A European Security Council:
Building the Power to Decide and Act

Europe may finally be constructing the missing link between shared danger, political decision and coordinated response.

 

Europe has spent years discussing the forces, weapons and industrial capacity it needs to defend itself. It may now be preparing something just as important: the political machinery needed to decide and act together.

In her State of the Union address on 16 September, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the Commission would present ideas for making a European Security Council a reality. The envisaged leaders' format would reach beyond the European Union, involving partners such as Ukraine, the United Kingdom, Norway and Canada. It would sit alongside proposals for an emergency security protocol against hybrid threats and a new European instrument for strategic enablers.

None of this is settled. Membership, authority, leadership and decision rules remain to be designed. Yet the direction deserves enthusiasm. Europe is no longer thinking only about what it must possess. It is beginning to consider how it can recognise danger, decide and organise a response as a security power.

The missing power to decide

Europe does not lack forums for consultation.
EU leaders meet in the European Council. Ministers coordinate through the Council of the EU. NATO provides collective defence and military planning. The European Political Community brings almost the whole continent together.

What Europe still lacks is a permanent, focused link between these worlds: a place where the most relevant leaders can develop a shared assessment, decide what should happen next and connect that decision to the institutions and countries capable of carrying it out.

That is the difference a European Security Council could bring us now. Its purpose to shorten the distance between warning and decision. When sabotage, cyberattacks, drone incursions or military escalation occur, ofcourse Europe needs to do better than twenty-seven parallel national conversations followed by a carefully negotiated statement. It needs a trusted mechanism able to establish political direction quickly.

From decision to action

And then, decision-making alone is not enough. Europe must also be able to translate a political decision into an organised response.

That response can be military, but not always.
It may involve sanctions, cyber defence, the protection of critical infrastructure, coordinated attribution of an attack, restrictions on hostile networks, the mobilisation of strategic reserves or accelerated defence production. And, in more serious circumstances, it may require air and missile defence, military transport, intelligence support or action by a coalition of willing countries.

The wider package announced by the Commission’s President von der Leyen is therefore crucially important. The proposed counter-hybrid playbook could provide procedures for threats that remain below the threshold of open war. The new instrument for strategic enablers could support assets such as air and missile defence, space systems, cyber capabilities, transport and air-to-air refuelling. A Security Council could supply the political decision at the top of this chain.

The emerging logic is simple: shared assessment, rapid decision, agreed response and identifiable responsibility for implementation. If Europe can connect those elements, it will have – finally - begun to build operational decision-making and response power.

With Ukraine inside the room

Ukraine's proposed inclusion is perhaps the most consequential feature.
Europe would no longer organise security only for Ukraine or provide assistance to Ukraine from outside. It would begin organising European security with Ukraine.

As we know, Ukraine possesses experience that no EU institution can reproduce: large-scale drone warfare, air defence under continuous pressure, cyber resistance, infrastructure protection, rapid military innovation and the mobilisation of society and industry during war. That makes Ukraine not simply a recipient of European security, but a producer of security knowledge and capability.

Permanent participation would also give practical meaning to the accepted principle that decisions about Ukraine cannot be made without Ukraine. Kyiv should therefore be involved in designing the Council, not invited only after its structure has been agreed by others.

A wider European security community

Including the United Kingdom would be equally important. Brexit removed one of Europe's strongest military and intelligence powers from EU decision-making, but it did not remove Britain from European geography or European security. A Security Council could restore permanent strategic coordination without reopening the institutional argument over EU membership.

Norway would bring Arctic, energy and NATO importance. Canada would add military, industrial and transatlantic weight while reinforcing a community of democratic partners able to take its own political initiatives.

This broader membership would define European security by strategic contribution rather than EU membership alone. The Union would remain the central organising force, but it would create a structure capable of drawing essential allied countries into continuous political coordination.

Strengthening NATO rather than duplicating it

The proposal must be designed to strengthen NATO, not compete with it. NATO remains the foundation of collective defence for its members and possesses the military command structure that the European Union does not. A European Security Council should not now attempt to become an alternative North Atlantic Council or operational headquarters.

Its contribution would be different. It should just improve Europe's needed political capacity to assess threats, mobilise EU instruments, coordinate participating governments and prepare European positions before action within NATO. A more coherent European pillar makes the alliance stronger as European countries achieve more capabilities, apply clearer priorities and develop a greater readiness to carry responsibility.

The difficult design now begins

The obstacles are still substantial.
A council containing every EU leader plus external partners will be too large for rapid crisis management. A smaller council will immediately raise questions about permanent seats, rotating representation and the voice of smaller member states. France, Germany, Poland, Italy and the Nordic and Baltic countries will not all view the ideal structure in the same way.

Leadership will also matter.
The Commission president launched the proposal, but foreign and defence policy remains largely in the hands of national governments. The European Council president and the High Representative will expect important roles. Clear arrangements will be needed to prevent institutional competition from consuming the energy created by the initiative.

Above all, the Council must be connected to implementation.
Regular meetings of national security advisers, shared threat assessments, emergency convening procedures and systematic follow-up will be necessary. Without a supporting machinery, the Council risks becoming another impressive summit followed by uncertain delivery.

These challenges show what must now be designed and agreed.
An informal, intergovernmental beginning may be more realistic and probable than immediate treaty change: a limited leaders' group, permanent participation by Ukraine and the United Kingdom, preparation by security advisers and the ability to convene rapidly.
It can develop through actual operational use before Europe formalises it further.

Europe is watching

The announcement has created a moment of expectation.
European Citizens understand that defence spending and new equipment are necessary. They also understand and worry that capabilities remain fragmented and politically weak unless Europe can decide when, why and how to employ them.

The Commission must now turn an important and attractive idea into a credible design.
Member states must decide whether they are prepared to create a mechanism that can genuinely accelerate common action. Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the other proposed partners must be treated as co-designers of a shared security structure, not as occasional guests.

Agreement will take time, and operational effectiveness will take longer. But the direction is hopeful. Europe may finally be moving from consultation as an end in itself towards consultation as the beginning of action.

All eyes should now be on the Commission's next proposal.
Europe has long known that it needs greater power. It may at last now be preparing the machinery needed to decide and act.

References

[1] European Commission, State of the Union 2026: Statement by President Ursula von der Leyen on security and defence, 16 September 2026. https://acceptance.audiovisual.ec.europa.eu/de/media/video/I-293062

[2] Reuters, 'EU's von der Leyen backs European Security Council and playbook against sabotage,' 16 September 2026. https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/eus-von-der-leyen-backs-european-security-council-playbook-against-sabotage-2026-09-16/

[3] European Council, Conclusions on Ukraine and on European defence and security, 18 June 2026. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2026/06/18/european-council-conclusions-on-ukraine-and-on-european-defence-and-security/

 

After Nearly Eight Decades of Conflict - A Middle East Teach-In - Seeking to Break the Cycles

 

After Nearly Eight Decades of Conflict

A Middle East Teach-In

R.M. Westerink; September 2026 

TEN READINGS. FIVE QUESTIONS. ONE PURPOSE. To replace fragments, slogans, and inherited certainties with a structured inquiry into how the conflict became locked—and what might unlock it. The cycles have continued for too long and exacted far too great a human cost to be accepted as permanent. Understanding how they sustain themselves is not merely an intellectual exercise. It is necessary if the cycles are finally to be broken — and another generation is to be spared their price.

Why a Teach-In?

Thirty-one EUROPE-IS-US essays produced, constitutes an investigation base.
Together they trace history, competing memories, failed peace efforts, maximalist strategies, Western responsibility, European choices, and possible alternatives. Yet volume can conceal the argument.
A reader who encounters one article at a time may see individual trees while missing the forest.

This Teach-In turns the collection into a guided inquiry.
It does not ask the reader to accept a finished doctrine.
It asks five questions, offers ten core readings in a deliberate order, and makes the remaining work available as evidence, challenge, and extension.
The aim is not false imbalance. The aim is disciplined moral and political clarity: the same human worth, the same rules, and the same scrutiny for every actor.

Why this matters now

The human cost is not an abstraction. Israeli fear, Palestinian dispossession, civilian death, displacement, hostage-taking, settlement expansion, dehumanizing speech, and recurring regional escalation live in different memories—but they interact in one political system.
Moral alarm is justified. It becomes useful only when joined to analysis: What mechanism is producing the next cycle? Who benefits from it? What incentives keep it alive? What could credibly replace it?

The companion alarm essay, We Promised “Never Again”, argues that a universal promise loses its meaning when it is reserved for one people. Its place here is to establish urgency—not to substitute analogy for evidence or conscience for strategy.

How to use this Teach-In

Read the five modules in order, alone or as the basis for a seminar.
Each module contains two core texts: one establishes a problem; the other complicates or redirects it. The short notes below tell you why each text is included. The further-reading section lets readers test the argument rather than merely follow it.

1. What happened—and why did the conflict become locked?

Begin by separating chronology from interpretation. A shared factual baseline is indispensable, but facts do not explain themselves. Communities organize them into stories about origin, necessity, victimhood, return, and security. Those stories then shape what each side considers possible.

1. Israel 1948–2025: Expansion, Casualties, Displacements—Timeline

Why read it. It places territorial change, war, casualties, and displacement in one chronology. Without that baseline, argument drifts toward selective memory.

Takeaway. The conflict is not a string of isolated eruptions. It is a cumulative process in which territorial change, violence, and displacement alter the starting point of every later negotiation.

2. Israel–Palestine: How Visions of the Past Shaped a Locked Conflict

Why read it. It moves from events to the rival meanings attached to them: refuge and return, liberation and catastrophe, security and dispossession.

Takeaway. Historical memory is not background material. It is an active political force. Peace cannot require either people to erase its memory, but memory cannot be allowed to dictate permanent domination or permanent war.

2. Why have negotiations and force reproduced the conflict?

After the history comes the machinery. Negotiations fail when they postpone foundational disputes, lack enforceable symmetry, or leave spoilers better rewarded than builders. Violence also has a feedback structure: each side’s maximalism supplies the other side with its strongest argument.

3. Israel–Palestine: Can the Cycles of Conflict Be Broken?

Why read it. It compares failed peace efforts and asks what structural conditions were missing.

Takeaway. An agreement is not a peace system. Durable change needs institutions, public legitimacy, mutual recognition of loss, and external powers willing to align incentives with a reciprocal settlement.

4. The Tragic Paradox of Maximalist Anti-Israel Resistance

Why read it. It examines a conclusion that criticism of Israeli policy often avoids: eliminationist resistance can strengthen the very fortress state it seeks to defeat.

Takeaway. When resistance promises Israel’s disappearance or celebrates attacks on civilians, it validates existential fear, weakens Israeli dissent, and makes territorial hardliners appear necessary. A just cause can be damaged by a self-defeating strategy.

3. What remained unresolved in 1948—and where does territorial maximalism lead?

The decisive question is not whether either people possesses a genuine history, trauma, or claim. Both do. The question is whether one people’s safety can be built through the political negation of the other. The essays in this module test two routes: a reciprocal settlement that was not built, and a territorial completion that promises security through dominance.

5. The Road Not Taken in 1948

Why read it. It uses counterfactual reasoning to clarify the principles absent from the founding settlement: reciprocal self-determination, reciprocal security, and reconciliation.

Takeaway. The value of the counterfactual is not that history could simply be replayed. It reveals the unfinished work carried into the present: neither national freedom nor lasting security can be one-sided.

6. The Greater Israel Mirage—A Hazardous Dream at Enormous Cost

Why read it. It examines the strongest version of the Greater Israel promise on its own terms: territorial permanence will eventually force acceptance and deliver a safe haven.

Takeaway. Even its most “successful” outcome would require indefinite coercive capacity, external protection, and management of accumulated resentment. Greater Israel promises permanent security. The Dream proves to be a Mirage, instead entrenching conflict, isolation and enormous costs.

4. What rules permit moral clarity without prejudice?

Criticism becomes credible when its rules survive a change of actor.
Antisemitism is real and lethal; so are anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia. None can be used to immunize a state, movement, or military strategy from scrutiny. Nor may scrutiny of political power become collective blame against Jews, Palestinians, Muslims, or any diaspora.

7. Can You Question Israel Without Being Called Antisemitic?

Why read it. It provides a practical bridge between two obligations: confronting antisemitism and judging Israeli claims and conduct by ordinary political and legal standards.

Takeaway. The test is consistency. Critique evidence, policy, ideology, and power. Reject ethnic conspiracy, collective guilt, and demands uniquely applied to Jews. Equal rules protect both free inquiry and human dignity.

8. A European Declaration for Middle East Stability

Why read it. It condenses the inquiry into three reusable principles: future, security, and reconciliation.

Takeaway. A proposal should be judged by whether it offers every population a livable future, treats security as reciprocal, and incorporates—not erases—historical injury. Principles matter when they constrain allies as well as adversaries.

5. What could break the cycles?

A diagnosis that ends with condemnation leaves the political field to armed actors and territorial facts. The final module therefore asks what kind of power could make a different future credible.
The answer offered here is European civil power: coordinated diplomatic, economic, legal, and civic support for actors who can build reciprocal political agency.

9. A European Civil Power Initiative for the Middle East

Why read it. It translates the series’ principles into an institutional proposal: give nonviolent political organization more capability and credibility than armed maximalism.

Takeaway. Civil power is not passivity. It requires conditional relationships, protection of civic space, sustained resources, and clear consequences for settlement, collective punishment, hostage-taking, attacks on civilians, and incitement—whoever commits them.

10. The Middle East Still Possible

Why read it. It ends with the destination rather than the machinery: a region whose histories and identities become sources of connection instead of permanent mobilization.

Takeaway. Peace must offer more than the absence of war. It needs a compelling picture of normal life, shared prosperity, cultural encounter, and political dignity. Without such a destination, fear will continue to outperform hope.

What the ten readings reveal

·        Security without reciprocity produces insecurity.
Military superiority can suppress threats, but it cannot by itself produce legitimate acceptance. When control is experienced as permanent humiliation or dispossession, it continually regenerates resistance.

·        Maximalisms reinforce one another.
Greater-Israel territorialism and eliminationist anti-Israel resistance present themselves as enemies, yet each supplies the fear, evidence, and recruitment narrative the other needs.

·        Historical memory must be acknowledged but cannot govern the future alone.
The Holocaust, the Nakba, expulsion, persecution, terrorism, occupation, and war are not interchangeable. Each deserves precision.
Their political lesson is nevertheless universal: no people’s trauma grants a permanent exemption from another people’s humanity.

·        Outside powers are participants, not spectators.
Western military, diplomatic, and economic choices have helped shape the incentive structure. Europe and the United States cannot plausibly call for peace while underwriting strategies that make a reciprocal settlement less attainable.

·        A viable alternative must be both principled and powerful.
Equal rules are the compass; institutions, leverage, protection, and credible political agency are the vehicle.

The hard conclusion

Nearly eight decades after 1948, neither territorial expansion, overwhelming force, armed maximalism, nor externally managed negotiation has delivered the promised destination.
The Greater Israel project has advanced on the map, yet the safe, accepted, normal state it was meant to secure remains out of reach.
Palestinian strategies centered on Israel’s defeat or disappearance have likewise failed to restore rights or produce sovereignty; they have repeatedly helped Israel’s fortress logic prevail.

This is the mirage at work: every costly step appears to bring security or liberation closer, while the political conditions required for either recede.
The price has been enormous—paid first in Palestinian and Israeli lives, freedom, displacement, fear, and moral injury, and then across a region repeatedly organized around conflict.

The conclusion is not that history has made peace impossible.
It is that the strategies pursued most relentlessly have not been routes to their declared ends. Enlightenment begins by seeing that contradiction clearly.
Political responsibility begins by refusing to finance, excuse, or glorify another cycle—and by building a reciprocal alternative strong enough to compete with it.

Further reading: test and extend the argument

Methods and the 1948 claims

·        Self-Determination Statehood Evaluation Framework — the criteria behind the paired assessments.

·        Evaluating Statehood—Palestine (c. 1947–1948) — application of the framework to the Palestinian claim.

·        Evaluating Statehood—Israel (1948) — the same test applied to the Israeli claim.

History, identity, and responsibility

·        Two Histories, One Mirror — a comparative lens on dispossession; an analogy, not an equation.

·        The Achievable Road to Real Peace — a forceful argument about Western origin-of-conflict responsibility.

·        The Urgent Need to Separate Jewishness from Zionism — a distinction between a diverse identity and a political ideology.

·        We Promised “Never Again” — the moral alarm underlying the present inquiry.

Applied position statements

·        EPS-001—Iran and Middle East Stability — the regional de-escalation test.

·        EPS-002—Israeli Settlement Expansion — the territorial and international-law test.

·        EPS-003—Hamas Armed Resistance — the civilian-protection and strategy test.

·        EPS-004—Greater-Israel Zionism — the same compass applied to territorial maximalism.

Plans, leverage, and changing politics

·        Trump’s 20-Point Peace Plan — a contemporary plan tested against recurring failure conditions.

·        A Western Pivot Moment — an early signal of changing conditionality.

·        Trump’s Iran Policy Reconsidered — a regional case for strategic de-escalation.

·        A New Democratic Consensus on Israel Is Emerging — a claim about changing U.S. political space.

·        Evidence Brief: From Emerging Consensus to Congressional Reality — a legislative reality check on that claim.

Europe and the regional alternative

·        Europe Needs Its Own Middle East Strategy — the case for European strategic autonomy.

·        Europe's Missing Role in the Middle East — why criticism needs a credible political road.

·        Europe's Missing Role Is Beginning to Appear — a progress check in a changing regional order.

·        Beyond Left and Right: Israel’s “Israel First” Reality — a synthesis of the durability of Israeli strategic priorities.

The Greater Israel Mirage - A Hazardous Dream at Enormous Cost

 

The Greater Israel Mirage

A vision of permanent Jewish security that may produce permanent mobilization resentment and isolation

R.M. Westerink; September 2026 

Greater Israel is usually discussed as a territorial project: settlements, annexation, Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley and the prevention of a Palestinian state. But territory is not its ultimate promise. Its deeper promise is security.

The vision tells Jewish Israelis that completing sovereignty over the historical homeland will end strategic uncertainty. Israel will no longer depend on temporary borders, unreliable peace processes or the willingness of others to tolerate Jewish existence. Once its permanence is beyond dispute, resistance will lose its purpose and the region will eventually accept reality.

That expectation deserves to be examined on its own terms. Suppose Greater Israel succeeds. Suppose Israel establishes permanent control between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, Palestinian statehood disappears from practical diplomacy and neighboring governments accept that the result cannot be reversed. Would the vision finally deliver the secure and accepted Jewish home it promises?

The answer may reveal the project as a mirage: territorial completion comes closer while lasting security continues to recede.

The Dream

For its supporters, Greater Israel is not primarily a program of conquest. It is the completion of the Jewish return. Jerusalem, Hebron, Shiloh, Bethel and the hills of Judea and Samaria are understood not as foreign territory but as the geographical heart of Jewish history.

In this account, the establishment of Israel in 1948 began national restoration; it did not complete it. The Jewish people returned after exile, persecution and the Holocaust, but remained territorially vulnerable and politically constrained. Greater Israel promises to end that incompleteness.

Its ideal end state is one sovereign Jewish state between the sea and the Jordan, with united Jerusalem as its capital, Judea and Samaria incorporated into Israeli national life and the Jordan Valley forming the eastern security frontier. Jewish towns and infrastructure connect the entire territory. No Palestinian state divides the land or overlooks Israel's narrow coastal center. Likud's foundational platform and later sovereignty initiatives express essential parts of this claim.[1][2]

Palestinians may retain private, religious, economic and municipal rights, but not a competing national sovereignty. Harder versions encourage those unwilling to accept the order to emigrate. Bezalel Smotrich's 2017 Decisive Plan states the logic particularly clearly: sovereignty, extensive settlement and the definitive defeat of Palestinian national aspirations.[3]

The emotional conclusion is powerful: exile has ended, the homeland has been reunited, defensible borders have been secured and Jewish vulnerability has finally been overcome.

What Victory Would Look Like

To test the vision fairly, assume that this territorial project has been achieved.
Organized Palestinian resistance has been defeated or contained. Egypt and Jordan preserve their treaties. Gulf governments expand practical cooperation. Eventually, the principal Arab states acknowledge that Greater Israel cannot be reversed.

This would be an “acceptance state”, but acceptance must be defined carefully.
It would not require Palestinians or Muslim societies to regard the outcome as just.
It would mean that they ceased organizing regional politics around its reversal.

The sovereignty question would be treated as closed. Palestinians could preserve family history, religion, Arabic culture and local identity, but Palestinian nationhood would no longer create a recognized entitlement to statehood, East Jerusalem as a capital, control of borders or an unrestricted right of return.

Arab and Muslim governments could continue expressing sympathy and supporting Palestinian welfare. What they would abandon is the proposition that Palestinian suffering still generates a recoverable territorial claim.

Greater Israel would have won when Palestinian memory remained, but no longer determined borders.

Assume the Region Accepts It

What would it take to keep this acceptance state functioning?

Neighboring governments would have to do far more than sign treaties.
They would need to prevent their territory from becoming a base for renewed struggle, interrupt financing and weapons transfers, constrain armed Palestinian organizations and cooperate with Israeli intelligence.

They would also have to manage memory.
Schools, state media, mosques and cultural institutions would need to separate remembrance from territorial recovery, solidarity from resistance and attachment to Jerusalem from a demand for Palestinian sovereignty.

The religious dimension would be especially sensitive.
Jordanian or Islamic custodianship of Al-Aqsa, reliable Muslim access and Israeli restraint around the holy compound would become indispensable. A serious Al-Aqsa crisis could reconnect Palestinian grievance with a much wider Islamic public within days.

Refugee-hosting states would face another burden.
If mass return had been definitively rejected, Palestinians would need citizenship or durable status elsewhere, economic integration and some form of compensation. Otherwise, the refugee system would continue carrying the territorial claim from one generation to the next.

Finally, the order would require a material bargain: regional investment, trade, security cooperation and visible economic improvement. Arab governments would need to show that accepting an irreversible reality prevented further suffering and produced tangible benefits.

None of this would be self-sustaining.
Each new displacement, settler attack, discriminatory law or high-casualty military operation would force neighboring governments to choose again between preserving relations with Israel and responding to their own populations.

The Most Successful Realistic Outcome

The most successful plausible result is therefore not comprehensive peace.
It is a managed cold regional order.

Israel would be too powerful to defeat.
Egypt, Jordan and Gulf governments would cooperate because confrontation offered no attainable territorial gain and because Israeli technology, intelligence and trade served their interests. Conventional interstate war would become unlikely.

Yet below that stability, Palestinian resistance would remain periodically active. Arab societies would remain more hostile than their governments. Iran or another challenger could present itself as the defender of Jerusalem and use Palestine to delegitimize cooperating regimes. Israel would require continuing military dominance, internal surveillance and external diplomatic support.

Existing experience supports this distinction.
Egyptian and Jordanian peace with Israel has survived repeated crises, but it has remained cold. The Abraham Accords have also survived, while popular support for normalization has remained shallow. Following October 7 and the Gaza war, Arab Barometer found support for normalization at no more than 13 percent in any of seven surveyed Arab countries.[4]

Such an order could last for decades.
But its durability would show that the costs of challenging it remained higher than the costs of enduring it. It would not show that the underlying grievance had disappeared.

Greater Israel may be capable of making resistance unsuccessful.
It is much less capable of making resistance meaningless.

The International Mirror

Greater Israel might eventually be accommodated by neighboring governments.
That would not make it internationally legitimate.

The United Nations would probably see a state that had permanently incorporated occupied territory, prevented Palestinian self-determination and placed two populations under one sovereign authority without equal national and political standing.

This judgment would not begin from a blank page. In 2024, the International Court of Justice concluded that Israel's continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory was unlawful. The UN General Assembly subsequently called for that presence to end within twelve months. A completed Greater Israel would formalize precisely the territorial order these institutions had rejected.[5][6]

Israel would remain a UN member and an important military, technological and economic power. It would retain allies and might deepen relations with governments that valued its capabilities. But it would increasingly be treated as an exceptional state: diplomatically protected by some, legally challenged by many and exposed to sanctions, boycotts and demands for non-recognition.

It might not become a complete pariah in the manner of apartheid South Africa. American protection and Israel's strategic value could prevent comprehensive isolation. A more plausible status would be that of a “protected pariah”: connected enough to prosper, protected enough to resist international pressure, but increasingly regarded as standing outside the rules applied to ordinary states. The term 'territorial pariah' has already entered prominent pro-Israel criticism.[7]

Israel would have achieved recognition of its power without achieving recognition of its right.

The Safe Haven Becomes a Fortress

That distinction returns the analysis to Zionism's original promise.

After centuries of persecution and the Holocaust, a Jewish state was intended to provide more than military refuge. It offered sovereignty, self-reliance and national normality: a place where Jews would no longer depend on the goodwill of others for their collective survival.

Greater Israel appears to complete that project.
More territory promises strategic depth. Control of the Jordan Valley promises defensible borders. Prevention of a Palestinian state promises removal of a potential military threat.

But its successful implementation could produce the opposite kind of security environment: a large Palestinian population living without national political ownership, neighboring societies carrying unresolved resentment, holy places capable of mobilizing a transnational religious response and an international legal order that rejects Israel's borders.

Israel would be territorially larger and militarily dominant, yet also permanently mobilized. It would be less vulnerable to conventional invasion but more exposed to insurgency, communal violence, sanctions, diplomatic isolation and repeated legitimacy crises. It would depend not only on its own power but on American protection and the endurance of Arab governments willing to contain opposition.

The safe haven would increasingly resemble a fortress: too powerful to be defeated, but never sufficiently accepted to relax.

The Mirage

The mirage is not that Greater Israel cannot be created.
Israel may be capable of establishing an irreversible territorial reality. Neighboring governments may eventually accept that military reversal is impossible. A managed regional order may survive for a long time.

The mirage is the belief that territorial completion will finally produce security, acceptance and normality.

The vision promises an end point.
Its implementation more plausibly creates a permanent system of maintenance: deterrence, internal control, regional bargains, religious crisis management and external diplomatic protection. Every serious shock would reveal that acceptance had remained strategic rather than legitimate.

This can also create a dangerous political dynamic.
When a project repeatedly promises final security but security remains out of reach, its supporters may conclude not that the project is defective, but that it has not yet been pursued decisively enough. Moderation becomes weakness; restraint becomes unfinished victory; each failure generates a demand for further force or expansion.

Greater Israel may radicalize over time not merely because its supporters are extreme, but because the security promised by territorial completion keeps failing to arrive.

This is no longer only a warning about a possible future.
The underlying bargain has been tested since 1948: security through sovereign strength.
Since 1967, an increasingly powerful territorial answer has been added: security through permanent control of more land. Israel has gained extraordinary military power and national endurance. It has not gained the promised release from existential fear, recurrent war, occupation, resistance or dependence on external protection.

The cost has been enormous: Palestinian dispossession, statelessness and lost lives; Israeli deaths and trauma; repeated wars and permanent mobilization; damaged institutions, moral corrosion and declining international legitimacy.
Not all these costs can be attributed to Israel, or to a single doctrine. But they are costs that the Greater Israel answer has plainly failed to end and, in important respects, has compounded.

After almost eight decades, the burden of proof has reversed.
The question is no longer whether completing territorial control might finally make the promise work.
It is why more control, more force and less Palestinian political agency should be expected to produce the security, acceptance and normality they have never yet produced.

The Great Israel project might therefore fulfill its map while defeating its purpose.
The Jewish people would possess sovereignty throughout the land, but within a state compelled to remain permanently armed, exceptional and dependent on protection.

The security mirage has shaped Israel since 1948;
Greater Israel Mirage has intensified it since 1967.
It has cost Palestinians and Israelis enormously.
Completing the Mirage is not a credible path out of the conflict, but a way of making its risks and costs permanent.

References

[1] Likud Party, Original Party Platform.

[2] Knesset, declaration supporting application of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria and the Jordan Valley, 23 July 2025.

[3] Bezalel Smotrich, Israel's Decisive Plan, 2017, English translation.

[4] Arab Barometer, Arab Public Opinion Constrains Normalization with Israel, 23 June 2025.

[5] International Court of Justice, Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Advisory Opinion, 19 July 2024.

[6] United Nations General Assembly, Resolution ES-10/24, 18 September 2024.

[7] Associated Press, Rahm Emanuel warns that Israel has become a territorial pariah, 8 July 2026.

 

We Promised “Never Again”

 

We Promised “Never Again”

History does not have to repeat itself exactly before we are required to recognize it.

 

R.M. Westerink; September 2026 

Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has called for Israel to kill “30 to 40” people in Gaza every night. Not only those presenting an immediate danger, he explained. Some people, he said, are “not worthy of life.” They are “not even people.”

He also declared all of Gaza to be Israeli territory, called for settlements throughout it and advocated encouraging as many Palestinians as possible to leave.[1]

These are not the words of an anonymous extremist. They are the words of a serving minister in the government of Israel.

If this does not sound the alarm, what would?

The Comparison We Are Afraid to Make

The Holocaust was unique in its historical circumstances, organization and murderous scope. But that cannot mean that it teaches us nothing until another Holocaust has been completed.

No historical comparison depends on perfect equality. History never repeats itself precisely. What returns are recognizable mechanisms: people divided into those whose lives count and those whose lives do not; an entire population associated with an enemy; expulsion presented as necessity; cruelty normalized through official language; responsibility dispersed until nobody appears responsible.

That is why comparison with the Holocaust is relevant—particularly for Israel.

The point is not that Israel is Nazi Germany. The point is that “Never Again” was supposed to establish a universal obligation: when a state begins stripping a people of their humanity, we must recognize the danger before we know its final extent.

If the Holocaust may be invoked only to defend Jews, but never to defend others against recognizable processes of dehumanization, its lesson has been reduced from a universal warning to an instrument of national exemption.

That cannot be its moral meaning.

We Know How the Descent Begins

Mass violence does not begin with mass killing. It begins by changing the moral status of its intended victims.

They become animals, terrorists, infiltrators or an existential danger. Their individual identities disappear. Children, civilians, doctors and journalists become members of a suspect population. Their deaths are explained as unavoidable. Their hunger becomes leverage. Their displacement becomes voluntary “emigration.” Their land becomes someone else’s security requirement.

The atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023 were real and indefensible. But no crime committed against Israelis can remove the humanity or legal protection of Palestinians. Justice does not permit one atrocity to place an entire people outside morality.

Ben-Gvir’s language matters because it reveals where the boundary is moving. He is no longer merely defending excessive violence as an unfortunate necessity. He is openly identifying people who, in his judgment, should not live.

Meanwhile, settlement and annexation pressures continue in the occupied West Bank. The International Court of Justice concluded in 2024 that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful and that its settlement policy violates international law.[2] What is happening in Gaza and what is happening in the West Bank are not identical. But both increasingly point toward the same political horizon: Palestinians removed, confined or permanently subordinated so that Israeli control can expand.

Responsibility Is Being Organized Away

Israel’s leaders invoke security. Military institutions invoke orders and operational necessity. Western governments invoke Israel’s right to defend itself. European institutions issue warnings but struggle to attach consequences. Citizens are told that the conflict is too complicated for moral clarity.

This is how responsibility disappears.

It does not actually disappear. It passes along a chain.

The politician who legitimizes dehumanization bears responsibility. The institution that converts it into policy bears responsibility. The ally that supplies weapons or diplomatic protection bears responsibility. The government that condemns violations while preserving the material relationships that help enable those violations bears responsibility.

And once the evidence is openly available, citizens and political representatives must also decide what they are prepared to accept in their name.

Silence is not always approval. But prolonged silence by those with influence becomes permission.

Never Again Is Being Tested

After the Holocaust, the world promised that it would learn to recognize the road toward organized inhumanity.

That promise is not tested when remembering past crimes is easy. It is tested when recognition carries political cost—when the state responsible is an ally, when the victims are unpopular, and when speaking clearly attracts accusations of disloyalty or antisemitism.

Antisemitism is real and must be confronted. But opposing the dehumanization, dispossession or killing of Palestinians is not hostility toward Jews. It is an application of the same universal human principle that makes antisemitism intolerable.

Indeed, many Israelis and Jews around the world are themselves sounding this alarm. They understand that Jewish history cannot confer permission to disregard the humanity of another people.

Israel is not exempt from the moral lessons of Jewish history. No nation is.

We Cannot Say We Did Not Know

We can see Gaza. We can see the West Bank. We can hear the words spoken by Israeli ministers. We know the legal findings. We know that warnings without consequences have not stopped the deterioration.

What remains is not a question of knowledge.

It is a question of courage and responsibility.

Governments that still possess political, economic and military influence over Israel must use it: suspend assistance that may facilitate violations, impose consequences for settlement and annexation policies, protect humanitarian access and make clear that official incitement to expulsion or killing places political leaders beyond normal diplomatic acceptance.

The threshold for action cannot be the completion of an atrocity. By then, “Never Again” has already failed.

History will not ask whether Gaza was identical to the Holocaust.

It will ask whether the warning signs were visible.

They are.

The alarm is sounding.

And this time, we cannot say we did not know.

References

[1] Frank Andrews, “Senior Israeli official calls for killing of ‘30 to 40’ people in Gaza every night,” CBS News, 17 August 2026.
[2] International Court of Justice, Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, Advisory Opinion, 19 July 2024.

 

On Israel and Palestine, and the West. Equal Rules. Human Values and International Law

 

On Israel and Palestine, and the West

Equal Rules. Human Values and International Law

R.M. Westerink; September 2026 

REFERENCES

A Timeline of Publications

ISRAEL 1948-2025 // Expansion - Casualties, Displacements - Timeline; 2025-10-13
https://europe-is-us.blogspot.com/2025/10/israel-1948-2025-expansion-casualties.html

Israel-Palestine: Can the Cycles of Conflict be broken? 2025-10-14
https://europe-is-us.blogspot.com/2025/10/israel-palestine-can-cycles-of-conflict.html

Trump’s 20-Point Peace Plan: A Breakthrough or Another False Dawn for Israel-Palestine? 2025-10-15
https://europe-is-us.blogspot.com/2025/10/trumps-20-point-peace-plan-breakthrough_15.html

Can you question Israel without being called antisemitic? 2026-03-24
https://europe-is-us.blogspot.com/2026/03/can-you-question-israel-without-being.html

Two Histories, One Mirror: What Native Americans Can Teach Us About Palestine; 2026-04-02
https://europe-is-us.blogspot.com/2026/04/two-histories-one-mirror-what-native.html

The Achievable Road to Real Peace: Accepting Origin-of-Conflict Culpability; 2026-05-11
https://europe-is-us.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-achievable-road-to-real-peace.html

A European Declaration for Middle East Stability; 2026-06-12
https://europe-is-us.blogspot.com/2026/06/a-european-declaration-for-middle-east.html

The Road Not Taken in 1948; 2026-06-13

https://europe-is-us.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-road-not-taken-in-1948.html

The Middle East Still Possible; 2026-06-14
https://europe-is-us.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-middle-east-still-possible.html

Beyond Left and Right: Israel’s ‘Israel First’ Reality and Its Implications; 2026-09-08
https://europe-is-us.blogspot.com/2026/09/beyond-left-and-right-israels-israel.html

 

Why Europe Cannot Yet Develop
the Leadership It Needs

The missing Democratic Capacity behind Europe’s Credibility Gap

R.M. Westerink; September 2026 

 

Europe’s problem is no longer a lack of ambition. Across security, defense, economic resilience, energy, technology, migration, and geopolitical autonomy, the direction of travel is becoming clearer. Citizens can want a Europe that protects them and acts with greater unity. Yet they still struggle to see how that Europe will come into being, who can credibly lead it, and how they themselves participate in authorizing its direction.

This is more than a delivery problem. It is also a democratic Leadership problem. The European Union has institutions for negotiation, legislation, administration, and restraint, but only weakly developed processes for sensing Europeans as a political community, imagining a shared future, allowing European Leaders to emerge, and testing their Leadership publicly. Europe’s Credibility Gap is therefore partly, but importantly, a Leadership-development gap.

From Credibility Gap to Leadership gap

The Europe Citizens Want—But Cannot Yet See Coming [2] described a widening distance between European aspirations and visible political movement. Citizens may broadly support a stronger and more independent Europe while doubting that National Governments and EU Institutions can create it. Strategies, summit conclusions, spending commitments, and legislative programs accumulate, but responsibility remains divided and the common undertaking remains difficult to recognize.

Why Democratic Parties Struggle to Develop Strong Leaders [3] identified a related weakness at national level. Democratic Systems select officeholders and limit their power, but they do not reliably develop Leaders who combine social recognition, political imagination, direction, delivery, and self-restraint. Those qualities are often left to emerge from an uncertain combination of personality, circumstances, public demand, and communication.

The problem is magnified in the European Union. Political authority is distributed among National Governments, the European Council, the Commission, the European Parliament, political parties, and administrations at several levels. That distribution protects pluralism and prevents easy concentration of power. It also makes it difficult for citizens to identify who represents a European direction, who carries responsibility for achieving it, and how a different direction could be democratically chosen.

Europe consequently has many Leaders, but no complete and continuously visible Leadership relationship with its citizens. National Leaders speak from national mandates. The Commission proposes and administers in the Union’s general interest. Parliament is directly elected but does not alone form a European Government. European political families appear most visibly during election campaigns and remain weakly rooted in everyday public life. Each carries part of European Leadership; none carries the whole.

The Threat from Within

This weakness matters because the human needs involved do not disappear. Under conditions of uncertainty, citizens continue to seek recognition, protection, belonging, and direction. Authoritarian and radical-right movements offer forceful interpretations of those needs. They identify a neglected people, define who belongs, describe internal and external threats, and present visible Leaders who promise to restore control.

Europe often answers with the benefits of integration, the requirements of law, policy programs, or warnings about nationalism. These answers may be justified, but they do not necessarily create an equally tangible political relationship. Citizens can be told why Europe is necessary without being enabled to imagine themselves as participants in a common European undertaking.

When Europe’s democratic political system fails to develop Resonant Leadership
and a compelling, inclusive image of Europe as a shared Political Community,
it leaves more room for authoritarian movements to interpret citizens’ desire for recognition, protection, belonging, and direction.

This does not mean that European Leadership failure causes the Far Right. Economic disruption, migration pressures, unequal regional development, cultural conflict, distrust, and organized political radicalization have their own importance. The narrower claim is that Democratic Europe leaves political space available when it performs essential Leadership functions only weakly. The Threat from Within grows not only from what authoritarian movements do, but also from functions Democratic Europe leaves insufficiently fulfilled.

Four Democratic Leadership Functions

Europe does not need to settle its final constitutional form before addressing this weakness. Nor must it immediately create a directly elected European President or transfer National Leadership to Brussels. It can begin by recognizing four functions as necessary democratic capacities and strengthening them through existing institutions and political organizations.

1  European Community Sensing

The EU already conducts opinion research, consultations, citizen dialogues, and deliberative exercises. What remains underdeveloped is a continuous political interpretation of how Europeans experience their communities and when they expect Europe to act. Aggregate approval ratings cannot reveal the relationships among insecurity, identity, institutional trust, regional difference, and demands for common protection.

A modest institutional direction would be to connect existing citizen panels, regional networks, public-opinion research, and frontline institutions in a recurring European assessment of lived problems and underlying needs. Such work should distinguish what citizens experience from the explanations political actors attach to those experiences. It should also show where national situations differ, where they converge, and where a European answer could become politically meaningful. The aim is not to replace electoral judgment with consultation. It is to give European Political Leadership a richer social starting point.

2  European Democratic Imagination

National Politics can draw upon countries that citizens already imagine as historical and political communities. Europe cannot assume the same depth of common identification. Its task is not to erase national belonging or manufacture a uniform European identity. It is to make Europe recognizable as an additional Political Community in which different Nations and citizens can pursue purposes they cannot secure alone.

Recurring European Democratic Imagination forums could bring citizens together with political leaders, historians, writers, artists, scientists, local representatives, and practitioners. Their task would not be to produce an official Brussels narrative. They would develop and test different accounts of what Europeans share, what Europe exists to protect, what future requires joint action, and what obligations accompany European solidarity. Their work should inform political programs and major public choices before communications specialists turn those choices into messages.

This is the critical function because it creates both vision and internal legitimacy. Vision identifies a destination. Internal legitimacy arises when citizens can recognize their countries, experiences, and agency within the undertaking. Communication explains what institutions intend to do; Democratic Imagination helps establish whose undertaking it is and why Europeans might authorize it.

3  European Leadership Emergence

Europe also needs more visible routes through which potential Leaders can acquire a genuinely European Political Identity. This is sensitive because Leadership Emergence eventually touches the selection of the Commission and other senior offices. Under the Treaties, the European Council proposes a candidate for Commission president after taking the European elections into account, and the European Parliament elects that candidate.[1] The resulting balance among elections, governments, Parliament, party families, and member states should not be casually displaced.

The immediate question, however, is less constitutional: can potential European Leaders become visible before formal negotiations distribute offices? European Political Families could identify candidates earlier, give them cross-national political assignments, require sustained engagement in several member states, and expose their judgment and record to public scrutiny. This would create a developmental layer before nomination without predetermining who must receive office.

Europe does not initially need a new procedure for electing one Leader. It needs a stronger process through which potential Leaders can demonstrate European experience, build relationships beyond their country and party base, and become recognizable to citizens before appointment decisions are made. Over time, such a process might make European elections and Commission selection more politically consequential. The present argument does not depend on agreeing to that further step.

4  European Public Testing

Leadership and political direction acquire legitimacy only when they face citizens under demanding conditions. European debate remains heavily mediated through national political arenas, while formal hearings often emphasize competence, portfolios, and institutional positioning. These are necessary tests, but they do not show whether a prospective Leader can connect different national experiences to a common direction.

European Political Families, Parliament, National Parliaments, Regions, and independent civic organizations could organize recurring multilingual public debates and citizen questioning across Member States. Prospective Leaders would have to explain tradeoffs, respond to conflicting regional experiences, defend democratic boundaries, and show how public criticism changed—or did not change—their position. Public testing would not replace elections or parliamentary responsibility. It would make the relationship preceding formal selection more European, visible, and demanding.

An agenda rather than a blueprint

The Four Functions reinforce one another.
Community Sensing discovers how Europeans experience change and protection.
Democratic Imagination translates those experiences into possible shared futures.
Leadership Emergence allows people capable of representing those futures to become visible.
Public Testing determines whether their claims deserve confidence beyond their original national and political constituencies.

None of these directions requires Europe first to resolve the argument between federation and confederation, rewrite the treaties, or construct a presidential system. They can begin as stronger connections among activities that already exist. The important change is conceptual and organizational: sensing, imagination, emergence, and testing should be treated as parts of democratic Leadership development, not as separate exercises in consultation, culture, personnel selection, and communication.

Nor can these capacities substitute for delivery. A European story contradicted by governmental failure will deepen distrust. Leadership must connect shared direction to choices, responsibility, implementation, and visible results. But delivery alone cannot tell citizens who “we” are, why common action belongs to them, or how they can authorize its direction.

Europe’s Credibility Gap will not be closed by better messaging.
Europe must develop the Democratic Conditions under which Leadership can become visible, resonant, effective, and legitimate.
The objective is not to manufacture a European leader or impose a European Identity.
It is to ensure that when Europeans need recognition, protection, belonging, and direction, Democratic Europe is capable of answering in its own voice.

 

References

[1] Consolidated Version of the Treaty on European Union, Article 17(7). EUR-Lex.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:12016M017

[2] Europe Is Us. “The Europe Citizens Want—But Cannot Yet See Coming.” September 2026.
https://europe-is-us.blogspot.com/2026/09/the-europe-citizens-want-but-cannot-yet.html

[3] Europe Is Us. “Why Democratic Parties Struggle to Develop Strong Leaders.” September 2026.
https://europe-is-us.blogspot.com/2026/09/why-democratic-parties-struggle-to.html