poured through. In one grotesque trick, attackers used a truck painted like an IDF vehicle to ambush a border outpost. They carried maps of kibbutzim, down to the location of nurseries and dining halls. The precision showed months of rehearsal.
Within minutes, Hamas gunmen were inside homes. Some used megaphones in Hebrew, pretending to be Israeli soldiers. Families who trusted the lie stepped out and were slaughtered. Others were burned alive in houses set on fire. The cruelty was not incidental. It was the point.
Iran’s hand was visible. The rockets and drones were Iranian-made. Hamas commanders had met Iranian and Hezbollah officials in Beirut weeks before the attack. Tehran wanted Israel distracted, and its proxies delivered.
Hamas also came ready to take hostages. Fighters carried zip ties, handcuffs, even food for captives. By late morning, more than 200 Israelis—babies, teenagers, the elderly—had been dragged into Gaza. Some were paraded through the streets to cheering crowds before being hidden in tunnels. Hostage-taking was not improvisation. It was part of the battle plan.
By the time the army regained control nearly two days later, over 1,200 Israelis were dead. Entire kibbutzim were wiped out. Soldiers fell fighting to retake villages. Hamas celebrated what it called a victory. In truth, it was a massacre carefully engineered in advance, designed not only to kill but to tear at the very sense of safety in the Jewish state.
October 7 ended the fantasy that Hamas could be managed. For years, officials in Israel and the West spoke of “rounds” of conflict as if they were weather patterns—ugly but predictable. Hamas was said to be pragmatic, tied down by salaries and sewage pipes, unwilling to risk its little kingdom in Gaza. Deterrence was supposed to hold. It didn’t. Hamas proved it was willing to bring ruin on Gaza and itself if it meant murdering Jews. Containment collapsed with the fence.
The attack exposed Hamas’s real creed. Many outsiders dismissed its calls to destroy Israel as bluster. They imagined Hamas as a nationalist militia, a political actor angling for leverage. October 7 tore that mask off. The butchery—the rapes, mutilations, toddlers shot, grandmothers executed—wasn’t military action. It was a pogrom with modern weapons. This was genocide in intent and practice, kin to ISIS and to the worst chapters of Jewish history. Israelis saw with searing clarity: this is not a rival to negotiate with. This is an enemy that wants you gone because you are a Jew.
It also revealed a failure inside Israel. A country famed for the best intelligence in the region, a nation that prides itself on constant readiness, was blindsided. Warnings were missed. Unusual movements were brushed aside. The assumption—that Hamas was deterred, more interested in permits and cash than in slaughter—had sunk deep into the security system. On that morning, the guardians of Israel were looking the wrong way, lulled into the same delusion of peace they used to mock abroad. The reckoning that followed cut to the bone.
Outside Israel, the attack broke another illusion: the lazy language of a “cycle of violence.” For years pundits used that phrase to suggest symmetry, as if Hamas rockets and Israeli responses balanced out in a grim rhythm. October 7 obliterated that narrative. It was not a cycle. It was a massacre. The scale, the cruelty, the intent demanded moral clarity. Yet much of the world flinched. Some tried to fit the carnage back into their old templates. Others excused it outright. Their reaction proved almost as revealing as the attack itself.
The days after October 7 should have brought moral clarity. Some governments lit landmarks in blue and white. Citizens sent messages of support. But another current surfaced fast: rallies that excused or celebrated slaughter. The West looked in the mirror and saw fracture lines.
In Sydney, the Opera House glowed with Israel’s flag. On its steps, crowds waved “Palestinian” banners, lit flares, and shouted chants that reeked of pogrom. The image was jarring: one of the world’s great symbols of culture split between solidarity and hate.
London erupted within 48 hours. Marchers paraded with Hamas insignia and chanted “From the river to the sea”—a slogan that erases Israel. Some praised the massacre outright. British Jews, stunned by events in Israel, now felt unsafe in their own capital.
Across the Atlantic, the rot was academic. At Harvard, more than 30 student groups signed a letter blaming Israel entirely. No mention of murdered babies or raped women—just a neat inversion that could have been drafted in Hamas’s press office. Employers withdrew offers. Alumni recoiled. The administration muttered a late, tepid disavowal. At Cornell, a professor called the massacre “exhilarating.” That word alone told us what ideology had done to the academy.
Media wavered too. Headlines spoke of “clashes,” as if Hamas and toddlers were equal combatants. The BBC refused to call Hamas terrorists, clinging to its style guide while Israelis buried children. At the UN, even a resolution condemning Hamas met resistance. Delegates wanted “context,” as if context could sanitize butchery.
For Hamas, this was victory. The killers knew Western elites had marinated students and activists in a story of oppressors and oppressed. They knew enough would cheer or equivocate. On October 7, they tested the West’s moral spine. Too many bent. Some snapped.
Peace is a pause; never a promise. October 7 proved it. In a few hours, the fantasy that the West had outgrown barbarism collapsed in smoke and blood.
Hamas’s massacre was a shatter point. It exposed the same delusion that left Israeli kibbutzim undefended, Europe dependent on Moscow, and the free world scrambling to contain Beijing. The belief that history’s wars were over led to mental and moral disarmament. Those who never stopped believing in war—jihadists, autocrats, fanatics—took their chance.
Hamas is not an exception. It is the latest expression of a long war. Russia’s conquest of Ukraine and China’s threats to Taiwan are not relics. They are reminders. “Never again” is not a guarantee. On October 7, genocide tried to return. The peace after the Cold War was only an interlude, maintained by the strength of the past. Once the West convinced itself history was tame, history struck back.
This book argues for shmirah—guardianship—as the condition of peace. Without vigilance, peace rots. Tikkun olam, repairing the world, is empty without defense. Peace must be built, guarded, and guarded again. Israel paid the price of neglect on October 7. The West will pay a far higher price if it fails to learn the lesson.
What follows is not a call to despair or to militarism. It is a call to sober realism. War and rivalry remain history’s constants. Pretending otherwise is suicide. The holiday is over. The test is how we face history’s return.
This book deals in clarity. Euphemism and hedging have crippled the West’s ability to see danger; they won’t appear here. When Hamas carried out a massacre, that is what it was—not “militants” clashing, not “unrest.” Terrorists murdered Jews. We will call it by its name. The same bluntness applies to our own societies. Western leaders who stumbled, even with good intentions, will be judged plainly. Papering over failure guarantees we repeat it.
The method is simple: history, politics, ethics, examined together. We move from ancient empires to modern battlefields, from policy data to Jewish ideas. Concepts like shmirah—guardianship—and tikkun olam—repair—give us words English often lacks. They are not sermonizing. They are lessons forged in Jewish experience that the West urgently needs.
Every claim here is grounded in evidence. No conspiracy theories. No lazy generalities. The tone is blunt because equivocation has already cost us too much. Clear words are the first step toward clear choices. The story ahead is grim at times, but not hopeless. Realism is not despair. It is the precondition of renewal. What follows is written with open eyes and moral confidence. The holiday from history is over. The only way forward is to face what returned.
Part One: The Myth of Order
Chapter 1: Fukuyama’s Folly
In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet empire cracked, and the West told itself a story. Liberal democracy had triumphed. Communism was finished. Peace was at hand.
Francis Fukuyama gave the mood its slogan: “the end of history.” Not the end of events, but the end of mankind’s great ideological struggles. Liberal democracy and free markets had won. Everyone else, sooner or later, would converge. There might be quarrels, but no more civilizational clashes.
Elites embraced this as gospel. The Cold War was over, therefore war itself was over. They acted as if the hard work of defense, vigilance, and memory could be abandoned. It was seductive. It was also a delusion. History had not ended. It had only paused, waiting for the West to look away.
Fukuyama’s thesis, first an essay in 1989 and then a 1992 book, argued that liberal democracy was the final stage of political development. Future wars, he suggested, would be peripheral, manageable. That claim leapt from seminar rooms to statecraft. In the 1990s, “End of History” became shorthand for the new normal. Leaders cashed in a “peace dividend.” Defense budgets shrank.
The cuts were real. Germany went from 2.6 percent of GDP on defense in 1990 to about 1.2 percent a decade later. Canada slid to barely 1 percent. Britain slashed its army by a quarter and retired ships early. A reunified Germany cut its forces from roughly 600,000 to under 350,000. The United States joined in. Active-duty troops fell by a third, from 2.1 million to 1.4 million. Army divisions dropped from 18 to 10. Spending sank to 3 percent of GDP by 2000. Republicans and Democrats alike called this responsibility. In truth, it was a holiday.
The spirit went beyond budgets. Globalization was hailed as the new security architecture. Pundits mocked old geopolitics and cheered a “flat world” where markets trumped armies. NATO expanded, the EU deepened, and Russia was labeled a “strategic partner.” China entered the global trade system. Davos panels and State Department briefings sounded the same: history’s conflicts were over, institutions and commerce had secured peace. Even pop culture joined in with the “Golden Arches Theory”—no two countries with McDonald’s would fight each other.
Reality disagreed. In 1993 a truck bomb tore through the World Trade Center. In 1994 Rwanda’s genocide killed 800,000 in three months. In 1998 al-Qaeda bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 200. In 2000 a suicide boat nearly sank the USS Cole, killing 17 sailors. Each outrage was treated as an aberration, a crime, a tragedy—not a warning that history was stirring. Policymakers still insisted the default setting was peace.
Into this atmosphere walked a heretic. If Fukuyama’s “End of History” was gospel, he argued the opposite. History was not over. It was gathering. His name was Samuel P. Huntington.
