Though it seems absurd in retrospect, there were many in Hamas who believed their massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, would succeed not just in wounding Israel but in destroying it.
They believed this out of religious fervor. They believed it because they hoped to inspire Hezbollah and Iran to join the battle with their own full-scale attacks. And they believed that Israel, for all its high-tech wizardry, was weak.
The belief turned out to be wrong — and fatal. But it wasn’t unfounded. “After 20 years, you will become weak, and I will attack you,” Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of Oct. 7, told his Israeli prison dentist about 20 years ago, according to reporting by The New Yorker’s David Remnick.
What Sinwar and others in Hamas saw in Israel was a country prepared to release more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, including Sinwar himself, for the sake of a single hostage. A country whose leaders talked tough but tended to be risk-averse for fear of upsetting the Israeli public’s thirst for prosperity and calm. A country with deep internal fissures — religious versus secular, Jews versus non-Jews, supporters of judicial reform versus opponents. A country anxious about what the rest of the world thought of it.
All this Sinwar gleaned from closely reading Hebrew-language newspapers, a habit he picked up from his many years in Israeli prisons. That may have been his biggest mistake. Journalism in a democracy, particularly Israel’s, tends to neglect what’s healthy in a society while obsessing over everything that’s not. (In autocracies it’s the opposite.) The result is that Sinwar was better acquainted with Israel’s many self-advertised faults than with its underlying strengths.
We’ll probably never know whether Sinwar, who was killed by Israeli troops a year ago this week, ever came to grips with the scale of his misjudgment. Israelis did not crumble in the face of his butchery, which he appears to have specifically ordered against soldiers and civilian communities alike “so as to evoke fear in Israelis and destabilize the country,” according to a recent report in The Times. They did not limit themselves to several weeks of fighting, as they had in previous wars, or buckle to unceasing international pressure, or surrender most of their war aims for the sake of releasing the hostages.
Instead, Israelis rallied and won — at least inasmuch as a lasting victory is ever possible in the Middle East.
They have changed the game with Lebanon and Syria. They have humiliated and defanged Iran, whose regime, as Karim Sadjadpour notes in a new essay in Foreign Affairs, is tottering. They have gotten back their remaining living hostages without giving up their most important leverage in Gaza, which is the control of its inner perimeter. They have secured the commitment of Muslim countries to a Gaza free from Hamas’s governance: If that fails, they have some assurance that Gazans will resist future attempts by Hamas to drag them into another calamitous war. They have maintained diplomatic relations with friendly Arab states. And, for all the global street protests, hostile op-eds and meaningless arms embargoes, they have the full-throated backing of the only foreign government that matters: America’s.
For all this, there’s been a heavy price. A shattered Gaza, with many thousands of civilian deaths and terrible suffering for those trapped in the crossfire. Rising antisemitism. A generation of Western progressives — joined by growing numbers of cohorts on the far right — who think of the Jewish state as the apotheosis of evil.
Maybe all that could have been avoided, though I doubt it: Israel had already been judged guilty of war crimes by all the “sentence first, verdict afterward” critics in the earliest days of the war. I also doubt most Israelis or supporters of Israel would seriously want to trade Israel’s current position for its opposite: strategic defeat in exchange for Western tea and sympathy. Centuries of persecution and discrimination followed by interludes of pity and accommodation are what drove Jews to establish the state of Israel in the first place.
It’s also what drove them, in this war, to win. Much of the analysis of Israel’s military strategy has been focused on the hows: How did Israel carry off the pager operation against Hezbollah? How did the Mossad smuggle a bomb into the Tehran safe house where the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was staying? How did Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, persuade Donald Trump to join in the attack on Iran? And how did Trump use Israel’s attack on Hamas’s leadership in Doha to engineer the diplomacy that stopped the war?
But the how questions are ultimately less revealing than the whys. Why, contrary to what Sinwar believed, did Israel not collapse on Oct. 7? Why did Israelis persevere through mass murder, forced internal displacement, ballistic-missile attacks and international isolation? Why was Israel determined to win rather than settle for a premature end to the war that would have left Israel’s major enemies mostly unscathed?
The answer came to me on an Israeli military base near Gaza, where I met a sergeant who went by the nickname Cholo. Cholo had been D.J.’ing raves in Brazil but returned to Israel immediately after Oct. 7 to serve. “I am not supporting this government,” he told me. “But I will go to the army.”
The word for this is patriotism, or what Mark Twain called “supporting your country all the time, but your government only when it deserves it.” Many of the Israeli soldiers who fought and fell in Gaza and other fronts were surely marching against Netanyahu during the protests over the judicial reform.
But they came from nearly every political quarter to fight not out of ideological or partisan conviction, but because Sinwar’s aims and methods on Oct. 7 made clear that the stakes were existential. What’s more, the gleeful support those aims and methods instantly engendered worldwide made clear that, even now, there’s still no safe harbor for Jews. Not Australia. Not Canada. Not Britain. Not France. Not Germany. And perhaps not America.
Do earnest progressives really think that if the Jewish state were to vanish tomorrow, to be replaced by some utopian binational state, the anti-Jewish furies in the Middle East, Europe or North America would somehow abate? Or would those furies simply find easier targets?
Nor did Israelis fight only because they were faced by an existential threat. They also faced an existential lie: the lie that Israel is a settler-colonialist state, a nonnative invasive species that has no place in that land. It’s a lie that’s taken hold everywhere, even if a 3,000-year historical record disproves it. And it’s a lie that, as it’s grown bolder, attacks the very roots of Jewish identity. “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem …” wasn’t simply meant as literary metaphor. To prove the point, Israelis had to fight and win the war.
The current cease-fire brings a set of difficult questions about what comes next — for Israelis and Palestinians and everyone else invested in their future. But it should settle important questions, too. Are Israelis weak? Is their state built on foundations of sand? Is their attachment to their beliefs slight?
Yahya Sinwar and those who followed him thought so. The grave he made for himself should settle the questions for good.
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Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues. Facebook
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