Israeli deterrence may shift Islamist threat to Europe

There is a principle in clinical psychology called symptom substitution. When a therapist blocks a patient's compulsive behaviour – nail-biting, hair-pulling – without treating the underlying anxiety that drives it, the compulsion does not vanish. It migrates to a new outlet. The surface behaviour changes; the root condition does not.

The analogy to geopolitics is imperfect but instructive. For four decades, radical Islam's obsessive focus on Israel was the behavioural expression of a deeper drive: the competition for legitimacy within the Islamic world, the theology of martyrdom, and the hunger for a defining victory. The 2026 strikes have now blocked that particular behaviour with overwhelming force. But the underlying drive – the ideological compulsion, the grievance, the need for a cause – remains entirely untreated. And if psychology teaches us anything, it is that the compulsion will find a new outlet.

Read the full article at The Jewish Chronicle.