At this moment, it appears that the wars with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon have entered a quieter phase. For how long, nobody knows. In the Middle East, silence does not necessarily mean peace, and a ceasefire does not necessarily mean that the ideology which created the war has disappeared.

Iran is a different story altogether.

When it comes to the Islamic Republic, I no longer believe the question is whether another confrontation will come. The question is when.

For decades, the Iranian regime has built its power around an ideology in which hostility toward Israel is not a side issue but an essential part of its revolutionary identity. It has financed, armed, trained, and encouraged forces throughout the region that have threatened Israel and destabilized neighboring countries. Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, and other Iranian aligned groups did not emerge in a vacuum. Tehran understood something the democratic world has been painfully slow to understand: you do not need to fight every war yourself when you can export ideology, weapons, money, and terror.

Removing such an extremist system is extraordinarily difficult. Governments can be defeated militarily, nuclear facilities can be destroyed, commanders can be eliminated, weapons can be intercepted, and terrorist organizations can be weakened. But an ideology cannot simply be bombed out of existence.

That is precisely why the struggle against radicalism is ultimately much bigger than Iran.

It is a struggle over what children are taught to believe.

For decades, the dream of peace in the Middle East has been poisoned by hatred, historical distortion, religious extremism, and political indoctrination. We repeatedly ask how Hamas can be dismantled, how terrorism can be defeated, and how the cycle of violence can finally be broken.

Part of the answer begins in a place far less dramatic than a battlefield.

It begins in a classroom.

I learned........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)