(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- As missiles filled the dawn skies of southern Israel that Saturday and thousands of armed Palestinians cut through the border fence on a mission of murder and abduction, a prerecorded speech played over regional airwaves. This human flood from Gaza, the speaker said, was the launch of a revolution that required all of Hamas’ Muslim allies to join “in Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, Iraq and Syria.” History, he said, is opening “its clearest, most noble and brightest pages.”
The speaker, Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif, is dead, killed in an Israeli airstrike. His co-conspirator, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, hasn’t been heard from in weeks and may be injured or dead as well. Much of their coastal strip has been ground to rubble in a punishing war, many of the Palestinians living there relegated to refugee tents, haunted by disease and hunger. The death toll is more than 41,000, according to Hamas authorities.
It took longer than Hamas leaders expected, but the multifront war they aimed to instigate is underway. Israeli troops are battling Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon while its warplanes attack missile-firing militias in Syria and Yemen. After Iran launched some 200 ballistic missiles on Israel on Oct. 1, the two nations are engaged in what both had carefully avoided for decades: direct armed confrontation.
A year is nothing in history. But some events don’t require time to grasp their significance. The Hamas Oct. 7 attack is such a development, one of the most effective acts of political violence in decades. It shattered Israel’s national spirit and reshaped its priorities at a time when its wealth and influence were rising rapidly. It lit a fire under Palestinian collective yearning, returning the issue to international prominence after years of dormancy. And it crystallized two shifts, one global, the other regional, lurking beneath the geopolitical surface: a tightening alliance among Iran, Russia and China and the power of Iran’s well-armed proxy militias, which dominate, or nearly so, the failing states of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
Israel and its supporters focused on the savagery of the October attack—parents shot dead in front of children, women sexually abused, babies and grandmothers taken hostage—as evidence of the moral bankruptcy of its perpetrators. Much of the world regarded it as an act of desperation resulting from years of Israeli oppression. Anti-Israel rallies sprang up in cities across the globe. Palestinians who’d rejected Hamas in favor of the more mainstream Fatah party hailed the newfound focus on their cause.
“Our issue is on the table again everywhere in the world,” says Samir Hulileh, a leading Palestinian investor and chair of the stock exchange in the West Bank city of Ramallah. “The losses in Gaza and the West Bank have been tremendous, but we have a different level of fight for our legitimacy vis-à-vis Israel.”
Israel argues that Oct. 7 revealed an existential challenge: it has to preemptively destroy those on its borders who arm themselves and vow jihad. If it shows resolve and strength, its enemies will understand their own limits. The impact of such a policy remains unclear. Militia leaders are indeed being killed and their infrastructure dismantled. Their ability to strike back is greatly reduced. But feelings of rage and humiliation are growing. In next-door Jordan, Islamist groups are on the march politically and threatening the pro-Western regime of King Abdullah II. Iran appears to be playing a role there. A similar dynamic is at work in Sudan.
In Israel itself, the impact of Oct. 7 is still too big to comprehend. The assault cramped the nation’s habitable land, driving tens of thousands from the north and south to temporary quarters in the center of the country, to escape missiles and the threat of invasion. It halted Israel’s growing alliance with Sunni Arab kingdoms, notably Saudi Arabia, turning the Jewish state into something of a pariah until it shows it’s willing to embrace the idea of a Palestinian state as its neighbor. Israel’s credit rating has been knocked down two notches. The famed high-tech industry of the so-called startup nation is largely stalled. The government budget is ballooning to cover what seems like an endless state of war for a society built increasingly around its military. Few Israelis doubt the justice of their fight, but many are applying for a second passport from another country as an insurance policy.
Listen to Ben Caspit, a veteran commentator in the newspaper Maariv: “We woke up on the morning of October 7 in a dependable, undefeated country. We went to sleep (but didn’t sleep) that night in a beaten, dumbfounded, defeated country. Until that day, an exclamation mark flew alongside the name ‘Israel.’ It suddenly turned into a question mark.”
The volatile brew of vulnerability and defiance of Oct. 7 has overtaken Israeli popular culture. The National Library of Israel says 169 books on the subject—studies, testimonies, poetry, photos, prayer—have already been published. Songwriters who once focused on sexy nightlife are now embracing heroic soldiers: the high-tech bigshot in reserve duty as a sniper, the friendly bus driver commanding an artillery battery. The sites of the massacres in the south, the invaded communities and the location of a music festival where hundreds were gunned down, are today shrines of collective mourning. Busloads of Israelis and foreign visitors arrive daily to pay their respects.
The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, home to avant-garde collagists and loquacious foreign films, has turned its entire outdoor courtyard into Hostage Square, a magnet for populist grief. A big electronic clock records how many days and minutes those abducted have been in Gaza. Communities destroyed by the attack sell commemorative goods. A long table set for Sabbath dinner with empty chairs for the hostages stands near a 25-meter mock Hamas tunnel where visitors can briefly feel the dimly lit claustrophobia faced by those in captivity. “A time of crisis forces you to redefine what a museum should be,” says its director, Tania Coen-Uzzielli.
The nation’s politics have been scrambled. Before the attack, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, indicted for bribery and fraud, faced weekly rallies of hundreds of thousands against his government’s effort to weaken the judiciary. Within days, a consensus formed that he couldn’t survive Oct. 7. Mr. Security, as he had long billed himself, had not only invited attack by dividing the nation but also presided over the worst security breach since 1973, when Syria and Egypt launched a surprise pincer assault that nearly defeated Israel in that Middle East war. Netanyahu, it was widely predicted, would end up like then-Premier Golda Meir, resigning or being forced out in ignominy.
But Netanyahu, 74, also known as the Magician for his political skills, quickly made clear that he and Golda had little in common. In his view, says former national security adviser Giora Eiland, the appropriate parallel is US President Franklin D. Roosevelt who missed alerts about Japanese aggression and endured the catastrophic 1941 Pearl Harbor assault on his watch. Instead of being blamed for that failure, he harnessed American industry and patriotic fervor into a war machine that helped the Allies defeat the Nazis and the Japanese, ushering in a decades-long Pax Americana.
The wars in Gaza and Lebanon have built a greater sense of unity in Israel as well. The further away from Oct. 7, the less Israelis blame Netanyahu, especially after intelligence and military triumphs in Lebanon during two weeks in September seemed to put the vaunted Hezbollah militia at Israel’s mercy, its communications devices exploding in commanders’ pockets, its adored shadowy leader assassinated, its long-range missile launchers destroyed. Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington and a Netanyahu critic, takes the World War II analogy a step further, declaring the killing of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah a “Midway moment” for Israel—a reference to the US naval victory in the Pacific six months after Pearl Harbor, a turning point in the war. “Don’t ask us to stop,” Oren says as Israel fights on several fronts.
For the moment, the Biden administration isn’t. And Netanyahu, who recently increased his ruling majority, looks likely to stay prime minister until the next election, scheduled in two years. Whoever wins next month’s US vote will have to work closely with him despite ongoing battles in Lebanon and his government’s rejection of Palestinian statehood. From a US strategic perspective, the fight with Iran will take precedence over Palestinian and Lebanese humanitarian tolls. The US has already increased its military presence in the Middle East to support Israel. Some in the country—and in the US—believe this is the moment to persuade the US to join Israel to achieve an unequivocal victory against Iran and its allies.
Those caught in the fight will continue to suffer. Among them is Rewa Shallah, a 23-year-old from Gaza City who gave birth to her third daughter, Bayan, on Oct. 7. She did so in the hospital, but as soon as she got home, they were on the move south to escape the combat. They've spent the past year in an overcrowded school in central Gaza. The baby turns 1 today. “Nothing is available and I cry for Bayan for not being able to care for her the same way I did for her sisters,” Shallah says. “Some people say Hamas did something good, but this has backfired on us.”
George, a 50-year-old owner of a men’s clothing store in the occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem, is also feeling the squeeze. The Palestinian area is seething as some 200,000 workers have been barred from entering Israel for the past year, military checkpoints proliferate and radical Jewish settlers burn cars and shops with impunity, because far-right government ministers allied with Netanyahu hold sway over West Bank affairs. George asked that his family name not be printed to avoid harassment from the authorities. Visit his shop any afternoon in the Almadbasa section of Bethlehem, where villagers hawk produce from street carts, and you’ll find him glued to the TV news. With business down 70%, he’s got little else to do. “This is different from any time we have ever been through,” he says. “It’s a pressure cooker and, at some point, it is going to explode.”
Sometimes it does. On Oct. 1, minutes before the Iranian missile attack on Israel that drove the entire country into bomb shelters and prompted a vow of harsh reprisal, two Palestinians from Hebron, 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) from George’s shop, sneaked into Israel armed with rifles and knives and attacked a crowd in the Jaffa neighborhood of Tel Aviv. Seven were killed. Most of Iran’s missiles were shot down by Israel’s Arrow air defense system, with only a single victim—a Gazan working in the West Bank city of Jericho. So just moments before one of the most sophisticated technological battles in the history of war—the Arrow actually takes down the missiles so high up it is considered space warfare—the biggest civilian toll all year was caused by two men wielding rifles and knives. And thus the Holy Land’s unending intimate and human battle over territory and legitimacy grinds on. —With Fares Alghoul and Fadwa Hodali
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