A “diplomatic tsunami” is how one Israeli newspaper has dubbed intensifying criticism from Israel’s Western allies of its latest military attacks – and the dire humanitarian crisis – in Gaza.
But this international anger, contrasting sharply with the sympathy that most of the world offered Israel after Hamas murdered and abducted hundreds of civilians on Oct. 7, 2023, may be diverting attention from an even greater impact of the war in Gaza.
It has revived long-simmering questions for Israelis about their country’s bedrock principles, its future direction, and its very identity – questions that go to the soul of the state founded just a few years after Adolf Hitler’s mass murder of the Jews of Europe.
Why We Wrote This
Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza seeking to eliminate Hamas has, for many, undermined the Jewish state’s moral authority and raised troubling questions about the country’s future.
Answering these questions has been made both more urgent and more difficult by the attack of Oct. 7.
More urgent because Hamas’ murderous assault shredded a founding promise of the Israeli state: to create a haven where, after centuries of diaspora prejudice culminating in the Holocaust, Jews could finally feel safe.
But more difficult, too. Because the trauma of Oct. 7 for Israelis of all stripes – Orthodox and secular, left-of-center and right-wing, West Bank settlers and Tel Aviv tech entrepreneurs – still runs deep.
Nowhere has that been more evident, until now, than in most Israelis’ inability to comprehend the scale of destruction in Gaza, or to connect on a human level with the agony of its Palestinian civilian victims.
That, at least, could be starting to change.
In recent days, street protesters urging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to prioritize the release of Israeli hostages from Gaza have begun holding up photos of Palestinian children alongside the images of captive Israelis. Opinion polls have suggested some erosion of long-solid support for Israel’s blockade on food and humanitarian supplies to Gaza.
Former members of Israel’s political and security establishment have also moved beyond criticism of the government’s conduct of the war to denounce its impact on Palestinian civilians. They have not minced their words, either, using terms such as “war crimes” and “ethnic cleansing.”
However the war ends, the legacy of Oct. 7 will impel Israelis to reopen a divisive debate about their country’s identity and future direction.
Some of the questions date back to the foundation of the state in May 1948.
What is Israel’s core identity? A Jewish state by a mix of language, religion, tradition, and demographics? Should it explicitly define non-Jewish citizens as playing a lesser role in the national narrative?
What place should the Orthodox and religious-nationalist community occupy? Dominant, or part of a broader tapestry including the majority of Israeli Jews who are secular or less observant?
What about the key issue raised by Oct. 7: security? What role does military power play? Can arms alone ensure long-term security?
And perhaps the most challenging question of all: Should – can – peace be sought with the Palestinians?
The early decades of the Israeli state were shaped by Labor Zionist luminaries, such as Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who were mostly East European, secular, socialist idealists.
The 1948 Declaration of Independence declared that Israel “will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens without distinction of race, creed, or sex; [and] will guarantee full freedom of conscience, worship, education, and culture.”
The founding doctrine of Israel’s military included a commitment to tohar haneshek, or “purity of arms,” enjoining soldiers to use minimum necessary force and do all they could to avoid harming civilians.
But a succession of Mideast wars administered shocks to the political compass, as Oct. 7 seems likely to do.
In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel gained control of the West Bank of the Jordan River and Gaza, then home to around a million-and-a-half Palestinians.
Even before 1948, a more right-wing stream of Zionism had embraced the dream of a Jewish state in all of biblical Palestine. Now, “greater Israel” became a live political issue.
Ben-Gurion’s heirs, still in charge, assumed that some sort of “land for peace” deal would eventually be possible.
Then came a very different war, with a surprise attack by Egypt and Syria in October 1973.
Israel prevailed, but not before suffering setbacks and heavy losses that jolted Israelis’ faith in their military’s preparedness as dramatically as the Hamas attack did half a century later.
The aftereffects were profound. Labor Zionism was voted out a few years later in favor of the right-wing Likud Party under Menachem Begin. He launched a widespread effort to plant Jewish settlements in the West Bank, with the explicit aim of making it impossible for Palestinians to establish a state there.
Then another war – his ill-fated 1982 invasion of Lebanon – strengthened support for groups like Peace Now, swinging the pendulum back toward a search for negotiated peace.
Prime Minister Netanyahu, who first took office in 1996, has pulled it rightward again, and his current government has supercharged that shift.
His coalition relies on the support of two virulently anti-Arab ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, committed to an exclusively Jewish state in all of biblical Palestine.
They have also advanced the idea of driving Palestinians out of Gaza, and emboldened West Bank settlers to mount violent attacks on Palestinian villages and farms.
For many hundreds of thousands of Israelis, such views are anathema. Still, it remains unclear what shape a debate over Israel’s post-Oct. 7 future will take.
Will Mr. Netanyahu pay the kind of political price for the war in Gaza that Israel’s left-of-center leaders did after the October 1973 surprise attack?
Or will the widespread and ongoing sense of post-October trauma blunt his critics’ pushback?
The complexity of the situation that will face Israel once the war is over was well-expressed in recent comments by David Grossman, the leading Israeli novelist and a long-standing voice for an open, socially tolerant Israel wedded to the search for coexistence with the Palestinians.
Mr. Netanyahu’s “gravest sin,” he said, had been the “normalization of figures like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.” He also remained worried by a “Samson-like” delusion that Israel’s military power, alone, could provide true security.
Yet he sensed it might now take years for Israelis and Palestinians to find the will, and the trust, to revive serious peace efforts.
The “absolute, demonic evil” of Hamas’s attack, along with a “sense of betrayal” by their own government, had left Israelis despairing and “shattered.”
Still, he did hold out a reason not to lose hope, nor to give up trying to move his country in a different direction.
Israel needs peace, he declared. Backing the establishment of a Palestinian state was not about doing the Palestinians a “favor.”
“We need them,” he said, “exactly as they need us.”
