If the war in Gaza 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 Oct. 7, 2023, too late for the 1,200 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 toward Gaza. Why? Because, as Yaakov Katz, a co-author of the excellent new book “While Israel Slept,” wrote me, technologies like the Iron Dome gave Israel the false sense that “it was impenetrable.” Yet when Oct. 7 came, Israel’s high-tech marvels in signals intelligence, missile interceptors, smart fences and underground barriers proved useless against Hamas’s low-tech paragliders and bulldozers.
“Weakness is provocative,” said Donald Rumsfeld. So is the appearance of weakness.
Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s 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 Oct. 7, thanks to the Netanyahu government’s heedless push for a judicial “reform” that looked to millions of Israelis like a lunge toward 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 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 Oct. 7.
Israel doesn’t have a P.R. 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 anticolonial 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 victimization, not showcase it.