"Mr. President, you planted the seeds of all the fruits we are reaping today."
There could not have been more apt and surreal parting words than these, uttered by Chief of Staff Benny Gantz to Shimon Peres this week, in the midst of the fighting in Gaza.

"Fundamentalist Islam," Peres had said rather determinedly, "will be kept at bay, in Iran." In reality, he brought it as close as possible, right into our living rooms. His vision of Israel as the economic and technological center of the global village seems as distant as ever from the terminal at Ben Gurion. The peace process was premised on the dismantling of the highly charged religious identity underpinning the conflict in the region, and an attempt to exchange it for an economic infrastructure free of any identity, by creating a new, multicultural environment where a joint railway system and industrial zones would traverse boundaries and dissolve cultural differences.
This was also the root of the mistake : the assumption that the individual and society are driven solely by materialistic considerations and disregarding the religious arena, thus opening the door for such murderousness in the name of God.
The Oslo process has collapsed. Its failure is attributed not only to its architects, but to the West's attempt at secularization. In this regard, we've all failed.
The West's secularization enterprise began with the secularization of our view of nature, which led to the development of the natural sciences and technological revolutions that have changed the world. It continued with the secularization of the public sphere, where modern political philosophy has established social consensus as the new basis of sovereignty. No more would the king – not the son of the gods from ancient times, nor the one sanctioned by the church – be the one to determine the people's way of life. Europe was thus freed from the church's corruption, fatalistic social class divisions, and the violence and oppression of kings.
Despite all its benefits, this secularization enterprise failed when we tried to apply it to religion itself. All of us – religious and secular – constitute the ninth and tenth generation of people living in a secularized world. We are imbued with secularization that has brought us great blessing, but has also left us bereft of the ability to understand religious mentality and the devoutly religious life.
The West tries in vain to contend with Muslim culture by seeking its secularization. What the West fails to understand is that the invitation it issues so freely for the "good life" will not be accepted by Muslims if it involves giving up a meaningful life. The average shahid, it turns out, is not a hungry refugee but rather from the middle class. We insist that he is driven by economic hardship, when in fact it is religious hope that drives him.
The thriving environment offered by the West, in which the Muslims' welfare can be guaranteed, is regarded by them as "Dar al Harb" – the World of War which must be redeemed by Muslim conquest, just like they did with the destruction sown in the Persian and Byzantine Empires. While we knock on the roof in attempt to save lives, they construct a fountain of blood in Iran, in memory of the hundreds of children sent to minefields in Iraq. We offer them democracy, when what they actually want is to surrender to the word of God.
"They don't really mean it," we tell ourselves, "it's only the extremists on the fringe." We try again and again to apply Western paradigms, as though their religion is merely the opiate of the masses or at most a personal, mystical hobby.
The Burrows of Islam
This time, it seems, we've dug a little deeper. Operation Protective Edge has revealed to all of us the extent of the tunnels burrowed by Islam – those that begin and end at the mosque, with murder and destruction. The Westerner has to enter these tunnels to know how to deal with them and put an end to them. And they do have an end: there is a light at the end of the tunnels.
Destroying the tunnels is not our real challenge now. The tunnels are not the enemy, just as Hamas is not a "terrorist organization" – another Western attempt at secularizing murder. It is a religious organization, and so the first step in this battle is the recognition of the enemy's religious nature and mentality and the total eradication of this form of Islam between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, following which the recognition and development of an alternative religiosity will ensue.
In Jewish thought, the principles of Western secularization such as human development, responsibility, and man's task to perfect nature and the world are not contradictory to faith. On the contrary, they have always been integral to Judaism's principles. Judaism holds within it the key to a viable alternative to the West and to Islam, who do not understand each other.
Developing such a paradigm is, obviously, not possible within a few weeks but is a long-term process which can create deep, positive changes in the region and rightfully position Israel as a center of civilization within the international arena. This would constitute a great contribution to Jews, Muslims, and humanity at large.