On September 23, 1980, I sat in the home of one of the greatest intelligence minds in Israel. Isser Harel, the founder of Israel’s intelligence services and the man who hunted Adolf Eichmann to the ends of the Earth, had spent his life studying evil.
I asked Harel a simple question. “Will terrorism ever come to America?”
He didn’t hesitate.
“In America, you kill a fly and rejoice. In the Middle East, we kill one, and hundreds come to the funeral. The first terrorist attack will be in New York City at your tallest building.”
This was more than 20 years before smoke poured from the Twin Towers. Long before Osama bin Laden became a household name. Long before the world learned the phrase “War on Terror.”
He saw what was coming because he understood something America refused to understand: terrorism is not a crime to be managed. It is an ideology to be defeated.
Israel understood what America did not
America spent decades believing oceans could protect us. We believed prosperity insulated us from hatred. We convinced ourselves that if we ignored radical evil, radical evil would ignore us.
Israel never had that luxury.
Israel learned that when terrorists strike, they are not looking for compromise. They are looking for victory. Every successful attack is not the end of a campaign. It is an invitation to launch the next one. Every concession is interpreted as weakness. Every hostage deal becomes a recruiting poster. Every unanswered attack convinces the next terrorist that the price of murder is acceptable.
Isser Harel understood that truth because he lived it every day. Sadly, too many American leaders did not. His warning came at a pivotal moment in American history.
The election that changed America’s course
When Ronald Reagan challenged president Jimmy Carter in 1980, nearly every political expert predicted Carter would survive. Throughout much of the campaign, Carter either led or remained highly competitive in national polling despite an economy crippled by inflation, rising unemployment, and the humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis. Washington’s conventional wisdom insisted that experience and incumbency would prevail.
The experts were wrong. The American people recognized that weakness invites aggression.
They had watched 52 Americans held hostage in Tehran while the world’s leading superpower appeared powerless. They saw a regime in Iran publicly humiliate the United States without paying a meaningful price. America’s enemies were taking notes.
Reagan understood what Israel had long understood: peace comes through strength, not surrender.
The fly always has friends
Harel’s point was simple. Terrorism is never an isolated act. Kill one terrorist without confronting the ideology behind him, and hundreds more step forward to take his place.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps did not become the world’s leading exporter of terrorism because it was too strong. It became powerful because the free world repeatedly chose containment over confrontation.
Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, and dozens of terrorist organizations did not emerge in a vacuum. They were financed, trained, armed, and inspired by a regime that discovered terrorism was an inexpensive way to wage war against democracies.
Too often, Western governments responded by treating symptoms instead of the disease.
They froze assets, then unfroze them.
They imposed sanctions, then lifted them.
They condemned terrorism while funding governments that sponsored it.
Israel has never been able to afford these illusions because every mistake is measured in funerals.
Americans often ask why Israelis respond so forcefully after terrorist attacks. The answer is simple. They know that if you allow one murderer to escape justice, you are not preventing violence. You are scheduling the next massacre.
That is precisely what Isser Harel meant.
In America, we celebrate killing the fly because we believe the problem has been solved.
In the Middle East, they know hundreds will gather at the funeral because martyrdom is celebrated, children are taught to admire murderers, and hatred is passed from one generation to the next unless it is decisively defeated.
September 11 changed everything, or should have
Twenty-one years later, Americans watched as Harel’s prediction unfold before the eyes of the world. September 11 should have erased every illusion we had about the nature of this conflict.
Instead, too many leaders returned to the fantasy that diplomacy alone could transform fanatics into partners. We treated terrorism as though it were merely the product of poverty or misunderstanding instead of recognizing it for what it often is: a deliberate ideological commitment to destroy Israel, America, and every society built upon biblical values and human freedom.
The same forces that attacked New York attacked Jerusalem. The same chants heard in Tehran eventually echoed on American college campuses. The same antisemitism that fueled Hamas now disguises itself as political activism in Western capitals.
The battlefield has changed. The enemy has not. That is why Israel’s war has never been Israel’s war alone.
Israel is fighting for all of us
That is why standing with Israel is not simply an act of friendship. It is an act of self-preservation. Israel has always fought the enemies that eventually come for the rest of the free world. The Jewish state has served as democracy’s front line outpost against radical Islamic terrorism for generations.
When Israel destroys a terrorist commander, it is not merely defending its own citizens. It is weakening an international network that ultimately threatens every free nation.
The world would do well to remember the words spoken to me in that Jerusalem living room nearly half a century ago.
Isser Harel was not making a prediction based on luck. He was describing the inevitable consequences of refusing to confront evil.
Kill the swarm
The only question remaining is whether we have learned the lesson.
Flies multiply. So does evil.
If free people continue celebrating the death of one fly while ignoring the swarm gathering behind it, we should not be surprised when the buzzing becomes deafening. The price of freedom has never been wishful thinking. It has always been vigilance, moral clarity, and the courage to destroy evil before it destroys us.
The writer has written 120 books and is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and Nobel Peace Prize nominee. He is the founder of the Friends of Zion Museum in Jerusalem, the Ten Boom Museum in Holland, and Churches United with Israel, one of the largest Christian Zionist networks in America.