Partygoers at the Supernova Psy-Trance Festival who filmed the events that unfolded on Oct. 7, 2023. Photo: Yes Studios

There is something profoundly disturbing about watching the international community scrutinize Israel almost obsessively while forces openly committed to destabilizing the Middle East continue expanding their influence far beyond Israel’s borders.

The latest developments surrounding the Houthis and the strategically vital waterways of the Red Sea should force people to reconsider the comfortable narrative that virtually every conflict in the region can somehow be traced back to Israel and the Palestinian question. The Houthis are part of a much larger regional struggle in which Iran and its allies have built networks capable of threatening Israel, Arab states, international shipping, and Western interests, yet public anger remains disproportionately directed toward the Jewish State.

Israel, meanwhile, continues to face enemies that have never been particularly secretive about their intentions.

Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Iranian regime are not identical organizations, and pretending that they are would oversimplify a complicated region, but they share something extremely important: Israel is viewed not merely as a government whose policies they oppose, but as a Jewish sovereign state whose continued existence they reject.

That distinction matters enormously.

Israel did not create the Iranian regime, Hezbollah, Hamas, or the Houthis, and removing Israel from the map tomorrow would not magically transform the Middle East into a peaceful collection of liberal democracies. Iran would still pursue regional influence, sectarian conflicts would continue, extremist ideologies would survive, and struggles over territory, religion, and political power would remain.

Yet Israel has somehow become the convenient explanation for almost everything.

What troubles me even more than this intellectual dishonesty is how easily millions of people repeat narratives they have barely examined, because history has already demonstrated the terrifying consequences of surrendering individual judgment to collective emotion.

Comparisons with the Nazi era must be made carefully, because today’s political movements are not automatically equivalent to Nazism and our present circumstances are not the 1930s. However, one lesson from that period remains painfully relevant: Societies become dangerous when people stop questioning what they are told, when slogans replace knowledge, when repetition becomes accepted as proof, and when belonging to the crowd becomes more important than determining whether the crowd is actually right.

That human weakness did not disappear in 1945. Today it has social media algorithms capable of spreading emotionally powerful claims around the planet within minutes.

People who could not explain the history of Gaza, Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, Iran, Lebanon, or Yemen suddenly speak with absolute certainty about an extraordinarily complicated conflict, while words such as genocide, colonialism, resistance, and apartheid are repeated so frequently that their emotional power often seems more important than their historical or legal meaning.

This week, another experience brought these thoughts painfully close to home for me when I finished watching the fifth season of “Fauda.”

Of course, “Fauda” is a television drama, not documentary evidence, and nobody should use a fictional series as proof of political claims. Nevertheless, its portrayal of fear, terrorism, infiltration, loss, and the terrible decisions produced by asymmetric warfare inevitably resonates differently after Oct. 7.

I found myself crying because some images no longer felt comfortably fictional.

What I still cannot comprehend is how anyone who witnessed what Hamas terrorists did on Oct. 7 can romanticize terrorism as resistance or immediately search for arguments explaining why Israel somehow brought such barbarity upon itself.

No territorial dispute makes deliberately murdering civilians heroic, no historical grievance transforms kidnapping families into liberation, and no political cause makes celebrating the slaughter of innocent people morally acceptable.

This is also where the conversation about Palestinian society must become more honest.

Palestinians are individuals and no population should ever be declared collectively guilty for the crimes of terrorists, but acknowledging that basic principle does not require us to pretend that radicalization, glorification of violence, antisemitism, and support for terrorism do not exist within significant parts of Palestinian society. If we genuinely want peace, these realities must be confronted rather than hidden because they complicate the narrative preferred by activists in Western capitals.

Peace cannot be constructed upon denial.

The world should therefore look beyond Gaza and ask a larger question about what is happening throughout the region.

If Israel disappeared tomorrow, would the Houthis suddenly embrace democracy, would Hezbollah abandon its weapons, would Iran’s revolutionary leadership become liberal, would sectarian struggles disappear, and would extremist movements suddenly accept pluralism and religious tolerance? Obviously not.

Israel is not the origin of every Middle Eastern conflict, and treating it as such allows the international community to avoid confronting ideological and geopolitical forces that existed independently of Israel and would continue to exist without it.

There is also an uncomfortable irony in watching Western demonstrators direct extraordinary anger toward Israel while paying comparatively little attention to movements whose values are profoundly incompatible with the freedoms those same demonstrators enjoy.

Supporting Palestinian aspirations does not require supporting Hamas, excusing terrorism, or denying Israel’s right to exist. Criticizing Israeli governments is legitimate, just as criticizing any democratic government is legitimate, but there is an enormous moral and political difference between criticizing Israeli policy and embracing movements that seek the elimination of Jewish sovereignty altogether.

Israel remains a tiny country surrounded by a region in which several powerful actors have repeatedly demonstrated that their ambitions extend far beyond one territorial dispute.

That is why developments involving Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis should matter not only to Israelis but also to Europeans, Americans, and anyone who depends upon international trade, regional stability, and the principle that political disagreements should not be settled through terrorism.

Following Sept. 11, of all dates, the democratic world should remember how dangerous it can be to dismiss extremist ideology until its consequences arrive at one’s own doorstep.

The lesson should not be that every conflict is identical or that every enemy Israel faces represents the same threat. The lesson is simpler and more uncomfortable: Fanaticism does not become harmless merely because its first victims live somewhere else.

Israel has spent years warning that the forces surrounding it represent a wider challenge than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict alone.

Perhaps instead of endlessly asking what Israel has done wrong, the world should finally begin asking what happens if Israel has been warning us about something we refuse to see.

Sabine Sterk is Founder of Time To Stand Up For Israel.