“WE HAVE RESTORED deterrence,” declares Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israel’s military-intelligence service, referring to the credibility Israel’s security services lost on October 7th 2023, when Palestinian radicals ran rampage across southern Israel, killing more than 1,100 people and kidnapping some 250. This has been regained by Israel’s devastating assault on Hizbullah, a Lebanese militant group that has been bombarding northern Israel for the past year, displacing some 60,000 civilians. In just two weeks Israel has killed and injured many Hizbullah operatives using booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies, assassinated several of its leaders in bombing raids and sent troops into southern Lebanon to destroy the tunnels, bases and rocket-launchers Hizbullah has been using in its attacks.
Whereas Israeli intelligence had little inkling of the plans of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that spearheaded last year’s attacks, it had thoroughly penetrated and outwitted Hizbullah. Whereas the mastermind of Hamas’s attacks, Yahya Sinwar, remains at large despite Israel’s year-long war against Gaza, from which the attacks were mounted, Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah’s leader, was killed by an Israeli bomb on September 27th. Whereas 97 of the hostages seized by Hamas and other militant groups on October 7th remain unaccounted for 11 months after Israel sent troops into Gaza in part to rescue them, the war against Hizbullah seems likely to reduce attacks on northern Israel—at least for a while—and thus allow residents to return safely to their homes. Most notably, neither Hizbullah nor its backers in Iran have succeeded in causing many casualties in their various attacks on Israel, including Iran’s barrage of 180 missiles on October 1st, in contrast with the massacres that took place on October 7th. Fully 80% of Israelis support the assault on Hizbullah, according to a poll commissioned by the Israeli Democracy Institute, a think-tank.
Yet as pleased as most Israelis are by the campaign’s success, the unity is only superficial. Israelis remain divided not just over the way forward in Gaza, where the Israel Defence Forces (idf) are still battling Hamas, but also over the lessons of October 7th. Before the war began, Israel was riven by protests over the right-wing government’s proposed reforms to the judiciary, which many believed would have diminished checks on the government and so weakened the rule of law. What is more, many Israelis blamed the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, for tolerating Hamas’s control of Gaza as a way to undermine Palestinian unity and support within Israel for any form of Palestinian autonomy. And as the war in Gaza has dragged on, many Israelis have concluded that his government is more interested in prolonging the fighting than it is in rescuing the surviving hostages.
Protesters and patriots
None of this has stopped Israelis from rallying around the flag and throwing themselves into the war effort. During the protests against the judicial reforms, many reservists, including 37 out of the 40 pilots in Air Force Squadron 69, threatened to suspend their military service. In the end the reforms got stuck in parliament and the courts and reservists have reported for duty as required. It was Squadron 69 that bombed Hizbullah’s underground headquarters in Beirut, killing Nasrallah.
Yet the war is lasting far longer than almost anyone anticipated. In the first weeks after the war began three-quarters of Israelis told a pollster it would take no longer than three months. Only 1.6% thought it would go on for over a year.
At one of the two divisional headquarters directing the idf’s ground operations in Gaza, the feeling of urgency of the first months of the war is long gone. Soldiers sunning themselves outside the temporary offices in portable cabins no longer carry helmets and flak-jackets, although Gaza is only a few kilometres to the south. The constant missile fire has all but evaporated, as the idf has destroyed nearly all of Hamas’s launchers. Most combat units have been redeployed to the north, near Lebanon. Gaza feels like a sideshow.
“The battle isn’t over, but the bulk of the fighting is,” says one of the division’s commanders. Inside Gaza, the main job of the idf is to patrol two corridors: one cutting it in half, which prevents the return of a million displaced civilians to Gaza City, and the other along Gaza’s border with Egypt, which prevents militants escaping and arms entering. Hamas’s command structure has been dismantled but thousands of its fighters remain at large, some mounting guerrilla attacks. The idf cannot carry out big offensives to hunt down these remnants since so much manpower has been sent north. Most of the remaining troops’ time is spent protecting themselves from ambushes, blowing up sections of Hamas’s tunnel network and escorting humanitarian convoys.
One way to drum up more troops would be to draft more ultra-Orthodox students, who are exempt from compulsory military service—something the Supreme Court has instructed the government to do anyway. Some 60,000 ultra-Orthodox men could in theory be eligible. But an attempt by the idf to call up a few thousand of them led to rioting outside draft offices. The ultra-Orthodox parties in Mr Netanyahu’s coalition have threatened to topple the government if he presses ahead with such a policy.
The current situation in Gaza is “stagnation”, a general complains. “No alternative force has been prepared to take over Gaza and meanwhile Hamas is recovering in parts of the strip,” says another officer. “We knew it was going to be a marathon, but not an ultra-marathon,” sighs the divisional commander, a reservist who, in civilian life, is joint ceo of a finance company which he is struggling to keep going owing to the number of employees on military duty like himself.
Mr Netanyahu speaks vaguely of a “demilitarised” and “deradicalised” Gaza, without specifying what that means or how it will be achieved. The far right, on which his government relies, would like to see a permanent occupation, of the sort that pertained before Israel’s withdrawal in 2005. The centre-left would prefer that Gaza be administered by the Palestinian Authority, which runs parts of the West Bank, with the support of Arab states.
The prime minister rules out both of these options. To the consternation of America and his own generals, he has refused to accept a ceasefire agreement that would allow the release of the surviving hostages, fuelling speculation that he prefers to keep the war in Gaza simmering, so that he can put off the moment of reckoning with Israeli voters.
Mr Netanyahu seems to hope that the campaign against Hizbullah will help restore his political fortunes. Although the polls have long indicated that more than 70% of Israelis would like him to resign, either immediately or once the war is over, he has clung doggedly to power. He has refused to take any blame for the failure to anticipate and prevent the massacre of Israeli civilians, and has instead promised “total victory”. Although his Likud party has recovered somewhat in the polls (mainly at the expense of his far-right coalition partners), Mr Netanyahu’s coalition would probably lose its majority if elections were held now. That likelihood, ironically, has helped keep him in power, since his allies do not want to risk their own jobs by precipitating an election.
Mr Netanyahu is also helped by the lack of an obvious successor. The official leader of the opposition and previous prime minister, Yair Lapid, a centrist, has failed to articulate a clear alternative to Mr Netanyahu’s policies and is languishing in the polls. For much of the past year Benny Gantz, another centrist and former commander of the idf, seemed the most plausible candidate. He joined a national-unity government days after October 7th and was considered by many to be a voice of reason. But he left the government in June, complaining that Mr Netanyahu had no plan to end the war. Since then his ratings have also declined. The most popular candidate according to the polls is Naftali Bennett, a right-winger who led a short-lived government after toppling Mr Netanyahu in 2021. But he has yet to set up a planned new party.
Michael Ohayon, a grizzled butcher from northern Israel, captures Israelis’ mixed feelings about Mr Netanyahu. Having fled Hizbullah’s rocket attacks last year, he is now living in a hotel in the coastal city of Haifa. On a recent evening, shortly after Hizbullah fired missiles at Haifa, too, he said, “Of course we blame Netanyahu for the situation Israel is in. But who else do you see who can replace him?”
Still processing
A year after October 7th Israelis are still trapped in a vortex of sadness, anger and recrimination. Nightly news programmes still devote lengthy segments to Hamas’s atrocities, as new details continue to emerge. Politicians frequently compare the massacre to the Holocaust.
This anguish, in turn, has inhibited public debate about how the wars in Gaza and Lebanon are being prosecuted and how they might be brought to an end. “The trauma is too fresh among Israelis, on the centre-left as well, for us to have a discussion now on peaceful solutions to the conflict. The levels of rage are still too high,” admits Mickey Gitzin, the head of the New Israel Fund, a progressive ngo which has directed funding to Israeli communities affected by the war, as well as humanitarian relief to Gaza.
A two-state solution, he admits, has become a non-starter for most Israelis. But polling his organisation commissioned shows an openness to enlisting the help of Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia in some alternative arrangement. “We’re not at a point right now to talk of a Palestinian state, but there is an opportunity. The right wing’s concept of ‘managing the conflict’ collapsed on October 7th and our responsibility is to present Israelis with a way forward.” “Israel had a chance to emerge from the war in Gaza with a more stable regional framework in which the Saudis and other moderate Arab states would have been invested in maintaining the security,” echoes Tamir Hayman, a former general and head of the Institute for National Security Studies, a think-tank in Tel Aviv. “That opportunity was squandered because of politics.”
Zeev Raz, a retired colonel and former commander of Squadron 69, believes that Nasrallah’s assassination has made Israel safer. In 1981 he led an air raid that destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor, which Israel feared would be used by Saddam Hussein’s regime to develop nuclear weapons. But today he believes the greatest threat to Israel is not Iran’s nuclear-weapons programme, but Israel’s inability to engage with the Palestinians. “So now we’re euphoric that we’ve eliminated Nasrallah and we’re ignoring the mess we’ve got ourselves into in Gaza,” he says. “Israel is still in an illusion that we can somehow manage the conflict with the Palestinians while we deal with Iran and its proxies.” ■
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