I’ve been listening to an audiobook called The Man Who Stopped the Sultan, a vivid chronicle of the 15th‑century struggles within the various fiefdoms of Western Europe and also with the Ottoman Empire. What resonates most is not merely the clash of armies, but the atmosphere those people breathed: constant, suffocating uncertainty.

No one knew who might invade next, whether their town would be looted in the fullest sense, or which alliance would abruptly shift. As I listened to the book, I wondered what it truly felt like to inhabit such an unstable world.

Then I realised – I don’t have to imagine it.

For those of us in Israel, across the wider Middle East, and even within Iran itself, the future has collapsed into a single, unsettling question: what happens next?

We are suspended between a fundamentalist regime with unwavering, genocidal ambitions seemingly willing to hang onto power at all costs and acquire weapons of mass destruction, and a Western leader whose decisions remain opaque even to seasoned policymakers. Commentators speak with unshakeable confidence, yet their certainties evaporate with each new development. A brief scroll through X (formerly Twitter) is enough to watch today’s “definitive” opinions turn to dust before your eyes.

This wider instability becomes profoundly personal when I glance at the calendar: our daughter’s wedding is in two weeks. Family are flying in from across the world. And despite every theory I once studied at university – international order, institutional design, global governance – I find myself seized by the most human of questions: will this beautiful day be safe? Will it even be possible?

What troubles me most is how seldom the moral stakes seem to register in global decision‑making. The mass killings perpetrated by the Iranian regime, its decades-long sponsorship of terrorism, the devastation it has fuelled across the region, and its persistent pursuit of nuclear capabilities – none of these are minor. They define lives and extinguish futures. Yet in the grand calculus of world powers, these stark realities are often overshadowed by domestic political pressures, the short rhythms of election cycles such as the midterms, or the strategic priorities of distant regions (e.g. Ukraine, Greenland and Taiwan), as though human suffering were just another variable in an endlessly shifting equation.

America finds itself at the centre of this dilemma not because it sought the role, but because no other nation seems both willing and able to confront the regime’s accelerating actions. It is an unwanted burden, yet for now an unavoidable one. And if the world continues to look away, Israel – a very small nation and the sole Jewish State – will eventually be forced to act alone.

The past few years have only intensified the chilling sense that we are living through a modern remake of a pre‑modern age. A global plague swept across the world in 2020, shredding the illusion of stability. Soon after came a live‑streamed massacre, followed by the unimaginable sexual violence inflicted upon thousands in my country. We then witnessed open support for pogroms, for the murder of Jews, and for terrorists who openly call for our annihilation. And now we face the tangible prospect of direct conflict between a fanatical regime utterly devoid of regard for human life and a superpower paralyzed by the tension between strategic necessity and domestic political constraints.

It feels as though we’ve stepped through a tear in time – into an era where institutions built to preserve order are alarmingly fragile; where the calculations of great powers eclipse the suffering of ordinary people; and where the future feels medieval in its raw volatility. The only difference is that we now navigate this disquieting reality with smartphones, curated feeds, and modern comforts that form a dangerously thin veneer over the deeper instability beneath.

And perhaps the most unsettling truth of all is this: one side in this looming confrontation genuinely, fervently seeks to drag the world back to that age – an age stripped of enlightenment, empathy, and any sense of collective security.

It reinforces the critical need that Israel stay strong and be prepared to protect its own.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)