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What Israel Should Learn from Two Years of War

(New York Times) Bret Stephens - After two years of war in Gaza, here are some lessons: Believe people when they tell you who they are. Hamas declared in its founding covenant its intention to slaughter Jews, yet Israel continued to tolerate Hamas out of reluctance to topple the group. Successive rounds of fighting between Hamas and Israel never altered Israel's policy of containment toward Gaza. Technologies like the Iron Dome gave Israel a false sense of security. Yet when Oct. 7 came, Israel's high-tech marvels in signals intelligence, missile interceptors, smart fences and underground barriers proved useless against Hamas's low-tech paragliders and bulldozers. It is ironic that anti-Israel activists from Montreal to Melbourne, speaking European languages and living on land that was often stolen from the original inhabitants, have alighted on Hebrew-speaking Israel as the epitome of settler-colonialism. In fact, Zionism is among the oldest anticolonial movements in history, featuring struggles against overlords from Babylon, Greece, Rome, Istanbul and, until 1948, London. Antisemitism suffuses anti-Zionism, and anti-Zionism tends to produce antisemitism. After a British man named Jihad al-Shamie killed two people on Yom Kippur at a Manchester synagogue last week, the police said they were "working to understand the motivation behind the attack." Really. The attack illustrates how the distinction between "Jew" and "Zionist" is either invisible or pretextual to those who mean one or the other harm. Palestinian suffering is undeniable. Hamas is its principal author. Those chanting "ceasefire now" at anti-Israel rallies neglect to mention that there was a ceasefire before Oct. 7, 2023, which Hamas violated in the most grotesque way possible. Why did so many so-called peace protesters, who made incessant demands of Israel, never make any demands of Hamas? For Jews, within or outside of Israel, the war should also be a warning. After more than 3,000 years of history, the Jewish condition remains precarious. While friends and allies are nice, something else hasn't changed: We are alone. Survival means learning to live with it.
2025-10-09 00:00:00
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