It can be hard to remember, after 365 days of devastating war in the Middle East and in our broken discourse around it, that most of the civilized world responded with proper horror and outrage at the barbaric attacks of Oct. 7. That the relative handful who openly celebrated were generally condemned.
Yet many American Jewish leaders responded not with gratitude for those multitudes who supported Israel’s right to defend itself, but by criticizing the minority who remained silent and magnifying the few who cheered. How many of those same leaders, 12 months on, cheered themselves when Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency blew up thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies in Lebanon, killing and injuring not just the Hezbollah operatives carrying them but the civilians around them in the market or at a funeral?
Too many.
Too many people have responded to Oct. 7 and its aftermath by retreating to familiar corners where their preconceptions are never challenged. Too many people have spent this year of grief and rage shouting past each other rather than creating space to pose tough questions — and listen to the answers. Too many have treated difficult discussions as dangerous rather than sit in the discomfort of complexity.
While we cannot control what happens to us, our responses do affect what might happen next. That’s why the long view is so crucial.
Did you take off your Jewish star after Oct. 7 or put a sign in your lawn? Did that sign say “I stand with Israel” or “United against antisemitism”?
When you overheard people questioning whether Hamas committed sexual violence, did you speak up? What about when you heard people questioning the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza?
How have you allocated your tzedakah? Where are you getting your news about the war? What are you telling your children about it?
Each of these responses is a choice. We should make them with curiosity and with care.
Israel was right to respond with overwhelming force in Gaza after the brutal, dehumanizing assault of Oct. 7. But the response that was appropriate last October is not appropriate now, and has not been appropriate for many months. Israel’s response today should be guided by a single-minded focus: Bring home the hostages. That means ending the fighting in Gaza and withdrawing Israeli forces from the territory, including the Philadelphi corridor along its border with Egypt. Washington and the world, then, must respond by preventing Hamas from reviving its terror activities and oppressive reign.
Israel was also right to respond last month to a year of unceasing rocket fire on its northern communities by pulverizing Hezbollah strongholds and assassinating the terror group’s heinous leader, Hassan Nasrallah. But it would be a mistake to reoccupy southern Lebanon or otherwise expand that front now.
And Israel was, crucially, right in April to respond to the unprecedented direct attack from Iran with only limited, targeted, symbolic strikes. It must similarly show restraint again in responding to the barrage of ballistic missiles Tehran sent last week rather than spark all-out war.
That attack, terrifying as it was, revealed critical realities about Israel’s strengths and weaknesses. For even as Israeli and U.S. defense systems thwarted 99% of Iran’s 200 missiles, two Palestinian gunmen killed seven Israeli civilians at a light rail station in the center of Tel Aviv.
The existential threat to Israel’s survival is not the mullahs of Iran or their proxies. It’s the Palestinian conflict. And unfair as it may be, that conflict is Israel’s to solve because her enemies, though suffering disproportionately from it, are led by heartless dictators who benefit from its continuation. | 