The massacre of October 7th, 2023, was not merely a regional tragedy. It was a civilizational rupture. Hamas’s attack on Israel—an act of calculated cruelty, not resistance—forced the world to confront a truth that polite diplomacy has long tried to conceal: Israel is not just fighting for its survival; it is fighting for the moral architecture of the West.

For decades, Western societies have treated Israel’s security as a strategic issue, to be ‘managed’ or ‘balanced’ with the reasons for peace. But the events of that day have shown that it is not a matter of proportionality, but of principle. The deliberate extermination of civilians, the abduction of children, the celebration of death do not belong to the language of politics: they represent the very rejection of civilisation.

In the aftermath, a strange inversion took hold in parts of the Western world. The same societies that once vowed “never again” began searching for moral equivalence, as if the defense of a democracy could ever be placed on the same moral plane as the jihadist glorification of martyrdom. This intellectual drift—this loss of moral hierarchy—is perhaps the most dangerous legacy of our postmodern relativism.

Israel today is the test of our capacity for moral clarity.

Defending Israel’s right to exist and defend itself is not a favour to the Jewish people: it is an act of consistency with the founding principles of the West – sovereignty, individual dignity, rational self-defence. No other state would be forced to endure thousands of rockets or the presence of organisations that openly declare they want to destroy it. Yet Israel continues to be admonished to ‘restraint’ by European capitals that have long since delegated their security to American taxpayers.

Europe’s selective conscience has revealed a deeper sickness: the desire to treat comfort as virtue, and neutrality as wisdom. In truth, neutrality in the face of terror is complicity. The lesson of October 7th is that moral passivity enables violence; it does not mitigate it. As Václav Havel once observed: “the tragedy of modern politics is not that evil is strong, but that good has become unsure of itself.”

There is also a geopolitical dimension to this moral blindness.

A weakened Israel would not bring peace: it would emboldenIran, destabilise the eastern Mediterranean, and send a devastating signal to the world’s authoritarian regimes, proving that the West no longer has any coherence or will. On the contrary, a strong Israel guarantees balance, deterrence and a regional order that – although fragile – remains anchored in Western norms and values.

Defending Israel’s very existence, then, is not an act of political philanthropy, but of enlightened self-interest. It is the defence of a frontier where civilisation confronts nihilism. To support Israel is to affirm that theEnlightenment, with its imperfect but tenacious faith in reason and human freedom, still has defenders.

The memory of October 7th must therefore not fade into commemoration. It should serve as a moral compass. For if we lose the ability to distinguish between those who build and those who destroy, between those who defend life and those who glorify death, we will have forfeited not only the meaning of solidarity—but the meaning of the West itself.