A few weeks before the surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1945, a group of survivors of the Holocaust met in Bucharest to mark Passover, the Jewish festival of freedom. Among the group was Abba Kovner, who had escaped the Vilna ghetto and led a partisan campaign that struck at the Nazis and their col­lab­or­at­ors from the forests of Lithuania.

Kovner was consumed with desire for revenge. “He will repay them for their iniquity and wipe them out for their wicked­ness,” he told his fellow survivors at the gathering, invoking Psalm 94 and God’s promise to deliver vengeance upon the enemies of Israel.

After the war, Kovner and his comrades, known as the “Avengers”, hatched a series of plots to exact retri­bu­tion for the murders of their families and the near anni­hil­a­tion of the European Jews.

Most were aborted but the Avengers did succeed in getting their oper­at­ives into the kitchen of the Stalag 13 prisoner of war camp at Lang­wasser near Nuremberg, where Nazi SS, the units respons­ible for the imple­ment­a­tion of the Final Solution, were being held. They planned to poison the bread of the prisoners, but the poison failed to take full effect and not a single SS man died.

The pursuit of revenge after the Holocaust proved futile. How does one even begin to avenge such a crime, really a sequence of millions of indi­vidu­al crimes, including the murders of one million children, carried out by hundreds of thousands of per­pet­rat­ors across Europe?

It is a cliche to say success is the best revenge, but it is true. The real revenge the Jewish remnants took against those who pursued their oblit­er­a­tion was their survival and the re-estab­lish­ment of a suc­cess­ful national centre for the Jews in their ancient lands that revived Jewish culture and enhanced Jewish sci­entif­ic, cultural and scholarly con­tri­bu­tions to the world. Kovner would become one of that state’s greatest poets.

For those of us who watched the carnage of 9/11, the desire for revenge was a difficult emotion to suppress. “Revenge is the first law of nature,” Napoleon wrote as a young man. It was certainly just and necessary to find those who mas­ter­minded the murders of 2996 people and to inca­pa­cit­ate terrorist organ­isa­tions that would pursue further attacks. As the Baby­lo­ni­an Talmud teaches, “If someone comes planning to kill you, rise and kill them first.”

But the desire for revenge goes beyond justice or pre­ven­tion. It aims to redeem those whose lives were taken and to restore their dignity – a noble aspir­a­tion, but one that more often than not is unat­tain­able and the pursuit of which can corrode the soul.

The true revenge for 9/11 ought to have come in the form of global unity, com­pris­ing people of all faiths and none who stood in common revul­sion at the medi­ev­al­ism of terrorism and shared a determin­ation to drive fan­at­icism from our societies. Instead, the 9/11 attacks did what their mas­ter­mind had intended. Beyond killing thousands of innocent people, the attacks shook the self-con­fid­ence of the West. They divided us into doves and hawks, estab­lished fault lines that persist today and caused a col­lect­ive ques­tion­ing of our ideals.

Many would conclude that the pillars of our society – enlight­en­ment, ration­al­ism, human freedoms – were void and corrupt, as the al-Qai’da assassins had charged from their caves.

September 11 also triggered a dangerous defect in our thinking. Instead of under­stand­ing that the ter­ror­ists were motivated by a barbarism and blood lust of which mankind had always been capable, we began to believe we had brought this on ourselves.

We assumed rational objec­tions to policy were governing the thoughts of those for whom slaughter­ing morning commuters and teenage girls at pop concerts con­sti­tuted success. But ration­al­ism is not universal or innate. It occurs only in those who are raised in its tra­di­tions and teachings. And religious extremism does not breed ration­al­ism, it crushes it.

This doomed path of inquiry produced a narrative that Israel’s conflict with the Palestini­ans and US support for Israel were the root cause of radical Islam’s desire to overthrow the West.

US academics Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer claimed US support for its demo­crat­ic ally was a pre­dom­in­ant source of anti-American terrorism and urged punitive measures against Israel.

High school textbooks in Britain also suggested Israel’s creation was the root cause of Islamist terrorism and the motiv­a­tion for 9/11. Rather than con­front­ing radical Islam’s fanatical hatred of the Jews and Osama bin Laden’s stated mission to “punish the oppress­ive Jews and their allies”, such thinking in effect validated their racism and bowed to it.

The wicked sec­tari­an­ism on display in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon finally made mockery of the view that if only Israel withdrew from the West Bank, al-Qa’ida, Islamic State, Jemaah Islamiah and the rest would promptly beat their swords into plough­shares and their spears into pruning hooks.

As we all do, I still vividly recall September 11, 2001. I came into my torts law class that morning after watching the second plane destroy the south tower. Our lecturer announced that class was cancelled. “I’m not going to lecture you about the ‘reas­on­able person’ test when such unreas­on­able people exist in the world,” he said. Unreas­on­able people will continue to exist and inflict misery; the dis­in­teg­ra­tion of Afghan­istan and the recent ISIS-inspired stabbing spree in an Auckland super­mar­ket attest to that.

But our revenge and our victory lie in the survival of free societies, our reas­on­able, rational thought and our unified purpose to uphold precisely that which the ter­ror­ists sought to destroy.

Alex Ryvchin is co-chief executive of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry and the author of Zionism: The Concise History.