On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas and other Iranian-backed terrorists invaded Israel, catching the Jewish state off guard and perpetrating the largest slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. For the first time in decades, Israel appeared truly weak and vulnerable, surrounded by enemies on all sides. Long regarded as the region’s military superpower, Israel was caught flat-footed, suffering more casualties on its soil than on any single day in its nearly eight decades of existence.

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Few, perhaps, would have predicted the situation as it stands today.

Two years after what has become known as the Simchat Torah massacre, named for the Jewish holy day on which it fell, Israel has defied critics and cynics alike, scoring tremendous victories while facing a growing chorus of international criticism. It might seem odd that Israeli military success would be met with increased ostracism. But the two are inextricably linked. That is, the more Israel succeeds on the battlefield, the more it is condemned. This is not a coincidence.

To understand how far Israel has come in two years, it is important to understand how devastating and dire the events of Oct. 7 were. They represent a watershed moment, both for Israel and the broader Middle East — indeed, for the world.

Israel, of course, is no stranger to war. In fact, the nation was reborn amid violent conflict. 

On Nov. 29, 1947, the United Nations voted to adopt Resolution 181, creating two states, one Arab and the other Jewish, out of British-ruled Mandate Palestine. The Arabs rejected the opportunity to create another Arab state if it meant living peaceably next to a Jewish one. By contrast, the Zionists, those who believe in Jewish self-determination in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland, supported the measure, even if it meant a smaller nation than had been promised in previous years. There had been previous attempts to create what today is called a “two-state solution,” most notably in the late 1930s prior to World War II. But Arab leaders rejected them all. And so, in 1947, war came.

Jews throughout the world celebrated the recreation of the first Jewish state in two millennia. Coming less than three years after the Holocaust and the near extinguishment of European Jewry, it seemed bittersweet. But many Arab leaders were clear that the existence of a Jewish state was an intolerable affront. Amid the celebrations, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, knew what was coming, writing in his diary, “Across the land, there is joy and profound happiness,” but “I mourn among the joyful.” 

Seven Arab armies, plus militias and terrorist groups, some with former Nazi officers serving as advisers, spearheaded the invasion. They were explicit in their objective: to destroy the fledgling Jewish state. The Zionists were vastly outnumbered, facing forces that, in many cases, were better equipped. An international arms embargo, loosely enforced, served to help the Arab armies more than the ill-equipped and poorly supplied Jewish forces. Initially on the defensive, they rallied but suffered tremendous losses — an estimated 1% of their population fell in the conflict. As the Duke of Wellington reportedly said of Waterloo, it was the “nearest run thing.” 

That war, Israel’s first, set the tone for decades of conflict. The Zionists faced opponents who were often numerically superior and capable of advancing on multiple fronts, with many receiving various levels of international support. The British, for example, had trained and led Transjordan’s Arab Legion, which proved to be the best fighting contingent of Israel’s opponents. 1948 was an Israeli victory, but the Jewish state’s opponents were only temporarily defeated, their loss the byproduct of the conflicting aims and ambitions of their many leaders.

The newly created Israel Defense Forces would become among the most battle-tested armies in the world. More wars followed: 1956, 1967, the so-called War of Attrition, 1973’s Yom Kippur War, the First Lebanon War, the First Intifada, the Second Intifada, the Second Lebanon War, and wars against Hamas in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, and 2021. These conflicts varied in scope and scale. Nearly all resulted in Israeli military victory. And several, perhaps most notably in 1973, started with Israel on the defensive, caught flat-footed, before rallying and recovering ground. Several resulted in territorial gains for the Jewish state. In no single instance did Arabs achieve a military victory. But on paper, peace largely remained elusive. However, initially Egypt, once the spearhead of Arab opposition to Israel, and eventually Jordan, brokered separate peace agreements. In 2020, the so-called Abraham Accords, a set of peace agreements between Israel and numerous Arab and Muslim majority nations, deepened what many in the region had come to see as a reality: Israel wasn’t going away. Its existence, both now and tomorrow, was a fact. Indeed, it was a thriving, modern state with much to offer its neighbors. 

The Oct. 7 attack, dubbed “Al Aqsa Flood” by Hamas and its supporters, was an attempt to rewrite this consensus. The assault was shocking, both for its brutality and its seeming success.

Hamas and other Iranian proxies invaded Israel in the early morning hours of Oct. 7. The terrorists reveled in their brutality, filming themselves torturing and murdering family members in front of one another. They burned homes with families, including babies and children, still in them. They murdered the elderly while they waited at bus stops, they gleefully shot family pets, and they raped women en masse. Maps found on dead terrorists proved that they had intentionally targeted schools and community centers.

Terrorists paraglided into the Nova music festival, murdering 378 people. It was the largest death toll of any music festival in history, yet it was only one part of the horrors inflicted that day. More than 1,200 people were murdered, and more than 200, including women, children, and the elderly, were taken hostage and brought to Gaza, where they endured sexual violence, torture, and starvation. In many cases, some were murdered. And in many cases, ordinary, everyday Palestinians in Gaza were the hostage-takers. 

In at least one instance, a “journalist” for the Palestine Chronicle, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit group, held three hostages in his family home. Abdallah Aljamal was also a frequent contributor to Al Jazeera. In subsequent months, several other Al Jazeera “journalists” were revealed as working with, and in some cases directly for, Hamas and other allied terrorist groups. But faux “journalists” aren’t alone in aiding Hamas. The U.N. itself has helped Hamas. Terrorists used U.N. employees and facilities to perpetrate the Oct. 7 massacre. The attack was proof positive that Hamas, whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the genocide of Jews, means what it says. But it also offered incontrovertible proof that segments of the international community, including the U.N. and multiple nongovernmental organizations, are complicit, willfully or otherwise, in aiding Hamas.

The barbarians were proud of their handiwork. One terrorist called his father, bragging, “Look at how many I killed with my own hands. Your son killed Jews!” The father, clearly beaming with pride, exclaimed: “Oh, my son, God bless you!” Terrorists livestreamed murders, uploading horrific videos on Facebook and other social media platforms for the world to see. One woman, Mor Bayder, learned that her grandmother, Bracha Levinson, was murdered when a Hamas operative used the dead woman’s own phone to post a video of her blood-splattered body.

The horrors of Oct. 7 defy description. Numbers and comparisons can offer only a glimpse at the scope of the tragedy. It was the largest invasion and organized mass killing by an Islamist terrorist group against a democracy in modern history. Adjusted for population, the massacre was roughly the equivalent of more than 30,000 Americans murdered in one day — more than 10 times the number killed by al Qaeda on 9/11. It would be unthinkable for a country enduring such losses not to respond militarily. 

Indeed, the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an epoch-defining moment, precipitating the so-called global war on terrorism, and leading the United States to war, fundamentally changing America and Americans forever. And this, it must be noted, was against Islamist groups that, while having a presence in the U.S., were headquartered overseas, far from our shores. No nation could be expected to tolerate such a threat directly on its borders. In many respects, Oct. 7 was Israel’s Pearl Harbor, its 9/11 — albeit worse in terms of the per capita loss of civilian life.

There was a great deal of uncertainty two years ago, but even then, this much was clear: Nothing would be the same after Oct. 7. It couldn’t be.

For years, the Israeli security establishment bought the idea that it could buy peace from Hamas with copious amounts of aid. This delusion was widely held and bipartisan, and it was encouraged by a host of actors, many of them well-intentioned. In contrast to current depictions of Israel as a “warmongering” nation, the Jewish state did everything it could to avoid all-out war with its genocidal neighbors. It was thought that it could conduct limited military operations to “mow the grass” and degrade burgeoning capabilities and planned attacks. Oct. 7 revealed this to be a willful fantasy. The events of that day highlighted the costs of complacency and wishful thinking. 

The fallout from the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Israel was similarly surprised and confronted with a host of intelligence failures, was severe. Israeli society was forever changed, its politics and culture irreversibly moved. The aftereffects of the Simchat Torah massacre, when more civilian blood was spilled and on Israeli soil, livestreamed for the whole world to see, are certain to be as wide-reaching. But some lessons are already apparent.

Coexistence with a genocidal terrorist group on one’s borders is not sustainable in the long term. And peace with terrorist organizations that wantonly sacrifice their own people and rejoice in murdering children, Jewish and Arab alike, is simply not possible. Hamas and its ilk would have to be destroyed, wiped from the face of the earth like their Nazi forefathers. 

For two years, Israel has set about doing just that. As it has in previous wars, the Jewish state rebounded from its initial losses. Its people and society rallied to fight what became another multifront war. And for a nation reliant on a reservist military, this is essential. This is now Israel’s longest war, outlasting previous kinetic conflicts such as the Yom Kippur War, the 1967 Six-Day War, and the 1948 War of Independence, by orders of magnitude. To be sure, Israel has fought several low-level conflicts that lasted several years, from the fight against the fedayeen in the 1950s to the long-running campaign in southern Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s. But these conflicts didn’t require the country to harness all the resources of the state as this war has. They didn’t threaten to exhaust its will, blood, and treasure. 

Indeed, this conflict has been several wars within a war, with Israel confronting multiple opponents in multiple countries, all of them sharing an objective, Israel’s destruction, and a sponsor, the Islamic Republic of Iran. This alone has made the war unique, both for Israel and in modern history. Previous multifront wars were against loosely allied nation-states such as Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. By contrast, this has been a war against Iran and its puppet states and vassals.

Yet Israeli military success has been great. Terrorist groups long regarded as far more formidable than Hamas, notably Hezbollah, have been severely degraded. Once called the “A-Team of Terrorist Groups,” Hezbollah had more than 150,000 missiles, many of them precision guided, and it de facto controlled Lebanon. Hezbollah had more munitions and men under arms than most European nation-states. Many analysts regarded Hezbollah as more fearsome than al Qaeda, the Islamic State, Hamas, and others. But Israeli cunning, buoyed by remarkable intelligence capabilities and precision targeting, has damaged the group. Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s longtime head, is now dead. Ditto for many of its commanders. Hezbollah’s decadeslong grip on Lebanon is less assured than it was two years ago.

The Islamic Republic, Hezbollah’s benefactor, is also weakened. The regime has lost many of its top military commanders and the majority of its nuclear scientists. Its nuclear program, air defense capabilities, and credibility have been severely damaged. The ruling mullahs have been exposed as adept at getting others in other countries to die for them. Iran’s conventional military powers have been revealed as middling at best. Two years ago, Israeli deterrence was in shambles, but now, it is Iran’s that is close to nonexistent. 

The so-called “12-day war,” in which Israel, eventually aided by the U.S., attacked Iran and its nuclear program, was one for the history books. Indeed, in that war’s opening salvo, Israel took out dozens of top Iranian commanders, many in one fell swoop. This too is worth underscoring: In the last two years, Israel has carried out more successful decapitation strikes in more countries and against more foes than any power, great or small, in modern history. No other American ally could accomplish what Israel has done. That’s not a talking point. Rather, it is a fact. 

The war has upended the region’s political calculus. Bashar Assad, the longtime Syrian dictator, was forced to flee. The forces in Tehran and Beirut that had propped up Assad, keeping him in power amid a bloody decadelong civil war, simply no longer had the capability to protect him. The war has resulted in a collapse of Iranian influence and power, its chief proxies and allies routed. Israel is, without question, the region’s preeminent military superpower once more, its military and intelligence capabilities amply displayed.

But Israel has been unable to replicate its battlefield success on the diplomatic front. And victory in Gaza, where the war was initiated, has remained elusive.

It has become axiomatic to claim that Israel is “running out of goodwill.” Many pundits and not a few policymakers have asserted that Israel’s “conduct” during the war has led to a loss of support. Many cite casualty figures coming from the Gaza “Health Ministry” — but they often fail to mention that the ministry is a Hamas-controlled entity, with a history of inflating, even outright lying about, casualties. There is no question that criticism of Israel, misinformed as it often is, has grown. But it is a lie to pretend, as many do, that the so-called international community was broadly supportive. It was not.

Indeed, before Israel had even launched an offensive in Gaza, rallies were staged in Western college streets and campuses. They were not protesting Israel’s response, which they preemptively labeled a “genocide.” Rather, they were celebrating the mass slaughter of Jews. It is equally false to pretend that, prior to the recent war, the U.N. and others stood by Israel. In fact, when it comes to self-defense, the Jewish state has always been held to a double standard.

For example, when Israeli agents captured wanted Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960, the Washington Post “chastised Israel for wanting to ‘wreak vengeance,’ rather than seek justice,” as the historian Francine Klagsbrun documented. Similarly, when Israeli fighter jets took out an Iraqi nuclear reactor on June 7, 1981, the New York Times editorial board called it “an act of inexcusable and short-sighted aggression” — never mind that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had called for Israel to be wiped off the map. The New York Times added that then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin “embraces … the code of terror” and “justifies aggression by his profound sense of victimhood.” Not much has changed.

This ingrained bias is what lies behind recent efforts, predominantly in Europe, to recognize a “Palestinian state.” France, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Spain, Portugal, and others have told Israel that they will do precisely that should the war continue. Several have done so already. Yet, these moves only embolden Hamas, removing an incentive for the terrorist group to release the hostages that it holds and lay down its arms. Indeed, Hamas hailed them as the “fruits of Oct. 7.”

When asked about French President Emmanuel Macron’s push for a Palestinian state, President Donald Trump remarked: “Here’s the good news: What he says doesn’t matter.” Indeed, these efforts are transparently less about creating a Palestinian state and more about punishing the Jewish one. They are not dealing with reality, refusing to recognize that both major Palestinian movements, Hamas and Fatah, call for Israel’s destruction and reject living in peace next to a Jewish nation. They also come amid rising antisemitism in Europe. For example, the U.K.’s Defense Ministry has banned Israelis from participating in courses at the Royal College of Defense Studies. Perhaps most shockingly, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez even openly lamented not having nuclear weapons to “stop the Israeli offensive.” Such efforts do nothing to advance peace and everything to embolden terrorism. That they’ve reached a fever pitch commensurate with Israel’s battlefield victories is revealing.

THE HAMAS UNIT THAT HUNTS PALESTINIANS 

One can expect these efforts to intensify amid renewed efforts to seize Gaza City, the last bastion of Hamas. By some estimates, half of the Palestinians in Gaza have fled the dense urban locale. Hamas’s strategy of using human shields and Israeli efforts to reduce casualties ensure that fighting will be fierce and prolonged. Hamas has been severely degraded, its top commanders killed, but for the moment, it remains a potent force capable of holding territory. There are ill omens on other fronts. On Sept. 19, the IDF announced that it had busted a terrorist cell in the West Bank that was manufacturing rockets to launch into Israel. That is, the threat of Palestinian terrorism not only remains, but it is also on Israel’s doorstep.

For decades, Europe, the U.S., and others have pushed Israel to “surrender land in exchange for peace.” But in the last three decades, Israel withdrew from Gaza, southern Lebanon, and the West Bank, only to be met with more terrorism and more war. The world must reckon with this reality. Two years after Oct. 7, that is precisely what Israel is doing.

Sean Durns is a senior research analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.