A woman runs to her concrete shelter moments after rocket sirens sounded in Ashkelon, Israel, on October 7, 2023. Photo / Tamir Kalifa, The New York Times
If the war in the Gaza Strip ends this week — not a sure thing — it will be followed by a long battle about its lessons.
Here are mine:
‘Believe people when they tell you who they are.’
Maya Angelou’s classic warning should have been believed in 1988, when Hamas declared in its founding covenant its intention to slaughter Jews.
Instead, Israel continued to tolerate Hamas out of a combination of ideological convenience — it suited Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, to have a divided Palestinian polity — and international reluctance to topple the group.
That was until October 7, 2023, too late for the 1200 people slaughtered that day.
Brilliant technology is never an adequate substitute for sound strategy.
Successive rounds of fighting between Hamas and Israel never altered Israel’s policy of containment towards Gaza. Why?
Because, as Yaakov Katz, a co-author of the excellent new book While Israel Slept, wrote to me, technologies like the Iron Dome gave Israel the false sense that “it was impenetrable”.
Yet when October 7 came, Israel’s high-tech marvels in signals intelligence, missile interceptors, smart fences, and underground barriers proved useless against Hamas’ low-tech paragliders and bulldozers.
‘Weakness is provocative,’ said Donald Rumsfeld. So is the appearance of weakness.
Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ late leader, already believed that Israel was weak when he and hundreds of other Palestinian prisoners were released for the sake of a single Israeli hostage, the soldier Gilad Shalit.
But Israel had never looked so weak in the months that preceded October 7, thanks to the Netanyahu Government’s heedless push for a judicial “reform” that looked to millions of Israelis like a lunge towards authoritarianism. As it turned out, it was the stumble before the fall.
Israelis are better than their government.
Nobody typifies this better than Noam Tibon, a retired general in his 60s who, with his wife, Gali, drove to the rescue of his son Amir and his son’s family in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, which had been overrun by Hamas.
“We understood that if we will not go and get them, nobody will,” the elder Tibon told the New York Times the next day. Noam fought his way into the kibbutz, rescuing his family, while Gali ferried wounded Israelis to safety.
There are scores of similar stories. The Talmudic injunction “All of Israel are responsible, one for the other” — that is, communal responsibility — is what saved the Jewish state on October 7.
Israel doesn’t have a public relations problem. It has a narrative problem.
It’s an unwitting irony that anti-Israel activists from Montreal to Melbourne, speaking European languages and living on land that was often stolen from the original inhabitants, have alighted on Hebrew-speaking Israel as the epitome of settler-colonialism.
In fact, Zionism is among the oldest anti-colonial movements in history, featuring struggles against overlords from Babylon, Greece, Rome, Constantinople, Istanbul, and, until 1948, London.
The argument Israel’s supporters need to make is about the country’s indissoluble right to exist as a Jewish state — no different than, say, the right of the Irish to an Irish state or Greeks to a Greek one.
It can’t be a debate whether Jews or Palestinians are the greater victim. Israel came into existence to end Jewish victimisation, not showcase it.
Anti-Semitism suffuses anti-Zionism, and anti-Zionism tends to produce anti-Semitism.
After a British man named Jihad al-Shamie rammed his car into a Manchester synagogue in an attack that killed two people on Yom Kippur last week, police said they were “working to understand the motivation behind the attack”. Really.
The attack illustrates how, outside of academic seminars and left-wing journals, the distinction between “Jew” and “Zionist” is either invisible or pretextual to those who mean one or the other harm.
This point bears on the previous one: Even if Israel’s defenders were to accomplish a miracle of persuasion by shifting attitudes towards the country — or if Israel had fought a much more limited war in Gaza — it would still face a chorus of ill-disguised bigotry, which would seek to accuse it of the worst crimes on the slimmest bases.
Palestinian suffering is undeniable. Hamas is its principal author.
For those who spent the past two years chanting “ceasefire now” at anti-Israel rallies, they neglect to mention (as Hillary Clinton pointed out) that there was a ceasefire before October 7, 2023, which Hamas violated in the most grotesque way possible.
As for those who rightly decry the suffering of Palestinian civilians, they must equally rue the fact that Hamas continually and deliberately put ordinary Gaza residents in harm’s way by waging war beneath, behind, and between them.
This war could have been ended at any time in the past two years by Hamas laying down its arms, which even now it is reluctant to do.
Why did so many so-called peace protesters, who made incessant demands of Israel, never make any demands of Hamas?
There will be no Palestinian state if Hamas or other militant groups survive as a military or political force.
Feckless diplomatic gestures, such as the recent recognition of a Palestinian state by France, Britain, and other countries of diminishing relevance, will do nothing to pressure or persuade Israelis that they should replicate their Gaza experience — withdrawal followed by endless war — on the vastly greater scale of the West Bank.
The only viable path to a sustainable Palestinian state is a cultural revolution among Palestinians that ends, once and for all, the fantasy of Israel’s destruction.
That’s as much the work of educators and imams as it is of Palestinian politicians and foreign diplomats.
And it requires an end to Hamas or to any armed group prepared to enforce a militant orthodoxy over other Palestinians. What, one might ask, are Britain and France prepared to do for that?
Want influence over the policies of Israel? Hug it close.
Why did Netanyahu acquiesce to US President Donald Trump and call off attacks on Iran, or agree to Trump’s 20-point peace plan?
Because most Israelis believe — based on his decisions to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, recognise Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and bomb Iran’s nuclear sites — that he’s the best friend they’ve ever had in the White House.
If leaders like France’s Emmanuel Macron and Britain’s Keir Starmer wanted to be similarly effectual, they’d take the lesson rather than play to their peanut galleries.
For all its undoubted horrors, this war may ultimately be remembered as liberating.
Liberating for the Lebanese, who, for the first time in two generations, have a realistic chance to free themselves from the yoke of Hezbollah’s insidious control over their politics.
Liberating for Syrians, who would not have been able to topple Bashar al-Assad’s regime if Israel hadn’t first decimated Assad’s helpers in Hezbollah.
Liberating for the Druze of southern Syria, who are being protected by the Israeli military.
Liberating, potentially, for Iranians, whose leadership is now at its weakest point in decades thanks to the military humiliation it experienced at Israeli and American hands in June.
Liberating for Gaza residents who suffered under Hamas’ Stasi-like domestic apparatus and its willingness to start wars it knew would bring suffering.
For Jews, within or outside of Israel, the war should also be a warning.
After more than 3000 years of history, the Jewish condition remains the same: precarious.
And while friends and allies are nice, something else hasn’t changed: We are alone.
Survival means learning to live with it.
- Bret Stephens is a New York Times Opinion columnist.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Bret Stephens
Photographs by: Tamir Kalifa, Doug Mills
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