John Lennon’s death in December 1980 shocked the world. As a member of the English boy band, The Beatles, he helped define the cultural upheavals of the 1960s. Their message—simple, powerful and deeply appealing—was that love, not power or ideology, could unite humanity.
“All You Need Is Love” was more than a beautiful song, incorporating, one can assume purposefully, “La Marseillaise,” the French revolutionary anthem calling citizens to rise against tyranny, set within musical textures spanning Bach to Brubeck as only The Beatles’ originality could. It became a creed. If all we need is love, then the Vietnam war, the other main issue of the day, could be solved. The assumption was that beneath political systems and cultural differences, people ultimately wanted the same things.
John Lennon’s more radical vision—most clearly expressed in “Imagine”—suggested a world stripped of borders, nations and competing loyalties. As former Soviet refusenik and later, an Israeli statesman, Natan Sharansky argued, such a utopian vision, however appealing, risks ignoring the realities of regimes and ideologies that do not share those assumptions.
The belief—call it hope—that the world could unite under these universalistic aspirations seeded themes that shaped decades of social thought. It helped fuel the movements for women’s equality, civil rights and environmental responsibility. Noble causes all. Former President Richard Nixon had bravely opened the door to China, and less than 30 years later, former President Ronald Reagan challenged Gorbachev to tear down the wall that had divided East from West—something ultimately accomplished by the people of East Germany.
Democracy’s righteousness was on the rise, and geopolitics was cooperating. Maybe it wasn’t all love, but the sense was that things were bending in a favorable direction. Live and let live was at hand.
Even at the height of the inspired optimism, glitches in the path of 1967’s “Summer of Love” generation were easily overlooked. Headlines, often from the Middle East, were troubling but siloed. The Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973, both coordinated attacks on the Jewish state by regional Muslim-majority states, along with the rise of modern terrorism, were treated as aberrations to the underlying assumptions. Such disturbances were too far from the West to get in the way of the optimism.
Small but persistent voices cautioned that not all cultures and communities shared the West’s assumptions. They argued that appeals to shared humanity (noble as they were) would not be appreciated by the Communist or increasingly radical Muslim ideologies representing large swaths of the global population. Undeterred, the West continued to proffer increasing empathy, dialogue and goodwill. Surely, they would win the day.
It did not. Overtures of conciliation—by governments, universities and international bodies—were often interpreted not as invitations to mutual recognition, but as opportunities to advance asymmetrical aims. Wealth, particularly from oil revenues, amplified this dynamic, extending influence into all of these institutions.
Simultaneously, Israel’s repeated efforts at negotiation and compromise were often dismissed by its neighbors and repeatedly broke down in the Palestinian arena. As Israel became more effective in defending itself, early sympathy for a tiny, exposed nation gave way in many quarters to growing criticism of its methods. In some cases, this shift reflected a deeper discomfort with Jewish power itself—admiration proving easier when Jews were vulnerable than when they exercised sovereignty and force. Over time, segments of governments, academia and international institutions moved beyond rejecting Israel’s overtures for peace to questioning Israel’s very legitimacy as a Jewish state.
Concrete efforts illustrate the pattern. In 1978, then-President Jimmy Carter brokered a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, conditioned on Israel’s return of the Sinai Peninsula. Egypt’s Arab allies rejected the accord, diplomatically isolating Cairo for years. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981, in part the price for making that peace.
In 2000, then-President Bill Clinton invested significant political capital in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at Camp David. When those talks failed—a failure Clinton later attributed largely to PLO chief Yasser Arafat—the Second Intifada followed, resulting in more than 1,000 Israeli civilian deaths.
Nearly a decade later, former President Barack Obama’s Cairo address again appealed to shared values and mutual respect between the West and the Muslim world. These efforts reflected a genuine belief in convergence; however, they did not produce the broader transformation anticipated.
A harder truth emerged: Universalist democratic values do not automatically resonate across all societies. In Communist oligarchies as well as the Middle East, Israel has faced not merely political opposition but, in too many quarters, a sustained refusal to accept its legitimacy as a Jewish state. Repeated efforts at negotiation and compromise have not yielded acceptance and have, at times, intensified hostility. This dynamic is reflected in Iran’s cultivation of a “ring of fire” of proxy forces surrounding Israel, whose sustained attacks on civilian populations culminated in the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
And yet, many in the West continue to hold cherished ideals as guiding principles, despite continued assaults on Israel. Indeed, Israel’s self-defense is broadly opposed in much of Western society. Pundits and even Jewish organizations offer ever more far-reaching suggestions on how Israel should conciliate in the face of terror.
Which brings us back to Lennon.
His message of love—hopeful, expansive, humane—inspired genuine moral progress. It fostered hope that humanity might ultimately converge toward those ideals. In too many parts of the world, however, that expectation collided with societies that did not share those assumptions.
