Even With the Hostage Deal Global Respect for U.S., Israel Reluctant
The world now knows a breakthrough hostage deal was reached.
The latest hostage-release deal, secured through intense diplomacy, has brought relief across Israel and among the families who had waited for months.
Yet, the global reaction is strangely divided.
On television panels and in editorials from Europe to Washington, what should have been a moment of gratitude is treated with suspicion.
Some commentators call it a diplomatic triumph; others imply political calculation or moral compromise. Beneath those arguments runs a familiar undertone — the instinctive unease greeting Israeli success.
That dissonance — joy shadowed by judgment — reveals a deeper shift.
The country once pitied for its fragility now occupies the strategic center of the Mideast.
Every hostage negotiation, every intercepted drone, every intelligence success confirms how far Israel has moved from dependency to strategic autonomy.
The Trump administration's Abraham Accords merely formalized what had already become evident: cooperation with Israel is now a pillar of regional security.
The Psychology of Overreach
Strategic success brings its own paradox. Israel's visibility and influence — disproportionate to its size — have revived an old discomfort.
In Western societies, Jewish accomplishment has often been treated as excessive.
Now that reflex appears at the level of the state.
Israel's efficiency in war or technology is read by some not as capability but as moral distortion or insensitivity to the destruction that war inevitably causes.
This continuity is troubling.
The suspicion once directed at Jewish financiers or intellectuals has migrated to the image of Israel itself. It is the same reflex against prominence — the belief that Jewish success must conceal unfair advantage.
Even where criticism stops short of hostility, it assumes that when the IDF causes civilian deaths, it must care less for human life than other armies at war.
In Europe and North America unease about Jewish power has resurfaced.
Israel's deterrence is read not as security but as overreach.
Ironically, this perception is far stronger in the West than in much of the Arab world.
Many Arab governments, tired of scapegoating Israel now view their neighbor pragmatically: a power to be balanced or emulated, not demonized.
The Abraham Accords underscored this new pragmatism.
The region's diplomatic map has quietly realigned around a shared understanding that Israel’s stability supports their own.
A New Definition of Security
Whether criticism of IDF for disproportionate civilian deaths is justified enough, Israel’s mastery of defense has made terrorism — once the weapon of the weak — far less effective.
For half a century, asymmetric warfare relied on spectacle: hijackings, hostage-taking, suicide attacks.
These tactics reshaped how the world travels and lives, creating a global infrastructure of fear. One might wonder how many of the 4.4 billion people who pass through airports each year would join in a peaceful, flag-free protest, against the terror threat which has crippled air travel and costs taxpayers and travelers an estimated $15 billion annually.
Israel’s integration of intelligence, early-warning systems, and missile-defense networks such as Iron Dome have made surprise attacks increasingly futile.
If terrorism’s purpose was to make the strong feel vulnerable, Israel has inverted that logic. Its resilience shows that constant vigilance can blunt fear itself.
The New Balance
The Middle East has rarely been so paradoxical.
A state once thought existentially fragile is now the anchor of regional security; the nations that once defined themselves by rejecting it are quietly adapting to its presence.
The narrative of Jewish weakness — so deeply ingrained in Western consciousness — has been overturned by technological power and strategic clarity.
That, paradoxically, is why Israel's strength still unsettles many observers: it exposes how the myths of the 20th century — colonial guilt, victimhood, resistance — have been overtaken by the realities of the 21st.
The world is still learning how to think about a Jewish state that no longer asks for protection but offers it.
That reversal is disorienting, yet it hints at something larger: the possibility that the era when terrorism dictated the rhythm of global politics may finally be drawing to a close, and the time may come when Israel will be recognized for its contribution to global security and to the defeat of state-sponsored terrorism.
Mark L. Cohen practices law and was counsel at White & Case starting in 2001, after serving as international lawyer and senior legal consultant for the French aluminum producer Pechiney. Cohen was a senior consultant at a Ford Foundation Commission, an adviser to the PBS television program "The Advocates," and assistant attorney general in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He teaches U.S. history at the business school in Lille l'EDHEC. Read Mark L. Cohen's Reports — More Here.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.