A Nation Between War and Memory

THE EXTENT TO WHICH the ongoing war—which has crossed 500 days—against Hamas and its bewildering ar­ray of allies has influ­enced the national psy­chology of Israel is best illustrated by a visit to the Nova music festi­val site. Located a short distance from Israel’s border with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, Nova was a vast open ground that hosted a boisterous music festival on the Jewish festi­val of Shemini Atzeret on October 6-7, 2023.

Like most festivals that involve young people camping in the open, enjoying the live bands and doing very much what the young do on such occasions, the Nova music festival was no different. Whether the Hamas offen­sive across the border wilfully targeted this gathering or not is a matter of conjecture, but the result was a one-sided massacre in which some 364 people were brutally gunned down and another 40 carted off as hostages.

Today, the Nova festival site has become a pil­grimage for Israelis and Jews across the world. Just as the black-and-white photographs of children who were sent to the death camps in Auschwitz, Belsen, Dachau and others, haunt the world and the daily visitors to the iconic Yad Vashem—the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem—the improvised memorials com­memorating each one of those who were felled by terrorist bullets on the morning of October 7 has moulded the national psyche of Israel.

The photographs of the victims tell their own story. They could have been the excit­able girl you encountered at a late-night bar in Haifa; they could have been the sweet boy with bulging muscles you came across during the journey to an idyllic spot in Himachal Pradesh; and they could have been the nerdy boy with startup plans you met at a coffee shop in Tel Aviv.

The sheer ordinariness of the photographs of these young people who will never become old is obvious. As every Israeli who makes the pilgrimage to Nova, maybe to light a candle or perhaps just to offer a silent prayer, knows only too well, it could have been their son or daughter.

Had the Hamas targeted the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to trig­ger a war against a state whose very existence has been contested since 1948, it may have been understandable. But, like the revel­lers in Nova who were targeted, the Hamas army that breached Is­rael’s supposedly impregnable border defences in some 62 points, the casualties included some of Israel’s most inoffensive citizens.

The Nir Oz kibbutz is a little paradise the pioneers created out of nothing. It boasts tropical plants, trees with saplings brought from Bengal and even a few peacocks. The kibbutz movement that played a seminal role in the creation of Israel and its consolidation in the initial difficult years was built on slightly utopian notions of egalitarianism and community living. Although many of the old principles have been diluted with the onset of the market economy, simplicity has remained the hallmark of the kibbutz. The modest houses of the 400 or so “ashramites” reminded me so much of the government-designed staff quarters of public sector units in social­ist India. They were modest but comfortable.

The Hamas attack targeted the Nir Oz kibbutz. First came about 300 Hamas fighters spraying bullets, and this was followed by 500 civilians from Gaza with a single-minded devotion to loot­ing and further destruction. Some 46 kibbutz residents, mostly elderly, were killed and a staggering 71 were taken hostage. Today, rows of houses, including some which doubled up as studios for artists, are either burnt shells or boarded up, with yellow flags signifying they belong to the hostages in Hamas custody. There are cats loitering around the ruins, awaiting the return of their owners. The community has taken the responsibility of feeding the forlorn pets.

THE ATTACKS OF October 7, 2023 devastated Israel. The massacre of some 1,200 people is said to be the most heinous attacks on Jews since the Holocaust. There was an initial sense of disorientation and surprise because Israelis had been told to believe that the border with Gaza was electroni­cally monitored every inch and near-impregnable. Hamas made a mockery of this smug, self-confidence by not only sending some 3,000 fighters to invade Israel but supplementing its terror army with some 5,000 Gaza civilians who made it their business to carry back trophies of war. These included everything from cash, jewellery, electronic gizmos and hostages to dead bodies which they hoped to exchange for convicted criminals in Israeli jails.

It speaks volumes for the gritty determination of the people of Israel that they brushed aside their legitimate anger over a monu­mental intelligence failure and focused on the task ahead. Hamas had timed its attack to coincide with the mounting civil unrest against the Benjamin Netanyahu government over its attempt to overcome the political obstruction by the judiciary. It had con­cluded that the steady softening of Israeli society would make it difficult for the country to replicate the resolve it had shown in 1948, the Six-Day War of 1967 and after the initial reverses of the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

On paper, Hamas planned a multi-pronged blitzkrieg. The assault across the Gaza Strip would be followed by rocket attacks by the Hezbollah from southern Lebanon, a similar onslaught by the Houthis from Yemen and sustained pressure on the Go­lan Heights by Assad’s Baathist regime. To compound its woes, it was believed that the Arabs living on the West Bank of the River Jordan, the region Israelis refer to as Judea and Samaria, not to mention the Arabs in Israel and in East Jerusalem, would rise in revolt to trigger a third Intifada. Finally, as all the pieces of the jigsaw fell into place, Iran would deliver the final blow with an unrelenting wave of missile attacks that would, hopefully, pierce the Iron Dome over cities like Tel Aviv.

There was another non-military facet of the diabolical plan to decimate Israel. On the very day that Hamas was mowing down Israeli civilians and forcing hostages into the elaborate network of tunnels in Gaza, the Islamists in conjunction with the global fraternity of discredited leftists, mounted a sustained attack to corner Israel diplomatically. The monster demonstration across all European cities and the spirited protests on American campuses had two objectives. First, they were planned to divert attention from the brutal terrorist attacks on Jews. Second, by positing Israel as the real criminal and Palestinians as helpless victims, the Hamas propagandists hoped to bring international pressure on Israel to soften its inevitable military retaliation on Gaza.

The plan didn’t succeed for two reasons. First, because Israeli society put aside its internal differences and opted to respond unitedly to the challenge thrown by Hamas. Second, the leader­ship provided by “Bibi” Netanyahu has proved decisive. This is not to say that there has been no opposition to his leadership of the country at such a crucial juncture. A section of the old estab­lishment, some IDF functionaries and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant appear to have had different ideas about how the war should be conducted. However, following Gallant’s dismissal by Bibi on November 6, 2024, the public spat over war aims ap­pear to have subsided somewhat. It may well have been a very different story, not only for the Netanyahu government but for Israel as a whole, had the US presidential election resulted in a victory for the Democrats.

The war aims of Israel were stated to be, first, securing the release of all Israelis in Hamas captivity and, second, ensuring the total elimination of Hamas as a military and political force from Gaza. Netanyahu’s distinctive contribution to the war lay in extending the scope of the war to target both Hamas and all the other proxies of Iran that had directed their fire at Israel. During the war, Israel’s prime minister did not shirk from targeting the source of Hamas’ strength: Iran. This was something that Israel had earlier hesitated from doing, in the belief that an Israel-Iran conflict would engulf the whole of West Asia and become impos­sible for Jerusalem to control on its own.

There is no doubt that in the course of the past 500 days of war, the political standing of Netanyahu has risen dramatically. Many of those who were bitterly opposed to him prior to October 7 now concede that as a war leader he is unrivalled in Israel. At the same time, there is a perception among the grudging admirers of the prime minister that his inclination is to persist with the war until he can achieve total victory which they feel is impossible.

IN THE HEART of Tel Aviv is a public square that has been dubbed Hostage Square. In this public space, people of various political persuasion— mainly those are on the left of the political spec­trum—have set up tents publicising the continuing incarceration of the hostages. The place is dotted with photographs of the hostages and each evening there are small musical concerts and prayer meetings. At the head of the square is an electronic timer that counts, to the nearest minute, the time the unfortunate Israeli citi­zens have spent in Hamas captivity. The whole place is run by noble-minded and public-spirited, middle-aged men and women who appear to be driven by humani­tarian concerns rather than hatred towards the captors.

Although partisan politics is carefully kept out of public view, it is quite apparent that overall mood of the activists who have kept vigil month after month is fiercely anti-Netanyahu. There is a peace constitu­ency in Israel which, while electorally insignificant, re­ceives disproportionate global attention. Whether it is through the columns of the English-language Haaretz or in rarefied events such as the Jaipur Literature Festi­val, the Israel dissenters have spread a message that by persisting with a fierce, disproportionate military response—not to mention the targeting of the Hamas leadership—Netanyahu has endangered the lives of the hostages, and converted them into dispensable pawns in a larger chess game. At the burnt-out site of a home in the Nir Oz kibbutz, there is a large handwritten poster in Hebrew that says: “Bibi you have blood on your hands.”

The emotional trauma of those whose loved ones are believed to be in Hamas captivity—there is no surety as to whether they are alive or dead—is understandable. However, the mindset that believes Israel must deal with the Palestinians with exceptional generosity and understanding, no longer finds favour within the Jewish community. At a seminar I attended in Tel Aviv, a dis­tinguished retired diplomat was laughed at for suggesting that Hamas didn’t represent the people of Gaza. Indeed, it would be difficult to find support for any proposal that involved handing over the Gaza Strip to representatives of the Mahmoud Abbas-led Palestinian Authority. From all accounts, they appear to have been overtaken by the radical Islamism that has overwhelmed not only Gaza but, increasingly, the entire West Bank.

The blame for this radicalisation is pinned on the Oslo Accord of 1995 which accorded a measure of self-government to the Palestin­ian Authority in Gaza and the West Bank. According to Arik Agassi of IMPACT, an organisation that is monitoring the school curricu­lum in Islamic countries, the textbooks used in schools under the Palestinian Authority contain hateful anti-Jewish propaganda and are the “blueprints for radicalisation”. Blame is particularly attached to the internationally funded United Nations Refugee Welfare Association (UNRWA) that is said to bankroll the opera­tions of Hamas. According to details provided by Israel’s Ministry of Defense, 2,440 of the 12,000 UNRWA staff in Gaza are active Hamas members. These include 400 staff who are active military wing members. Additionally, over 10 per cent of those employed by UNRWA’s education system, including school principals and their deputies, are members of either Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Some 19 UNRWA staff have also been identified as participants in the October 7 attacks on Israeli civilians.

In recent months, Israel has withdrawn its recognition of UNRWA, and the Trump administration has ceased funding it. But the damage caused by the global indulgence of Islamic radi­calism and anti-Semitism is deep and, occasionally, extremely provocative. This in turn often triggers extreme reactions from within the Jewish community.

Policy analysts in Israel repeatedly stress the importance of ‘de-radicalisation’ among Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza. They often take inspiration from the profound curriculum changes that have been undertaken under the reformist MBS regime in Saudi Arabia.

There is only one, perhaps insurmountable problem. Wher­ever Islamist propaganda in the schools and institutions of higher learning has been countered, it is because of changes imposed from above. This isn’t always easy given the deep penetration of Islamism on the Arab Street. While Saudi Arabia has managed to steer radical impulses out of the curriculum, this has, for example, not been pos­sible in Egypt, a country with which Israel has the longest running peace treaty. Since Egypt was in control of Gaza till the beginning of this century, the voices of moderation from Cairo would have had some impact in the strip adjoining Sinai. Unfortunately, while the governance of Egypt has been in the hands of those wedded to secular pan-Arabism of the Nasser variety, they followed a policy of detachment and non-interference from anything to do with religion, except when it affected the security of the regime. Thus, while the Muslim Brotherhood (one of whose offshoots is Hamas) has traditionally been non-kosher, the virulent anti-Semitism of the Islamists was allowed to be disseminated quite undisturbed.

It therefore follows that any scheme for the de-radicalisation of the areas under the Palestinian Authority cannot proceed with­out the active cooperation of the local administration. How is this going to be possible under either a Fatah or Hamas dispensation? For Israel, there is just no guarantee of enduring peace under a two-state settlement.

What is indeed remarkable is how little Arab opinion has changed in its relation to Israel since 1948. When the parti­tion of Palestine was approved in the UN in 1948, the Arab states rejected the plan outright. The rejectionists included Jordan that would have emerged as the big­gest beneficiary. Unfortunately for the Arab states, including Egypt, Syria, Jordan and, at a pinch, Lebanon, the bid to overwhelm the fledgling Jewish state militarily came a cropper. Subsequently, Nasser tried again in 1967 and a combination of public opinion and ideological posturing pressured Jordan and Syria into joining the misadventure. The out­come of the Six-Day War was an unqualified Israeli victory, including the Jewish recovery of East Jerusalem and its takeover of the Golan Heights from Syria.

Since then, Israel has gradually returned its gains. Sinai has reverted to Egypt. But Cairo washed its hands off the Gaza Strip. Likewise, Jordan, which should never have entered the war in the first place, gave up the West Bank and longed for Jerusalem that Israel said it would never return. Syria, too, never got back the Golan Heights. Simultaneously, while the Arab states were smarting from their military humiliation, Israel saw the growth of a triumphalist Zionism that eyed the entire Biblical lands, particularly Judea and Samaria, known to others as the West Bank. This area, which was under the control of the Hashemite kingdom until 1967, is at the epicentre of the Jewish homeland.

The ongoing story of the Jewish settlers who created settle­ments in the Sinai and have subsequently proceeded to restore Jewish sovereignty over patches of territory nominally under the Palestinian Authority is fascinating. The tussle between an ideological Zionism centred on the self-determination of Jews and a geographical Zionism that laid claim to the traditional Jew­ish homeland has been recounted in great detail by Gadi Taub in The Settlers: And the Struggle over the Meaning of Zionism. Although published 15 years ago, when the settlers were a fringe group, the debates remain relevant today.

At the turn of the century when the ‘Land for Peace’ slogan was in vogue, the two-state solution that conceded a Palestinian state in the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as the capital (with joint sovereignty over the sacred sites) was favoured by enlight­ened Israelis. With the approval of the government in Israel, US President Bill Clinton offered it to Yasser Arafat at Camp David and was bewildered when the PLO leader turned it down. It was the biggest missed opportunity for the Palestinians and came to nought because Arafat was unsure whether he could sell the deal to his followers.

For decades, country after country has tried to thrust a two-state solution down the throat of Israel. This has included India which after some four decades of blind opposition to the exis­tence of Israel, finally embraced it in 1992, adding its support to a two-state solution by way of placating Muslim sceptics. The biggest problem with this attempt to create a Palestinian state out of the West Bank is that it has never been accepted by any Palestinian entity. Whether it is Arafat or Yahya Sinwar, a Palestinian state has always been prefaced by the disappearance of Israel from the world map.

What is striking about post-October 7 Is­rael is that the offer of a Palestinian state has, in effect, been withdrawn. There was a time when plans for the Jewish resettlement (if not outright annexation) of Judea and Samaria had the blessings of dreamers in the Likud Party and fringe group on the extreme right of the political spectrum. Today, with the focus on making Israel permanently safe and abjuring a war every decade against the same adversary, the two-state solution has become a non-starter in Israel. The ideological centre of gravity has shifted significantly to the right, and the Likud has reclaimed its inheritance.

However, at the heart of the Zionist project there was always a tussle between the impera­tives of democracy and the maintenance of a Jewish majority in Israel. Any moves towards the territorial expansion of Israel will reopen this unresolved debate.

It is in this context and amid the yearning for a border security that doesn’t involve a war every decade that President Trump’s Gaza plan needs to be viewed. Maybe it is a bargaining ploy, aimed at forcing the likes of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt into persuading the Palestinian leadership to temper its militancy. With Trump it is difficult to be certain about anything, not least the charming idea of floating on the Dead Sea and then settling down to a swim at a beach in Gaza-on-the-Med.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to be certain if popular certitudes turn out to be self-fulfilling prophecies. One thing is, however, very clear: most Israelis seem to think that the ceasefire is unlikely to last beyond March.

The deal involving the swapping of a handful of Israeli hos­tages for nearly a thousand Palestinian prisoners, some serving life sentences for murderous offences, hasn’t been popular in Israel. There has been an outpouring of emotion over the return of those who have managed to survive the ordeal of captivity in the tunnels, but this has been tempered by the understated fury at giving Hamas its moments of triumphalism. Just as Hamas is staging freedom rallies amid the devastation of Gaza, Israel is sharpening its knives awaiting the moment of revenge.

In my view, the triumphalism of Hamas is completely unwar­ranted. It chose to cock a snook at President Trump who had asked for the release of all hostages by midday of February 15. Hamas chose to hide under the flowing robes of the Saudis, Emiratis and Egyptians and stick to the original schedule. Netanyahu, who had endorsed Trump’s demand, had to grin and bear it. However, it is only a matter of time before he gets his own back.

The objective situation has never been more favourable to Israel.

First, despite its show of bravado, the military apparatus push­ing the Hamas agenda has been decimated. The organisation has lost its top leadership to targeted Israeli attacks. The civilian popu­lation is nominally supportive, but another bout of deprivation and devastation may see the tragedy unfold in unexpected ways.

Second, Operation Iron Wall in Samaria and similar search-and-destroy operations targeting terrorist hideouts in Israel’s immediate hinterland have one clear objective: ensuring that Hamas and Hezbollah are deprived of all supporting fire.

Third, while Israel’s foreign minister has alerted the world to Hezbollah cosying up to Turkey, the emerging power after the collapse of Assad’s Syria, it is by no means certain that there will be quick regroupment of the anti-Israel forces in the region. The new regime in Damascus may well have its heart in the Hezbollah, but it doesn’t want to exacerbate a conflict with Israel. It neither has the military capacity nor the political resources to endure an­other round of lightning strikes by Israel, not to mention the loss of yet more territory around Mount Hermon. Both Syria and the Hezbollah are Jerusalem’s formidable adversaries, but they need time to regroup.

Fourth, Iran has consistently underplayed the effects of the three waves of air attacks on its military targets on October 26, 2024. Yet, it is significant that since that devastating blow which, more than anything else, punctured the astonishing arrogance of the Islamic Republic, Iran has been consistently minding its own business. Of course, this seeming passivity has also been interpreted to mean that Tehran is quietly licking its wounds and planning something truly big, on a nuclear scale. What Israel’s intelligence makes of the state of the regime in Iran is significant. However, it will become truly relevant if that assessment matches that of the US.

Finally, for Israel, the biggest blessing has been the election of Trump. Never in recent history has Jerusalem experienced a presi­dency that is made up of just so many people whose commitment to Israel is an article of ideological faith. Unless the Arab states spring a surprise—such as Egypt undertaking a misadventure across Sinai—and derail everything, what we are witnessing is America establishing its overlordship in the Middle East. This may yield benefits for Israel in the short run, but being depen­dant on the vagaries of an administration with a life span of just four years is hazardous. Completing the unfinished agenda of the Abraham Accords is a matter of utmost urgency.

As I see it, Israel must first prevail in its very fight for survival. Having negotiated that formidable challenge, it must settle an outstanding existential question. Is it an outpost of the West as some would have us believe? Alternatively, has Jewish civilisa­tion come home to its eastern roots? On the resolution of this question will depend how, as the most dynamic power in the Middle East, Israel negotiates the way forward. Unending wars can steel a people, but the national mission must be more fulfill­ing than demolishing medieval bigotry.

Benjamin NetanyahuDonald TrumpIranIsrael-Palestine conflictIsraeli hostagesIsraeli soldierWar and Memory