The Gaza war is not only about Israel’s survival; it’s about our own. The current conflagration in the Gaza Strip is much more consequential than most people believe it to be. Israel’s destiny is the West’s destiny. This is not a simple land dispute. It never was. It’s the best example of the generational struggle between radical Islam and modernity. In it, Hamas is a surrogate for Iran and Islamists, and Israel is a surrogate for America and the West. This is a winner-take-all struggle for Israel but also for modernity and Western culture.

America and the West (including Israel) are at a crossroads in history. So early in the 21st century, we are embroiled in a fight for the world order. In one corner are the cumulative hard-learned cultural gains the West has carved out of history by promulgating and honing Judeo-Christian values in an uncivilized world. In the other is fundamentalist Islam, which has changed very little since the days of Mohammad some 1,400 years ago. The Islamists emulate the worst their religion has to offer; the raping of women, the beheading of nonbelievers (of Islam), the killing of Jews, and absolute intolerance of infidels who must convert to Islam or die. All of these are the “teachings” in Islamic scripture from the Koran and the Hadith (life of the prophet, Mohammad). Today’s Muslim radicals are remnants of the despotic, misogynistic rulers and backward thinkers of Islam from a bygone era. They exist with only one goal: the global imposition of fundamentalist Islam by defeating the West and expunging the blasphemy that is our Judeo-Christian democracies, starting with Israel and ending with America. There is no “live and let live” with Islamists. The Bible also has its share of violent passages. The difference is that over the centuries, Jews and Christians have mostly relegated the anachronistic aspects of their scripture to history and promoted the lessons of tolerance and love for one’s fellow man.

The answer is simple: We got here by sleeping through unfettered immigration, and decades-long antisemitic, anti-Israel and anti-American propaganda funded largely by Arab money. This Arab money flows into our universities as we educate radical foreigners who spread to our children their deceptive and poisonous lies. Vladimir Lenin once quipped: “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” This is the playbook they use, and they wield it well to kill two birds with one stone. Anti-Israel and anti-American sentiment bombard the younger generations in public schools and universities, Hollywood and via social media bots. The nearly universal and constant diatribe denigrating Israel has largely succeeded. They have literally recruited our children from under our noses, often aided by well-intentioned but ignorant liberals, Democrats and media sources. They are adept at using our liberties against us as they blur the line between religion and politics, thereby wrapping themselves in the protective cloak of Islam the religion, insulated from criticism. This “lawfare”—using our precious freedoms against us—is how they have come so far in so short a time.

Time is not on the side of the West. In a world where Muslims weren’t hell-bent on killing Jews and Christians, and destroying their cultures, no one would care that the growth rate of Islam far exceeds other religions. In Europe since 1990, 90% of all immigration has been Islamic. A Pew study projects that the percentage of Muslims in Europe will grow 70% by 2030 and exceed 14% by 2050. For any culture to sustain itself, the reproduction ratio of children to parents must be 2.11 to survive 25 years. In other words, each set of parents must produce just over two kids (statistically) to persevere. As a population shrinks, so does its culture. A growth ratio of 1.9 or lower has never been reversed. The non-Muslim reproductive ratio for France is 1.8; England 1.6; Greece 1.3; Germany 1.3; Italy 1.2; Spain 1.1; and 1.6 for both Canada and the United States. Muslims in all European nations and America exceed 2.1 and are as high as 4.4 in some countries. Between reproductive statistics and immigration, we had better defeat Islamism soon.

If Hamas survives the war, in any capacity, then Israel loses it. This would be a catastrophic loss for Israel because it would prove them incapable of obliterating an enemy for the first time, particularly a relatively weak one that is not even a nation-state. The ecstatic empowerment of radical Islam in America and the Western world from Israel’s defeat will be insuperable, and Israel will not likely survive it. Worse than that (even though worse is hard to imagine), America and the West will suffer an exponential increase in Islamist hostility at a time when we are reeling from the Islamist hate and hostility plaguing us.

Western culture is crumbling, and the last thing it needs is an accelerant. We have never experienced this magnitude of moral bankruptcy in our citizenry, our leaders and our media. This is why our destiny is so vulnerable to—and may be predicted by—Israel’s success or failure in this war. This is why Israel’s fate is America’s fate.