Holiday From History · Before Part One · Preface & Introduction
“Peace is not the natural condition of mankind. It is an achievement, held only for as long as someone is willing to guard it, and a civilization that mistakes it for the default has already begun to lose it.”
Uri Zehavi is our new Israel Correspondent, writing a weekly news brief on all things Israel and releasing a longer monthly piece on domestic Israeli affairs. We are sure that this news brief, linked to detailed information from the Mitzpe Institute, will become one of the go-to websites for Israel News.
Meanwhile Uri returns today with a timely book on how the West has taken holiday from history. Believing that peace is the natural condition of mankind and that the dark side of human nature has left us for warmer, idealistic shores, we have forgotten to defend ourselves and our values. We have wrongly believed in the “End of History”. Uri wakes us up from our slumber, starting with the day that changed the world: October 7th 2023. - Daniel Clarke-Serret (editor)
About the book. On October 7, 2023, Israel paid the bill for thirty years of Western complacency in a single morning. Holiday From History is the forensic account: how the post-Cold War West convinced itself history had ended, why the warnings did not break the spell, and what the collapse now reveals about the institutions meant to defend free nations.
Get the book: Paperback · Hardcover · Kindle
About the author. Uriel Zehavi is Managing Director of the Mitzpe Institute and publisher of Israel Brief. He is the author of Rooted Truth, serialised here on Guerre & Shalom, Rooted in Judea, and Letters Across the Table.
The Idol of Peace
Preface
You can carry the thesis of this book in a single sentence, before you read a word of the argument behind it. Peace is not the natural condition of mankind. It is an achievement, held only for as long as someone is willing to guard it, and a civilization that mistakes it for the default has already begun to lose it.
That sentence was close to unsayable in the rooms where Western policy got made for most of my life. The Cold War ended, the defense budgets came down, and a generation of foreign ministries and editorial boards built a worldview on the premise that great-power war was finished and the work left was administration. I name the architects and the doctrines in the chapters that follow, because the premise did not come from nowhere and the people who held it had addresses. The argument of this book is that they were wrong, that the evidence they were wrong sat in plain view the entire time, and that the bill for the error came due on a single morning in October 2023.
I write as a Jew, and the tradition I joined keeps two words for the thing those rooms forgot. One is tikkun olam — repair of the world — the phrase Western progressives borrowed and printed on the tote bag. The other is shmirah: guardianship, the watch. The tradition keeps them bolted together. We pray for peace and we hire a guard for the synagogue door. We set out to repair the world and we assume it still holds people who would rather break it, and us. A people that spent two thousand years as the standing case study in what happens when the watch goes unmanned does not get to treat safety as the weather. It turns out nobody else gets to either. They only thought they did.
So this book is for three readers, the three named on its dedication page. The Jew who felt the floor move in the autumn of 2023 and has been looking for the structure underneath the fear. The Christian who loves Israel and has begun to understand, correctly, that whatever is being tested on the Jews is being measured for everyone else in the room. And the citizen of no particular tribe in this fight who has watched a decade of headlines with a thickening suspicion that the people paid to explain the world have it backwards, and who wants the suspicion either confirmed or laid to rest on the evidence.
I am an exasperated realist. Some of the people I love most have settled on calling that pessimism, and they are wrong, with my affection. I remain, after all of it, hopeful — but hope is not a forecast, and it has never once stood a watch in place of a person willing to stand it. What follows is the account of a thirty-year holiday from that plain knowledge — how it began, what it cost, and what staying awake is going to ask of the rest of us now that it is over.
October 7, 2023
Introduction
At dawn the sky over the western Negev was clear. It was Simchat Torah, the morning that closes the long harvest festival, when the yearly reading of the Torah ends and begins again in the same breath. On the kibbutzim strung along the Gaza fence, families were sleeping in. In a field outside Re’im, a few thousand young people were coming down off a night of dancing. The first sirens sounded at six twenty-nine.
What came through the fence in the next hours has been documented to the minute, and this book documents it in its place. For these opening pages one figure is enough. By the time the army retook the last of the communities nearly two days later, roughly twelve hundred people were dead, the majority of them civilians, hundreds murdered inside their own homes, and the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust had been carried out inside the one country built precisely so that it could never happen again.
I am not going to walk you through the killing here. You have seen the footage, or you have made a decision not to, and either way the morning itself is not the subject of this book. The subject is the thirty years that made the morning possible — the long, comfortable, expensively maintained assumption, held in capitals that were not Jerusalem, that history had quieted to a hum and the serious work left was logistics. October 7 was the invoice. It was itemized in Hebrew, but the charges had been accruing in Washington, Brussels, and London for more than a generation, and the people who let them accrue are, for the most part, still in the room.
That is why a book about Israel turns, in the end, into a book about everyone standing behind it. The bill arrived here first because Israel sits on the seam, where the comfortable world is stitched to the one that never agreed the fighting was over. The Jews are the people history keeps wiring as the smoke detector, and then resenting when the alarm goes off. Whatever is coming for everyone tends to reach a Jewish address a few years early. It reached this one on a Saturday morning, and the smoke had a return label.
So I wrote it for you, and I mean you in particular, in one of three chairs. If you are a Jew who felt the floor go that autumn and has been hunting for the architecture under the fear, it is here. If you are a Christian who loves this country and has begun to see that the people stress-testing the Jews are taking notes for a wider audience, it is here. And if you belong to no side in this and have spent a decade watching the explainers explain while suspecting they have the story upside down, you are the reader I most wanted, and I built the book to survive being handed to you by a friend who finally ran out of road trying to say all of this across a dinner table.
The holiday is over. It ended on a clear morning, the way it always ends for the people who kept the watch and could never get anyone else to believe the watch was still required. Here is what it was, what it cost, and why the bill is now everyone’s.
Next: Chapter 1, Fukuyama’s Folly
We Jews are the canary in the coal mine. No one in my world, Christian or Jew gets this. I can seldom say what I really, no , what I really know to be true!.
Thank you Uri for getting this! Am chai Yisrael.
Or as someone else put it, "Peace is an deal whose existence we deduce from the fact there have been intervals between wars."