Circumstantial Evidence Is a Tricky Thing

Israel is doing a whole lot of things wrong, right?

Well, if you take your understanding from TikTok—or from ideologues who have dug themselves into some of our institutions like an Alabama tick—it can certainly seem self-evident.

But what if there is more going on than most of us yet conceive?

I’m presently enjoying David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity. This isn’t a review—not yet; I’ve only just begun. Rather, it is a reflection on an observation I found particularly apposite.

Circumstantial evidence—evidence concerning events we did not ourselves witness—is a tricky thing.

From one position, it can appear to point overwhelmingly towards one conclusion. Shift your position slightly, introduce another piece of information or challenge an assumption, and suddenly the same landscape can point somewhere very different.

“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact,” Sherlock Holmes reminds us.

We are notoriously fallible creatures. We do not simply perceive the world “as it is.” We interpret it. We conjecture. We build explanations from incomplete information, then become extraordinarily attached to them.

History is littered with examples. The celestial sphere once seemed obvious. Optical illusions appear obvious. A good conjuring trick depends upon making the wrong explanation appear inescapable.

Sometimes all that is required is to shift where you are standing.

That brings me to Israel.

My assessment is that Israel is a frontier democracy on the bleeding edge of our civilisation—a small country fighting determinedly to defend its people, sovereignty and way of life against enemies who openly seek its destruction.

That conclusion is very different from the synthetic environment presented across much of social media and parts of our institutional ecosystem.

Israel is fighting. Israel is adapting. Israel is surviving. In many respects, Israel is winning.

But the fight is not won. Perhaps such fights never truly are.

To borrow from A Song of Ice and Fire: What do we say to the god of death? Not today.

Civilisations survive in much the same way: not through complacency, slogans or assuming somebody else will protect what previous generations built. We defend our way of life because we believe it is worth defending—and because we owe something to the children who will inherit what we leave behind.

Which brings me to an uncomfortable question for those of us living in the comfortable, complacent and increasingly historically illiterate West:

If we were already 2.5 of 4 preconditions towards what future historians might call a Great War for Civilisation—World War Three—would we even recognise it?

I believe three are already visible to varying degrees.

First: Russia is fighting a NATO-backed Ukraine in the largest European war since 1945, with the strategic contest extending far beyond Ukraine itself.

Second: Iran and its proxies have spent years fighting Israel and targeting Western—particularly American—interests across the Middle East.

Third—the half-realised condition—is the damage Western nations have inflicted upon themselves: extraordinary sovereign debt; ideological capture within parts of our schools, universities and institutions; outsourced strategic manufacturing; dependence upon authoritarian states for energy and supply chains; dependable energy infrastructure closed before credible replacements were available; and collapsing birth rates combined with immigration policies insufficiently attentive to integration, social cohesion and liberal democratic norms.

Individually, these matters can be debated. Collectively, they should make us think carefully about the resilience of the societies we inherited.

I won’t examine the fourth, unrealised precondition here. For those interested, I explore it in A Light Still Burns: Israel and the Values Worth Defending, particularly the chapter “The Sum of All Fears.”

That book examines Israel not as a distant foreign-policy issue, but as a frontline democracy defending values shared across the free world. My second book, When Our Light Is Tested: The Bondi Massacre and the Choices Ahead, brings the argument home to Australia: what happens when antisemitism is normalised, institutions fail and ordinary citizens are forced to confront the consequences. Together, the books ask readers to look beyond slogans, understand what is at stake and exercise principled agency while there is still time to change course.

Yes, this is heavy. But difficult things do not become less difficult because we choose not to look at them.

And that brings me back to Deutsch.

Perhaps one of the most useful things any of us can do is deliberately shift our position.

Read the book you instinctively disagree with. Listen to the person your tribe tells you is beyond the pale. Travel somewhere rather than constructing your worldview from thirty-second clips. Ask yourself what evidence would cause you to change your mind.

That is part of why I wrote my books: not to tell people what to think, but to encourage them to look again—to challenge some of the “obvious facts” of our time and consider whether the evidence might point somewhere very different when viewed from another position.

I remain optimistic.

Human beings are capable not only of extraordinary error, but extraordinary correction. Free societies possess an enormous advantage: we can argue, learn, adapt and change course.

But first we have to look.

History is not destiny. The future is not yet written.

And when the challenges of our time ask what we say to the god of death, decline, surrender or despair, I know what my answer will be.

Not today.

Colonel Michael Scott CSC Ret’d is a former Australian army officer and the founder of The 2023 Foundation, an initiative dedicated to combating antisemitism.