I’m afraid you won’t like what I have to say, but I must. I don’t enjoy breaking illusions; I do it because it enrages me to see how willingly we choose deception when the truth feels inconvenient. I do it not to provoke, but because I believe we should face and state the truth clearly and without hesitation, speaking aloud what most people only dare to think in private.
To understand why people so often mistake illusion for reality, we must first face our own nature. We turn away from bad news, preferring comfort to truth. Yet history reminds us that broken promises of peace have accompanied humanity since time immemorial.
And so, there’s a difference between what we would like to believe and what is actually happening. If we look back through time, we find that both the Middle East and the lands that encompass present-day Ukraine have been theatres of war, invasion, and conquest for over 5,000 years. From the Bronze Age empires of Mesopotamia and Egypt to the Scythians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Mongols, Ottomans, and Russians, these regions have stood at the crossroads of continents, where trade routes, faiths, and ambitions collided.
Their fertile plains and strategic corridors invited not peace but perpetual struggle, making them two of the most repeatedly contested zones in human history, with conflicts recorded in nearly every millennium since the dawn of civilization.
That said, what I discovered while writing The Jerusalem Cycle, a trilogy available on Amazon, was something horrifying: there are two fundamental values on which human beings build their lives. One is the survival of their species, and the other is the pursuit of justice by whatever means are at our disposal. When in peril, and when that sense of justice is denied or distorted, it gives rise to something darker, a need to balance the scales through retribution. Revenge has always been the historical tool people and nations use to seek redress or to justify their actions.
And so, if we are to face reality rather than illusion, may I add a humble opinion about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the proclaimed end of the war, as of today? As I willingly intrude on people’s genuine joy of believing that the conflict is over and that people from all sides return home, let’s not make the mistake of thinking that the fear of extinction exists only on one side of this or any other conflict, past or present. I can’t help but repeat that this region has known little but cycles of conquest, revenge, and shattered truces for more than five thousand years. Every peace celebrated in this region of the world is built on the ruins of the last, and every generation inherits both the wounds and the wish to end conflicts.
To be clear, we are not witnessing peace in the making but a brief intermission, a pause that allows both players and their backers to regroup, rearm, and reframe their strategies for the next confrontation, each still driven by the same unyielding objective: the destruction of the other. And with every new cycle, the stakes grow higher, the weapons more sophisticated, and the devastation more widespread.
And yes, I did warn you that you wouldn’t like this post. Am I right to believe that the fear of extinction can drive anyone, even you, to do terrible things to innocent people?
AJH
NB. I am sure you’ve noticed that I did not take sides, blame one faction over another, or try to explain why peace should be what that region needs. If you didn’t notice, let me explain my position. I believe the conflict is not over and that we, those who are alive today, from children to the seniors we love, none of them will see peace in their lifetime. Not one. If you want to know when peace will come to the Middle East, let me share a brief exchange I once had with a former Canadian diplomat who had served there. After a long discussion about why peace could eventually come to the region, I finally pressed him and said: “I don’t want to hear what you would like to see happen, but what will happen in reality.” At the time, the former diplomat was sixty years old. So, I asked again: “Do you believe you will see peace in the Middle East in your lifetime?” He paused, looked at me, and simply said, “No.”