We are living in a remarkable time, and a frightening one. Artificial intelligence is driving a transformation that gives us reasons for both excitement and fear. The world order that emerged after World War II appears to be coming apart. Whether another order will replace it, or whether we are heading toward greater chaos, is unclear. Meanwhile, climate change is beginning to make its power felt.
But beneath all of this is another transformation whose consequences, I believe, are greatly underestimated: the inversion of the population pyramid.
For most of human history, there were many young people and relatively few old people. Each generation could expect a larger generation behind it, helping to support society and care for those who could no longer work. It generation expected to be better off than the previous one.
That arrangement is changing.
Across the OECD, fertility is below replacement level in every country except Israel. Even India is now below that threshold. This does not turn a population pyramid upside down overnight. But combined with longer lives, sustained low fertility changes the balance between generations.
We built our institutions around one demographic reality. We are entering another. The implications go far beyond the financing of pensions. They reach into the distribution of wealth, political power, opportunity, and hope.
What happens when young people begin to believe that the society they are expected to support has no place for them? They face expensive housing and uncertainty about their working lives. They are asked to prepare for a future in which AI may eliminate or transform the very jobs they are studying to obtain. At the same time, they see people who already own homes, investments, and businesses enjoying advantages that seem increasingly beyond their reach.
I do not know whether AI will replace most workers. But I worry that it could generate enormous wealth while weakening the connection between work and economic security. We have no broadly accepted answer to how that wealth should be shared.
For someone starting out, the promise that hard work will lead to a better life may become difficult to believe.
Look at France. Protests that began over school conditions and teacher shortages have broadened into anger about inequality, living costs, and public services. These demonstrations involve several generations and many grievances. Yet I see in them a warning about what happens when young people lose confidence in the institutions responsible for their future.
My fear is that this loss of confidence will deepen as the demographic balance changes.
Democracy does not automatically resolve the problem. Politicians need to get reelected. Older voters are an influential constituency, and asking them to accept fewer benefits or contribute more so that younger people can have better opportunities is politically difficult. The politicians themselves are getting older. In the last fifty years the average age of someone in congress went from 40 year to 50 years.
Protecting existing promises brings immediate rewards. Investing in people whose influence is smaller, and whose needs will unfold over decades, requires a longer view than our political systems encourage.
I write this as someone who is in their 80s. I understand why people want security in their later years. Many older people have little wealth and depend on public services. Nor do all young people face the same disadvantages. Those who inherit substantial assets may have a very different future from those who inherit nothing.
But those differences do not remove the underlying tension. They may make it worse. A society in which opportunity increasingly depends on what you already owns will struggle to persuade young people that the system deserves their loyalty.
For generations, there has been an implicit agreement: the young support the old, with the expectation that their turn will come.
What happens when the young no longer believe that promise?
I can imagine a breakdown in which age becomes one of the defining lines of political conflict. Anger could turn toward pensions, property, taxation, inheritance, and the institutions that determine who gets what. Movements could gain power by promising to tear down arrangements that younger generations believe have excluded them.
This is the war I fear: a struggle between generations over who must sacrifice, who deserves protection, and who gets to have a future. It would unfold within countries, communities, and families. That could make it particularly bitter. Growing government debt adds another dimension to this generational imbalance. Younger people stand to inherit not only the private wealth accumulated by older generations, but also the public obligations we leave behind. The two inheritances will not be distributed equally: private wealth will flow disproportionately to those whose families already have assets, while the cost of servicing public debt will compete with education, infrastructure, research, and other investments in everyone’s future. Borrowing can make sense when it builds a more productive society. But when it primarily sustains current consumption, we are passing the bill forward without necessarily passing along the means to pay it.
I do not believe this outcome is inevitable. But avoiding it requires us to take the possibility seriously. We need to give younger people credible reasons to believe that they can build secure and meaningful lives, and that the gains from technological progress will reach them. That will require difficult choices from my generation as well as theirs. I know this is pessimistic. But it is what I think, and what I feel compelled to share.
A society cannot remain stable indefinitely when its young people believe their future has already been spent.
A friend of my wife, a well-known television producer, is visiting Israel. During one of his meetings, he learned that on October 7 thousands of Gazans who were not Hamas fighters followed Hamas into Israel and took part in the atrocities. He was astonished.
The Israeli army later estimated that about 6,000 Gazans crossed the border that day. About 3,800 were Hamas’s elite fighters. The other 2,200 or so were a mix of members of other armed groups and ordinary civilians. It is the civilians I want to talk about. Frankly, I was not surprised when I learned about this a few days after October 7. The civilians of Gaza had been living in what was called by some the “world’s largest open-air prison.” A prison, I have to add, that was run by a gang of inmates, Hamas. I was not surprised; this was the first time they could leave, and the opportunity to take “treasures” like automobiles, TVs and computers must have been so tempting. However, I was shocked to learn about the violence some of them committed against Israelis they found, including murder and rape. I do not want to conclude that these civilians were typical of the people living in Gaza. I do not know. I do know that since the 1990s, they have been systematically taught to hate Israelis.
The Gaza I first knew
I found myself thinking not only about October 7, but about the Gaza I first knew more than fifty years ago. I moved to Israel in 1974. Gaza and the West Bank were under Israeli military occupation, but the physical separation that exists today did not exist in anything like its present form. I lived close to the West Bank, and I regularly drove there to buy vegetables. I didn’t often go to Gaza as it was about forty miles away but I employed workers from Gaza to help me build my garden. This sounds almost unimaginable today.
I don’t mean to romanticize the occupation at that time. Palestinians and Israelis certainly had grievances against one another then. But the relationship was different. There was human contact. The populations were intertwined economically and physically in ways that have largely disappeared.
Oslo and the two intifadas
This started to change with the first intifada, which began in 1987. Then came the Oslo peace agreement in 1993, and on July 1, 1994, Yasser Arafat returned, first to Gaza and a few days later to Jericho in the West Bank. I believe Israel, under a left-wing government at the time, was serious about a two-state solution, but Arafat was not. I also believe that Arafat stole billions from his own people, and his successor, Abbas, has faced persistent allegations of corruption, but that is another story.
Over the next fifty years, Israel built walls, some physical, some political and some psychological. The government also kept expanding the Jewish settlements on Palestinian land in both the West Bank and Gaza, which had begun after the 1967 war, under the mistaken belief this would make Israel safer.
How did we get from there to here?
One of the decisive moments came in 2005.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made the extraordinary decision to remove every Israeli settlement from Gaza and withdraw Israeli forces from inside that territory. Roughly 8,000 Israeli settlers were evacuated, some forcibly by Israeli soldiers and police.
I remember how traumatic this was within Israel. Israelis watched Israeli soldiers carrying other Israelis from their homes.
Whateverone thinks about Sharon’s decision, it created an extraordinary moment. For the first time since 1967, there were no permanent Israeli settlements or military bases inside Gaza. But there was opportunity.
Hamas takes over
What happened next was not what many people hoped for. In January 2006, Hamas defeated Fatah in Palestinian legislative elections. The struggle between the two movements eventually became violent, and in June 2007 Hamas seized control of Gaza. Fatah and the Palestinian Authority remained dominant in the West Bank. Gaza and the West Bank effectively became two different Palestinian political entities.
The open-air prison
Rocket attacks against Israel continued. Israel progressively tightened restrictions around Gaza, particularly after the Hamas takeover, while Egypt also severely restricted movement across its border.
Gaza became increasingly isolated, “the world’slargest open-air prison.” One run by its imates.
Israel controlled most access by land as well as Gaza’s airspace and maritime access. Egypt controlled the other land frontier. There was no functioning airport. Movement of people and goods became highly restricted, although Gazans could sometimes obtain permits to enter Israel for work, medical treatment and other purposes.
There was an undeniable reality behind that phrase: roughly two million people were living in a very small territory from which leaving was extraordinarily difficult. It was a prison of geography, politics, security and history. And Hamas ruled inside it.
A generation grew up behind the fence
This is the part of the story that worries me most. Half the population of Gaza is under 18. They grew up without any knowledge of the world I had known in the 1970s, a world where someone from Gaza could work in my garden. Rather, they knew checkpoints, permits, rockets, Israeli air strikes, Hamas, periodic wars and a border fence separating them from a country they were taught to regard as their enemy.
At the same time, Israelis living near Gaza grew up with rocket shelters, warning sirens and the knowledge that an organization committed to armed struggle against Israel governed just a few kilometers away.
Each side accumulated its own memories. Each generation inherited the fears of the generation before it.
Then came October 7, 2023.
Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups broke through the Israeli defenses and attacked communities, military positions and a music festival. About 1,200 people were killed and roughly 250 were taken hostage.
For Israelis, October 7 changed something fundamental. The border fence had represented security. Suddenly it represented the failure of security. And whatever sympathy many Israelis had once felt for the civilians living on the other side of that fence became much harder to sustain.
The war that followed
The war that then resulted brought death and destruction on an enormous scale to Palestinians. I do not support the actions Israel took and is taking after October 7 in Gaza. I think Israel should have first asked other countries to help it get its hostages back and to participate in disarming Hamas. Instead it acted out of rage. The rage is understandable, but the results were not good. I will not speak here of the ignorance of so many that only see Israel’s actions and do not assign any responsibility to Hamas and its supporters like Iran. Where does this end?
Netanyahu’s responsibility
The government of Netanyahu carries a heavy share of the responsibility for the situation. He has been in power about two-thirds of the time since 1996. He did not just ignore Gaza. For years he allowed Qatar to send money to Hamas there, because a divided Palestinianleadership suited him. What did he think would happen? Israel needed to work with other countries to find a solution for the people that lived there, not just build a bigger fence. The people of Gaza, like all people, deserved a decent life for themselves and their children. When you have nothing to lose, you will risk everything.
My dream for Gaza
I had, and still have, a dream for Gaza. Imagine, for a moment, something radically different.
It starts with both Israel and Egypt offering land to create a “Gaza II” adjacent to the current one, “Gaza I.” Then imagine a massive regional development project involving Israel, Egypt, Palestinians and outside countries willing to finance it. New Palestinian communities would be built with modern infrastructure.
Desalination plants could produce water, as they already do on a massive scale in Israel. Solar installations could produce abundant electricity. Modern agriculture could use some of that water and energy. New cities could be designed rather than improvised. Industry could provide jobs. A functioning port could connect the population with the outside world.
Most importantly, imagine hundreds of thousands of young Palestinians waking up in the morning with someplace to go. A job, a business, a university, farms, and industry. A future!
Can prosperity become part of security?
We have spent decades trying walls, checkpoints, military deterrence, blockades, rockets and wars. They have not produced peace. We need a different way forward.
The West Bank is equally difficult but needs a different solution
I understand why many Israelis fear the creation of a Palestinian state immediately adjacent to Israel’s principal population centers. Israel is extremely narrow in places, and October 7 made territorial security concerns much more visceral.
Palestinians, however, cannot reasonably be expected to live indefinitely without political rights, economic opportunity and control over their own future.
At the same time, there are Israelis who regard the West Bank, Judea and Samaria as an inseparable part of the historical Land of Israel and support permanent Israeli control or annexation.
These positions do not fit neatly together but that is the reality.
I can imagine arrangements that might eventually reconcile Palestinian self-government with Israeli security. I have much more difficulty imagining the political leadership capable of implementing them today. And perhaps that is what saddens me most.
A word about the hatred directed at Israel and at Jews in general
My heart breaks to see how Israel and Jews in general are being treated. I have no problem with people being critical of the Israeli government. I am myself. But unless you think that every American is responsible for Donald Trump, you cannot think that every Israeli is responsible for Netanyahu, let alone non-Israeli Jews. How people can support Hamas is beyond me. I do not understand the stupidity of gay people that support the people that would kill them after cutting off their testicles. Women that support rapists who would cut off their breasts.
The supporters of the Palestinians have accomplished nothing for the Palestinian people. They are not really for Palestinians because they know nothing about them. They are just against Israel and Jews. The result of their actions has only strengthened Israel’s resolve and feeling of isolation, which can lead to the government taking more actions against the Palestinians.
I remember something different
I keep returning to those men from Gaza who helped me build my garden in 1974.
I don’t remember discussing geopolitics with them.
They came to work and I paid them.
We worked together, we smiled. My wife would bring them water. My children would play with them
Then they went home to their wives and children
It was hardly a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it was human contact, and human contact matters. Today a young Israeli and a young Gazan can live perhaps twenty kilometers apart and inhabit completely different universes. Each may know the other primarily as someone dangerous.
Something to lose
I don’t pretend to know how to solve it.
I do believe, however, that security alone cannot be the objective. Nor can Palestinian nationalism, Israeli nationalism, revenge, historical entitlement or military victory by themselves produce a livable future.
People need something to lose and something to love.
They need homes, jobs, education, businesses and families whose futures seem more valuable than the promises offered by extremists.
Maybe that sounds naïve after October 7 and the war that followed. Perhaps it is.
But after watching this conflict for more than fifty years, I find the alternative much harder to believe: that another wall, another generation of hatred and another war will somehow produce a different result.
Israeli analyst Danny Citrinowicz made a striking point: this could be the war that pushes Iran past the threshold toward acquiring a nuclear weapon. His analysis is thoughtful, measured, and deeply concerning. I strongly recommend listening to the interview.
What stood out to me is how he explains the role of leadership—specifically how the hubris and poor strategic judgment of both Trump and Netanyahu have contributed to a situation that may no longer be reversible. In my view, Trump may be the least capable president in modern history, and Netanyahu has done profound damage to the long-term security and moral standing of the Jewish people.
The likely outcome? A stronger, wealthier Iran which is possibly nuclear-armed alongside a reinvigorated Russia. Furthermore , it would not surprise me to see China move on Taiwan.
The world order I’ve known throughout my life may be ending. What comes next is deeply uncertain and, frankly, quite scary.
Most Israeli Jews think of themselves first as Israelis and second as Jews. Regarding the Jewish diaspora, they generally believe that one of Israel’s core purposes, the Zionist mission, is to provide a safe haven for Jews. While I disagree with the actions of the current Israeli government, I subscribe to this belief myself. I am a Zionist and believe that the Jewish people must have their own homeland if they are to survive.
Unfortunately, this movement has been distorted under Netanyahu and his coalition, particularly through the support of the settler movement and the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank. While I understand the desire for an Israel that encompasses the heart of the ancient Jewish homeland in Judea and Samaria, we must also recognize that Palestinians have a legitimate claim. Regrettably, they do not reciprocate by accepting the right of Jews to their own homeland.
As I have written previously, I believe the future of the diaspora is already in jeopardy due to intermarriage and declining birthrates. While Israel’s actions since October 7, 2023, have contributed significantly to the rapid rise of antisemitism, they did not cause it; they merely gave expression to the latent antisemitism that characterizes much of the Western world.
The months since October 7, 2023 have changed something in the world as well as something in me.
The barbaric attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians shook Israel to its core. Families murdered. Women assaulted. Hundreds taken hostage. I spoke almost daily with friends in Israel. The grief in their voices was raw. The fear was real. The anger was overwhelming. I felt it too.
What followed was a war that has devastated Gaza. Entire neighborhoods destroyed. Tens of thousands killed. Images of injured and displaced children broadcast across the world. As the war unfolded, something else happened. The world polarized.
Israel was condemned in capitals and on campuses. Protesters filled streets in Europe and America. In some places, criticism of policy blurred into something darker hostility toward Jews as Jews. Antisemitism reared its ugly head once again. Jewish communities far from the battlefield were treated as extensions of a government they did not elect and may not support. I found myself reacting defensively.
When people accused Israel of genocide, I rejected the claim. Words matter. Genocide has a definition. I do not believe this war, however tragic, meets it.
Some spoke as if October 7 had not happened. In some cases, that it was even justified. Hamas targeted civilians deliberately and in the most despicable ways. It knew Israel would respond militarily. It knew civilians in Gaza would suffer. It prepared for both the military confrontation and the public relations battle. Israel was prepared for one of those and not the other. I disagreed with aspects of how the Israeli government handled the war. But I understood the trauma that shaped its response.
Then somewhere in the outrage, the arguments, and the rising antisemitism, something shifted inside me. I stopped being empathetic.
I guess I need to start by saying that while I am a supporter of Israel, I am not a supporter of its current government and in particular how it has conducted itself in Gaza.
I must also say that Hamas and its supporters are aberrant. They are both religious fanatics but also scum. How women and gay people can support them is not comprehensible. Hamas are killers of babies, rapists and torturers of their captives. They have given ups any right to be alive.
All around the world there are millions of people coming out in support of Palestinians and in particular the people of Gaza while ignoring the plights of so many others
Russian invasion of Ukraine
Sudanese civil war (2023–present)
Conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo / DRC–Rwanda tensions
I’ve lived in Israel twice in my life—first in the seventies, then again from 2015 to 2023. Back in the seventies, I lived just a few miles from the West Bank. I could cross over freely. The men who built our garden came from Gaza. Life felt complicated, yes, but also connected.
In my most recent years in Israel, I again traveled into the West Bank. I met Palestinians, supported nonprofits, and even helped some young people with their education. They were warm, kind, and eager for a better future.
That’s why October 7th shook me so deeply. I don’t support Netanyahu’s policies or Israel’s heavy hand in Gaza. But that doesn’t mean I can accept what Hamas did. I understand the rage Israelis feel. What I don’t understand is the world’s double standard—the marches that cry for Palestinian rights but fail to condemn Hamas or call for the release of hostages. That silence speaks volumes.
I sometimes joke that I support a “two-state solution”: one where Palestinians and Jews live side by side, and another where their politicians are kept far away from them. Beneath the joke is a serious truth: the people can live together, but the politics keep them apart.
The history of the Jewish people before the establishment of the Kingdom of Israel around 1000 BCE, under King David, is not fully understood. What we do know is that the ancestors of the Jewish nation lived in Canaan. The Kingdom of Israel was their first independent state.
Over time, the land was conquered repeatedly—first by the Assyrian Empire, then by the Babylonians, later by the Persians, and eventually by the Greeks. Independence was briefly restored under the Hasmoneans, but Rome ultimately took control. Following a series of revolts, the Romans forced many Jews into exile, scattering them throughout their empire, particularly in North Africa and Europe. Yet not all left—Jews continued to live in the Land of Israel, maintaining an unbroken presence that has lasted to this day.
I am deeply saddened and concerned about what has been happening in Israel, especially since October 7, 2023. But it did not begin that day. For years, Israel has been shifting steadily to the right, particularly under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu. Ironically, had Arab citizens of Israel voted at the same rate as Jewish citizens, Netanyahu’s coalition would not have secured a majority.
It is often said that Netanyahu clings to power to avoid the consequences of his bribery trial. While there is truth to that, I believe the greater reality is simpler: he wants to stay in power for the sake of power itself. He has become a megalomaniac, much like Donald Trump, convinced that “he alone” can save his country. Meanwhile, the opposition in Israel has grown weaker and less clear in its leadership. Tragically, the same phenomenon can be seen in the United States. As a citizen of both countries, I find myself living under the leadership of two men I deeply despise.
The Dangers of Disengagement – Germany 1933 / USA 2025
Many Americans, including myself, find ourselves tuning out the news—or perhaps more accurately, running away from it. I can’t believe what is happening in the USA. The administration is far worse than I expected, and I thought I had expected the worst. Even writing this blog post makes me fear for my safety. Like so many others, I feel helpless.
Although I no longer live in the United States, most of my family and friends do. I can’t easily ignore their plight—or that of so many people suffering from the brutality and ineptitude of the American government. Furthermore, what is happening in the U.S. is not confined to that country; it is putting the entire world order at risk. The last time the world saw something like this was the rise of tyranny led by Nazi Germany prior to World War II.
I Was a News Addict
For most of my life, I was pretty much a news addict. I would watch two or even three hours of news a day. Now, I watch almost no TV news. I still visit the websites of The New York Times and CNN because I don’t want to be totally uninformed. Slowly, I suspect, news outlets will bend to the will of the “Dear Leader”—so perhaps it won’t matter anyway.
Did the Germans Turn Off the News
Reflecting on my own behavior and that of my friends, I began to wonder if something similar happened in Hitler’s Germany, starting in 1933. Is this phenomenon we’re witnessing—the widespread turning off of the news—a reaction that has occurred before?
Hitler never had the support of the majority of Germans. In the last free election, 1933, his party won just 44% of the vote. His power came from a coalition of elites and a mobilized mass base. Sound familiar? The majority of Germans probably didn’t approve of his actions but became passive endorsers out of fear, fatigue, or apathy.
Inner Emigration
In 1930s Germany, media freedom did not exist in the way it still does (for now) in the United States. Once Hitler rose to power in 1933, the Nazi regime quickly dismantled independent journalism, replacing it with propaganda directed by Joseph Goebbels. We are beginning to see echoes of that in the U.S. today.
Germans weren’t tuning out so much as being forced to tune in. And yet, despite the saturation of Nazi messaging, many Germans chose what historians have called “inner emigration”—emotionally and intellectually distancing themselves from the regime while outwardly conforming. Many didn’t approve of what was happening, but they chose not to resist, or even to fully acknowledge it.
