So what am I thinking about on this anniversary of the Hamas-Hezbollah-Iran-Israel war? Something my strategy teacher, Prof. John Arquilla of the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, taught me: All wars come down to two basic questions: Who wins the battle on the ground? And who wins the battle of the story? And what I am thinking about today is how, even after a year of warfare, in which Hamas and Hezbollah and Israel have inflicted terrible pain on one another’s forces and civilians, no one has decisively won the battle on the ground or the battle for the story.
Indeed, one year after Oct. 7, this is still the first Arab-Israeli war without a name and without a clear victor — because neither side has a clear win or a clean story.
We can and should sympathize with Palestinian statelessness and Arabs in the West Bank living under the duress of Israeli settlements and restrictions, but to my mind, there is nothing that can justify what Hamas attackers did on Oct. 7 — murdering, maiming, kidnapping and sexually abusing any Israeli they could get their hands on, without any goal, any story, other than to destroy the Jewish state. If you believe, as I do, that the only solution is two states for two indigenous peoples between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, the Hamas rampage set that back immeasurably.
And what story is Iran telling? That it has some right under the U.N. charter to help create failed states in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq so it can cultivate proxies inside them for the purpose of destroying Israel? And by what right has Hezbollah dragged Lebanon into a war with Israel that the Lebanese people and government had no say in and are now paying a huge price for?
But this Israeli government does not have a clean story in the Gaza Strip, either. This was always going to be the ugliest of Israeli-Palestinian wars since 1947, because Hamas had embedded itself in tunnels underneath Gaza homes, schools, mosques and hospitals. It could not be targeted without significant civilian casualties. Therefore, as I argued from the start, it was doubly incumbent on Israel to make clear that this was not just a war to defend itself but also to destroy Hamas in order to birth something better: the only just and stable solution possible, two states for two people.
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The Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu steadfastly has refused to do that, so much so that a year later, it still has not told its people, its army or its U.S. arms supplier what it wants to build in Gaza in place of Hamas other than “total victory.” With Israel still bombing schools to kill a few Hamas fighters hiding inside yet failing to articulate any future for Gaza residents other than permanent war, it feels as though killing every last Hamasnik is the goal — no matter how many civilians die. That’s a forever war that will undermine both Israel and America’s credibility and embarrass Israel’s Arab allies.
But the lack of a good story is hurting Israel in other ways. Israelis are being asked to send their sons and daughters to fight every day against Hamas and Hezbollah foes — yet cannot be sure if they are going to war to save the state of Israel or the political career of their prime minister.
Because there is more than enough reason to believe that Benjamin Netanyahu wants to keep this war going to have an excuse to postpone testifying in December at his corruption trial, to postpone an independent commission of inquiry as to how his government failed to prevent the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, as well as to forestall new Israeli elections and maybe even to tilt our presidential election to Donald Trump. Netanyahu’s far-right Jewish supremacist partners have told him they will topple his government if he agrees to stop the war in Gaza before an undefined “total victory” over Hamas and if he tries to bring the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority, which has embraced the Oslo peace process, to help govern Gaza in the place of Hamas — something that Hamas greatly fears.
This absence of a story is also hurting Israel strategically. The more Israel has a legitimate Palestinian partner, like a reformed Palestinian Authority, the better chance it can get out of Gaza and not preside over a permanent insurgency there, the more allies will want to help create an international force to fill any vacuum in southern Lebanon and the more any Israeli military strike against Iran would be understood as making Israel safe to try to make peace with the Palestinians — not safe for an Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, which is what some of Netanyahu’s far-right partners are seeking.
I cannot guarantee that there is a legitimate Palestinian partner for a secure peace with Israel. But I can guarantee that this Israeli government has done everything it could to prevent one from emerging — by strengthening Hamas in Gaza at the expense of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
It is simply insane to me that the United Arab Emirates is telling Israel that it would send military forces to Gaza to stabilize the peace there, in conjunction with the U.S. and other international forces — and that Saudi Arabia has indicated it is ready to normalize relations with Israel, help pay for Gaza’s reconstruction and open a road for relations between the Jewish state and the whole Muslim world — and yet Netanyahu up to now has said no to both because all of this would require that Israel open talks with a reformed Palestinian Authority on a two-state solution and that this Palestinian Authority would formally invite the UAE and others to help secure Gaza.
And it is disastrous in another way that is not so obvious. Israel has just delivered a devastating blow to Hezbollah’s leadership. As a purely military operation — combining high tech, intelligence and precision strikes by the Israeli Air Force — it will be studied by armies all over the world. But here’s the rub: I can assure you that most of the Israeli pilots, spies and technologists who produced that operation were the same Israeli street protesters and leaders of the opposition to the judicial coup that Netanyahu attempted in the year before the Hamas invasion — a coup attempt that split the country and encouraged Hamas’ invasion and Hezbollah’s pile-on, as Netanyahu was warned before the war.
No one has taught me more about the tension between those pilots’ stories and Bibi’s story — and its implications for Israel’s fate — than Dan Ben-David, a Tel Aviv University economist who heads the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research. I wrote to him to ask what he was thinking about the Oct. 7 anniversary. This is what he emailed back:
“My mom was a 13-year-old smuggled alone out of Baghdad to Palestine during World War II. My father landed here as an orphan; his father was butchered by his Lithuanian neighbors as the Nazis moved in. Following the war of independence, my parents’ army units joined to create Kibbutz Malkiya on the Lebanese border. (That kibbutz, where they first met and married, became a charred ghost town over the past year.) That’s my family’s history — but change the names, and you basically have the history of Israel 1.0.”
That generation, Ben-David continued, “made sure their children and grandchildren would understand the importance of preserving Israel as our people’s safe haven, built on democracy and the rule of law.” That priority, that story, “was the thread of steel that has bound each generation to our founding one. It creates a situation that makes Israel unique, and not just in comparison with those who want to annihilate us.”
Look at how “both Ukraine and Russia have had to pass laws to prevent able-bodied men from leaving during war,” he added. “But when Israel is threatened with war, the planes that are full are not with Israelis trying to escape possible hell but with those dropping everything abroad — school, work, vacations — to come home and defend the country, many of whom eventually lose their lives in doing so. You cannot buy that kind of motivation.”
“That steel thread is what has saved us over the decades — and that is exactly what is so dangerous about Netanyahu’s domestic divide-and-conquer strategy that puts his personal interests above all else. Here we are, after the most horrific period in Israel’s history, and Netanyahu keeps snipping away at the thread,” Ben-David wrote. “Aside from encouraging his cultist followers to make state enemies out of hostage families, pilots, physicians and anyone else who dares to criticize the great leader, he has no exit plan for the deepening military crisis, no budget for the deepening economic crisis, no intention of drafting the ultra-Orthodox into an army desperate for manpower to replace all those who we lost. Because all of those might lead his far-right allies to turn against him.”
So on this first anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack, I find myself most preoccupied with the fact that Israel is fighting a multifront war and Israelis still don’t know whether they are fighting to make Israel safe for a Jewish democracy or safe for the prime minister’s political survival, safe for the ultra-Orthodox to never have to serve in the military and safe for the prime minister to declare to the world he is defending the frontier of freedom in Gaza and Lebanon while sustaining a morally rotten and economically draining settlement engine in the West Bank.
The biggest threat to Israel today is not Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah or the Houthis. A united Israel can beat them all. It is those who are unraveling Israel’s steel thread — with a bad story.
Thomas Friedman writes a column for the New York Times.
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