Israel Will Never Be the Same
Dreaming of prosperity and peace, Israel allowed itself to sleep with both eyes closed. Waking to a nightmare, we know that is over.
Last Saturday, the world changed. Most of us didn’t know it at the time and what we did know about the situation unfolding in southern Israel seemed beyond belief. Thirty-five Israelis abducted into Gaza? Young partygoers massacred within Israeli territory? Children – babies – taken by Hamas terrorists? And scores of people murdered in their homes? None of these things (let alone all of them) was in the realm of the possible.
What we’ve learned since then is not only were all these things possible, not only were they real, but they were far worse than even those horrific initial reports. There are now 150 hostages being held by Hamas, including women, elderly, and small children. Over 1,300 Israelis – along with tourists and workers from around the world – were slaughtered, most of them while fleeing from Hamas terrorists. Women were raped next to the corpses of their friends. Babies were wheeled out of their rooms on a gurney and murdered, some beheaded. And all the while, barrages of deadly rockets rained down on Israeli population centers.
Never in Israeli history has there been an event of this scale, of this magnitude, of this horror. The enormities are so great that they’ve spilled over into the West, causing grief and outrage—but also unbridled joy at the carnage from supporters of Hamas. While we, living in the West, can go back to our routines—the morning coffee, the commute, the weekend relief—in Israel that is no longer an option. In the space of one day, everything there changed. It’s as if a layer of soot fell from the sky, covering everything we knew to be true and altering it forever.
The first manifestation of his massive shift will be Israel’s response in Gaza. For most the past two decades since Israel unilaterally left the Strip, the country has attempted to achieve a delicate balance, using enough force in response to Hamas attacks to deter the terror group, but not use so much that it would cause excessive harm to Gaza’s civilian populations. The IDF developed techniques like roof “knocking,” dropping a loud but mostly harmless bang on the top of a building before bombing it so civilians could escape. The Israeli army knew full well that this also gave the terrorists hiding in these buildings an opportunity to escape with the civilians, whom they used as shields. Nevertheless, it was a price they were willing to pay.
This week, a journalist noted that the IDF seemed to have not used the technique in a given instance and asked whether the army had stopping the practice. The response from the army’s spokesperson was that, while he would not comment on specific tactics, he would say that “the paradigm" has shifted. This was an expression of profound understatement. The paradigm has not just shifted. It has been obliterated. In previous conflicts, the IDF has considered a ground invasion of Gaza something beyond a last resort and more of a lose-lose scenario. Now, a ground invasion is imminent—and soldiers are being given a much wider berth in how they fight.
Even more than this, however, Israeli military actions that were once unimaginable will now be squarely on the table. This includes Israeli strikes on Hamas’ puppet masters in Tehran, its fellow proxies in Lebanon and Syria, and the longtime host of Hamas’ senior leadership, Qatar. In any previous war, Israel would have sought – and in some cases lobbied for – clearance from the US to undertake even the most conservative military options. Today, there will be no such permission seeking. Israel will act.
Part of the reason for this is that, for the past 10 years, Israel has watched again and again as America empowered Iran, whether through strategic incompetence or willful disregard of Israeli security. We saw George W. Bush launch an adventure in Iraq that left the country under Iranian control. We saw Obama bend over backwards to appease the mullahs, going so far as to employ as his Iran policy lead Robert Malley, who was recently exposed as part of an Iranian spy ring. And just weeks ago, we saw Biden lavish the genocidal regime, which murdered hundreds of its own citizens, including girls and women, for daring to question the dictates of their corrupt theocracy, with a $6 billion prize.
Now, in the wake of a vicious modern-day pogrom by Hamas, which is backed, equipped, trained and funded by Iran, Israel will understand that relying on the Americans is no longer tenable. This will give Israel more room to maneuver than it has known, but it will also make Israel recall what it has always known in some way: that it is the sole author of its own fate.
This is an idea that, in the space of just days, has trickled down to the individual. Israelis have watched the global leftist movement not simply remain quiet in the face of the atrocities but wildly celebrate them. Regular Israelis now know that there is no overture for peace, no act of goodwill, that will ever convince the global left that Israel is anything but evil. We have watched the persistent anti-Israel corruption of international bodies, with the UN just this year tapping Iran to chair the Human Rights Council. We saw, in 2022, the UN issue more resolutions condemning Israel than all other countries combined—this, while Russia ravaged Ukraine in a bloody war of aggression.
Most of this was long known to Israelis. But there was always a belief, maybe just a hope, that one day we would convince the world of our legitimacy. In the wake of October 7, that belief has been abandoned completely. In the days after the attacks, pundits and talking heads declared the attacks to be a sly Iranian attempt to scuttle the normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia and urged Israel not to fall into the trap. Now, there are vanishingly few Israelis who, learning day after day of new atrocities, new forms of barbarism, will think of the Saudi Arabia deal as anything but empty words printed on worthless paper. The dream of normalization, once Israel’s grand vision, also died that day in Israel’s south.
The real reckoning, however, will be at home. In the aftermath of the 1973 war, when Arab armies caught Israel unaware, Israel engaged in years of searing introspection and self-investigation. But the failures of 1973 pale in comparison to what has taken place in Israel today. No politician, military leader or intelligence head will escape the blaze of this internal interrogation. In no conceivable realm will Bibi Netanyahu’s government stand once the initial military operations have concluded. The chief of staff will resign in shame. The intelligence heads will be replaced and their replacements will overhaul their agencies. The border will be re-conceived. A new security strategy – a new strategy for our very survival – will be painstakingly developed and deployed.
And the culture will shift. Over the past ten years the fissures in Israeli culture – between left and right; secular and religious; Ashkenazi and Mizrahi; Arab and Jew – have become a chasm. Anger between citizens is palpable almost everywhere you go. In Judaism, the term for this is “sinat chinam,” wanton hatred, and the Jewish tradition has warned for centuries that when it sets in among Jews what follows is national destruction. Thankfully, Israel has not arrived at that place, traversed so many times in our fraught, forever history. But we’ve seen our most ruthless, barbarous enemies leverage the cracks in Israeli society as a toehold. While, days ago, we were confident of our future, we now see that we were closer to the precipice than we could ever have imagined.
With our dreams of prosperity and peace—fulfilled in so many ways by a vibrant economy, a diverse populace, and a slate of stunningly successful new relationships with some of our Arab neighbors—Israel allowed itself to sleep with both eyes closed. In doing so, the country came to accept once-distant dreams of peace as an emerging reality. Waking up to a nightmare, we know that is now over. What remains is for us to forge a new reality from the rubble of the previous one—to find strength in our brush with destruction and to do what Israelis—what Jews—have always done, which is reinvent our future while staying rooted to our past.
Israel will never be the same again. Our only hope is that what comes next is, in some way, better. And that those two simple words distilled from the horrors of the Holocaust, “never again,” be reinvested with all the power they demand.