It’s a powder keg, a story unfolding with the highest possible stakes. An interesting aspect: We know more than we did last week, but I haven’t seen any minds change. People are where they started. I am also.
Now and then you just want to share your worries. Here is one of mine, one of many. A day or two after the Oct. 7 horror I wrote to friends: “What is happening now doesn’t feel like the past, when, say, a surprised and underdog Israel, a tough and scrappy nation, spiritedly repelled its invaders. Or, later, when an unstoppable and determined nation came down hard on its foes, with all the hardware those foes didn’t have. This feels—and has felt from the beginning—like a nation that is not as competent, not as certain.” It felt like an Israel that had grown less disciplined, with a government that was complacent and distracted, “an Israel more generationally removed from its founding ideas, and its founders.”
Over and over I have seen the footage of the terrified young men and women running from the rave in the moments they first understood they were under attack. The most-used clip shows a young man in his 20s in some sort of knee-length caftan or cloak, his long hair up in a pony tail. The first impression was: modern. My second thought: That’s not David Ben-Gurion. Israel is a thoroughly modern Western culture in a neighborhood that isn’t thoroughly modern and doesn’t like all Western-inflected things. It’s long seemed to me societies that grow steadily more affluent grow stronger, and then at some point weaker.
Israel is unified by what has happened, but it will have to be strong now, and very cool. I find I am reacting to everything—from the first day, with the slain and abused children, with the videotape of babies sobbing as they were grabbed and taken hostage—not as a thinker on politics, or one who has read a lot of history, or lived long in the world, but simply as a mother. All of the instincts of a parent, especially a mother, are protective: You want to keep the young from harm so everyone gets to go on and live.
And so, even as I fear it may be too late—it looks to me as if plans for a ground invasion of Gaza are in place, that decisions have already been made, possible repercussions considered and perhaps accounted for—I am where I was:
Israel was attacked on Oct. 7 because its enemies thought it was weak—divided and distracted, with unwise leadership. Its job now is to get stronger—build itself up internally and in the world. In this corner we have urged a strategy of refortification, of digging deep and making foundations more stable. Strengthen, on all borders and within. Build up. Get Hamas in a way superior to what you have attempted in the past, dust off plans never acted on, step it up, be more focused, vigorous and professional. The world will not only understand it will be impressed by Israel methodically getting its tormentors. It largely won’t understand, in part because it doesn’t want to understand, more maximalist measures.
Why should Israel focus on making itself stronger? Because it is vulnerable. It is surrounded by passionate enemies and ambivalent friends. Because in the end it will never be able to do away with everyone in Hamas, it can’t get rid of all of Hezbollah. The region will only keep making them. Some problems can’t be solved, only managed. And because, in the end, all paths leading to a greater protection, and a new flourishing, run through politics—through diplomacy and deals and agreements and treaties.
If more fronts open it will be dangerous. Israel must do everything in its power to prevent them from opening. It is hard to see how a full-scale ground invasion of Gaza would make Israel’s position stronger. It will more likely bleed the country and deplete it, even as it produces an untold number of innocent casualties and a refugee crisis. It will make Israel look bloody-minded in the eyes of the world.
And Gaza is, most likely, where most of the hostages are—203 of them, at latest count, possibly including 13 unaccounted-for Americans. They haven’t been the focus of things the past week, and they need and deserve more.
Pounding, entering and holding Gaza will likely be a long, brutalizing exercise, and innocents will suffer. In conversation one picks up an air of, “It’s a terrible idea but the only idea we’ve got.” When your only idea is a bad one, that’s a sign to wait and think harder.
When the hospital grounds were bombed in Gaza this week, it was a revealing drama. Many thought Israel was responsible for a simple reason: Israel had been bombing Gaza, and a hospital in Gaza was bombed. Hamas is experienced and talented in propaganda, and it immediately pumped out the word: Israel targeted and bombed the hospital. What used to be called the Arab street exploded with demonstrations. Within a day or two the preponderance of evidence and intelligence showed it wasn’t Israel but an errant terrorist rocket.
It matters who was responsible because it matters who killed innocent people. But it is in the nature of what is under way in Gaza that there will be large-casualty events down the road. People will immediately blame Israel because they wish to, and because Israel is in Gaza. The propagandists will do their instant work. Shortly after the hospital explosion Rep. Rashida Tlaib tweeted: “Israel just bombed the Baptist Hospital killing 500 Palestinians (doctors, children, patients) just like that.” She and her friends in the Squad are quickly becoming America’s Jeremy Corbyn, the British Labour Party leader who’d grown so extreme and anti-Semitic in his rhetoric—he called Hezbollah and Hamas his “friends”—that in 2020 he was thrown out of the party.
A Gaza invasion will be brutal, too, for Israeli troops. The other night in New York a great retired American general spoke of trying to hold such places—of the effect on soldiers, the psychic and emotional price, and the attrition, with time, of their capacity, as they go room to room to clear them. “How many rooms are there in Gaza?” he asked.
Finally, a Gaza invasion marks a historic gamble on the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Will people have confidence in his judgment? This week the liberal newspaper Haaretz reported the families of the Israeli hostages have organized and begun a worldwide media campaign, with pro bono legal and media advisers. Amazingly, it reported, the families have even hired their own hostage negotiators—formerly high-placed veterans of Shin Bet, the security service, and Mossad who are believed to have “deep contacts in the Arab world.” “That’s how low their confidence is in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government.”
It is hard to lead a successful long war when that’s where you’re starting from.
I hope Israel digs deep, refortifies, and devotes its focus to making itself stronger than it seemed on Oct. 6.