The Reckoning

On April 22, 1979, four Palestinian terrorists set out from southern Lebanon on a rubber dinghy and landed on the Israeli coast, near the northern town of Nahariya. They proceeded to an apartment building, breaking through the front door of the Haran family. Inside, they seized Danny Haran and his 4-year-old daughter, Einat. Meanwhile Danny’s wife, Smadar, hid in the attic with her 2-year-old daughter, Yael.

The terrorists took their two hostages to the beach, where they shot Danny and smashed Einat’s skull against a rock. Back in the attic, Smadar, attempting to quiet Yael, accidentally smothered her to death.

Of all the Palestinian terror attacks of the era, none had as great an impact on the generation of Israelis that came of age around the 1973 Yom Kippur War as the destruction of the Haran family. The fate of the Harans hit so hard in part because the ultimate Israeli nightmare is helplessness. Zionism promised to empower the Jews; the Haran family’s fate belonged to Eastern Europe, not the Jewish state.

This week, the Jewish state became Smadar Haran.

Like so many other Israelis, I have forced myself to watch the unwatchable clips, trying to understand the new reality in which we find ourselves. The dead bodies paraded through the streets of Gaza while crowds defile them and cheer; the elderly woman forced to make a V sign while holding a gun, surrounded by laughing terrorists; the boy placed in a circle of Palestinian children, who mock and abuse him; the child captives.

The dimensions of our losses are incomprehensible. The latest army prediction is that the final death toll will be about 1,000—this from a population of 9 million. The suicide bombings of the Second Intifada, in the early 2000s, killed that many, but over four years, not in a single day. And the Israel Defense Forces’ ground offensive inside Gaza hasn’t even begun.

No less horrifying to Israelis was the unbearable ease with which the murderers went from house to house, kidnapping and slaughtering. Over and over, we ask one another the questions that have no answers: Why did it take the IDF a full day to reach those communities? Where were the police? Why did the desperate calls for help go unanswered?

The massacre carried out by Hamas has been compared to 9/11, but like most analogies applied to Israel’s situation, it fails to describe the reality. No American seriously thought that the very existence of the United States was endangered by the fall of the Twin Towers. But the defeat inflicted by Israel’s least formidable opponents has profound strategic implications, emboldening other enemies on its borders. In Israel, no strategic depth separates the home front from genocidal threats.

Scarcely less frightening than the IDF’s failure to protect Israeli citizens at their most dire moment is that our leadership has effectively collapsed. Addressing the nation on Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered little more than bluster and clichés, without inspiration. No Israeli cabinet minister has visited the wounded in hospitals, although that is standard procedure during times of crisis. The desperate families of the missing have pleaded with the government to meet with them, so far to no avail.

Clearly our leaders are afraid to face an outraged public. A cartoon in the newspaper Haaretz showed the members of the cabinet cowering under a table.

Israel’s most divisive government is presiding over one of the most sensitive moments in our history, when we desperately need leaders we can trust. But not only is this government the most politically extreme in our history; it is also the least qualified to decide matters of life and death. Collectively, the heads of the coalition have less military experience by far than the leaders of any previous government. Much of the country had lost faith in the government’s competence long before this week’s catastrophe. Now that judgment has been frighteningly confirmed.

Israelis aren’t waiting for our leaders to mobilize and unite and inspire us; we are mobilizing ourselves. The nation’s most horrific moment is also becoming one of its most stirring chapters. On their own initiative, civilians drove down to the besieged towns and kibbutzim and rescued relatives and friends. Residents in the south went out into the streets with pistols and fought bands of terrorists armed with RPGs.

Overnight, Hamas has transformed Israel from a society that was tearing itself apart to an unprecedented extent into a society united as it has rarely been. The heads of the protest movement—which opposes the right-wing government’s proposed judicial reforms—have called on reservists to fulfill their duty, and thousands of reservists who had previously declared that they would not serve Netanyahu’s dictatorship-in-the-making are showing up to their units. Brothers in Arms, the organization of reservists who’d refused to serve, is arranging transportation to army collection points, along with distribution of food and clothing to Israeli communities along the Gaza border—taking the place of an AWOL government. Until the massacre, there was growing fear of a mass emigration of liberal Israelis. Now flights are landing in Ben Gurion Airport filled with young Israelis returning to join their reserve units.

Militarily, the timing of the massacre was impeccable, but for Hamas, it will prove to be a disaster. Perhaps if it had waited before launching the most deadly terror attack in our history, allowing Israeli society to continue to be torn apart by the Netanyahu government, the bitterness would have penetrated too deeply for us to cohere again.

But now the old Israel is back.

What we realized about ourselves on the morning after the massacre is that we had not yet reached the point of no return. We still have it in us to pull together. What our enemies have never understood is that when they try to break us with some unimagined horror, we become more determined. This nightmarish moment may well save the Jewish state.

Israel faces two very different reckonings. The first is with our enemies. Until now, Netanyahu and his right-wing allies viewed Hamas as a kind of strategic asset: So long as it was in power in Gaza, a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was impossible. For that reason, in addition to effectively bribing Hamas to refrain from attacking Israel, Netanyahu allowed massive infusions of cash from Qatar to prop up the Hamas government.

But much of the Israeli public is now demanding that Hamas be toppled. The immediate need to end its rule over Gaza has surpassed the question of what will follow. The devil we know is no longer preferable to uncertainty. Perhaps the Palestinian Authority will return to govern in Gaza; perhaps the Saudis and the Gulf States will invest in its rehabilitation. Perhaps it will become a territory ruled by rival gangs, like Somalia. Israelis are willing to take our chances.

Besides Netanyahu’s delusion that Hamas could be politically useful, successive Israeli governments had other reasons to stop short of removing Hamas. The price of such a military conflict, in the loss of both Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians, would be horrific. And now all-out war with Hamas would mean an almost certain death sentence for the 150 Israeli hostages it has seized in its attacks.

Israel itself, though, has been taken hostage; to empty out the prisons of Hamas terrorists in exchange for the return of the hostages would only compound the enormity of our defeat. Despite our anguished concern for the fate of our hostages, we have no choice. Hamas has made capitulation impossible.

Yair Golan, a former deputy commander of the IDF and one of the most vociferous critics of the settlement movement, has said that we must win this war and then seek a political solution. The 61-year-old left-wing activist, who put on his old uniform and personally rescued some of the hostages, knows better than most what “winning” will mean in the crowded urban spaces of Gaza, where terrorists are embedded in the civilian population. For now, Hamas has succeeded in erasing the difference between Israel’s political left and right.

The Netanyahu government has so far declared its intention to destroy only the military capabilities of Hamas, apparently still reluctant to break with the old policy of leaving in place the group’s political leadership. But that leadership is, in practice, indistinguishable from the organization’s military wing. If a national-unity government emerges in the coming days in Israel, it may well signal a decision to pay the horrific price of all-out war.

Toppling Hamas could lead Israel into a multifront war, with Hezbollah firing tens of thousands of missiles and rockets at cities and towns. It could bring the most devastating conflict that Israel has experienced since its War of Independence in 1948. But that war might not be avoidable. In fact, the army has been training for years in preparation for a showdown with Hezbollah, which publicly avows its intention to invade northern Israel and seize several villages. The twist is that no one imagined that the opening phase of that war would begin in southern Israel—and with an invasion of two dozen communities.

For now, Israel is enjoying a level of global support we haven’t experienced for many years. As gratifying as it is to see the facades of parliaments and other public buildings lit with images of the Israeli flag, we know that much of that support will disappear as civilian casualties in Gaza—and perhaps in Lebanon—mount. Israelis will tell you: We don’t need the world’s sympathy only when the violated bodies of our family and friends are being displayed to cheering mobs in Gaza. We need that sympathy most when we attack those who have carried out these atrocities. If you can’t distinguish between an army that tries to avoid civilian casualties and a terrorist group that seeks to inflict them, then spare us the condolences.

Israel’s critics cite the siege of Gaza as an explanation for Palestinian desperation. Yet in 2005, Israel dismantled all of its settlements in Gaza and withdrew to the internationally recognized border. Where might we be today if, instead of immediately launching rockets on Israeli neighborhoods across that border, the Palestinian national movement had attempted to create a different dynamic in the first territory it truly controlled?

Israel’s critics are right to link the slaughter carried out by Hamas with the occupation of the West Bank, but not in the way they suppose. The atrocities have provided Israelis with a visceral reminder of why so many dread the prospect of a full withdrawal from the West Bank, risking the creation of another Gaza minutes from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. To say that the occupation causes terrorism misses the larger point: Terrorism has all along reinforced the occupation, convincing Israelis like me who believe that a two-state solution is essential to also fear that a two-state solution is impossible.

Israel is hardly blameless. Understandably but disastrously, many Israelis have conflated security fears, which justify a military presence in the West Bank, with historical and religious longings for the biblical land we call Judea and Samaria. Those longings are the basis for the settlement enterprise, whose political goal is to preclude any solution to the Palestinian tragedy. And in recent months we have seen an outrageous rise in settler violence against innocent Palestinians. Even as we protect ourselves from Hamas, we need to oppose those among us who would emulate Hamas.

Israel’s second reckoning, which must await the end of the war, will be with Benjamin Netanyahu. Following the Yom Kippur War, a lone reservist named Motti Ashkenazi began a hunger strike outside the office of Prime Minister Golda Meir, demanding that she take responsibility for the joint Egyptian-Syrian surprise attack and resign. The Agranat Commission, a government-appointed inquiry headed by Israeli Supreme Court Chief Justice Shimon Agranat, focused on the failures of the military leadership and avoided blaming the politicians. But an enraged public rallied around Ashkenazi and, six months after the war, the prime minister resigned.

If anything, the rage many Israelis feel today toward Netanyahu is far greater. By tearing apart the country in his attempt to weaken the courts, he knowingly undermined Israeli deterrence. He was repeatedly warned by the IDF of the likely consequences of his judicial revolution, in terms of both the IDF’s readiness for war and the willingness of Israel’s enemies to test its weakness. Netanyahu ignored the warnings, even refusing at one point to meet with the IDF chief, Herzi Halevi.

Halevi will need to answer hard questions, including about the IDF’s stunning intelligence failures and its initially disastrous performance in dealing with the terrorist invasion. Perhaps the most crucial of those questions is who gave the order to transfer the division on the Gaza border to the West Bank, to protect settlers against terror attacks—a decision that the army must own but that certainly originated with the government.

Netanyahu will stay true to form and try to deflect the blame onto others, beginning with the army but also including the anti-government demonstrators who thwarted his antidemocratic revolution. This time, though, his evasive tactics won’t work. Netanyahu has presided over the most devastating day in Israeli history, the inevitable culmination of the disaster he has inflicted over the past year on his own people.