05/12/2014 the Cathedral – to Shlomo Gazit • As the year 2015 begins, we find ourselves at the height of a historic earthquake, in multiple dimensions, the like of which hasn’t been seen since the end of WWI and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. • In the Middle East – within three years, the "Arab spring" turned into the "Islamic winter" – borders have vanished and centuries of conflicts between tribes and factions are erupting onto the surface. • The bi-polar and multi-polar world we knew has been replaced by a world with not even one geopolitical center of gravity. It is a Gestalt in which everything depends on everything else, and dealing with the challenges requires global cooperation . • Israel finds itself at the center of a kind of "perfect storm,"the only outpost of the western way of life in the Middle East – at the meeting point of the "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West, as Huntington envisioned it, and at the same time, in the spinning "eye of the storm" of the clash of titans within Islam itself: between Sunni and Shi'ite, between tradition, extremism and terrorism on the one hand, and modernity and moderation on the other; between the dream of "past glory" and the vision of a "leap into the future”. And all of this is drenched in a lot of blood.