The Israeli society that emerged from Hamas’s frightful Simḥat Torah attack is different from what it was before. Some major shifts have occurred in the nation’s collective psyche.
The horrors inflicted by Hamas have shattered all illusions of Israel as a “normal” country (like Sweden as the Yesh Atid party likes to say) and of Hamas as a manageable foe. It sparked intense feelings of vulnerability and anger throughout Israel and the Jewish Diaspora. Hamas has shown itself capable of terrorizing Israelis in our towns and homes while our security forces appeared completely helpless to intervene.
One obvious change that needs to be acknowledged is that Israelis can no longer believe in the promises of our elites that Israel can be a “normal” country. We can’t. We’re not a “normal” people and we don’t exist in a “normal” situation.
Another major shift is the public’s faith in our security and intelligence forces – including the “experts” who assured us that it was safe to surrender the Gaza region in 2005.
For years, we’ve been arrogantly taking our own strength for granted to the point that dominant sectors of Israeli society and our own army’s public relations unit has focused on presenting the IDF as a fun and moral (according to liberal Western standards) institution instead of presenting it in such a way that would deter potential threats.
What happened over the weekend shouldn’t have ever happened. But it did. The takeaway for many Israelis is that we can’t blindly trust our leaders or delegate our security needs to the state while living “normal” lives oblivious to the conflict.
It’s clear after seeing how thin our security forces have been spread over the weekend that Israeli communities should each have their own civilian militias and gun owners should be trusted with more than 50 rounds of ammunition at home. The situation Israel exists in requires civilians to contribute meaningfully to our security.
Another palpable psychological change is how Israelis think of Hamas. In the minds of the Israeli public, Hamas is no longer an implacable yet benign nuisance but rather an intolerable malignant threat. This change in the collective Israeli psyche will likely have serious consequences for not only Hamas but also for the entire population of Gaza.
Hamas may have overplayed its hand and succeeded beyond its own expectations but its entire strategy is a based on a deep misunderstanding of what Israel actually is.
Israel’s critics – including Hamas – often speak of the Jewish state as a rootless settler colony doomed to eventual collapse in the face of protracted Palestinian resistance. They see Israel as a colonial project that for all its military power lacks the authenticity and inner conviction to survive.
This portrayal of Israel isn’t mere propaganda. It’s a perscription for the kind of sustained armed struggle that ended other colonial projects. This understanding of Israel is the core anti-Zionist accusation and serves as the basic logic behind Palestinian strategy that assumes making the price of occupation more expensive than the benefits of occupation will ultimately make the occupier leave.
This was the logic behind the Jewish urban guerrilla struggle to free Palestine from British rule in the 1940s. In fact, it’s actually a great strategy for and and every anti-colonial struggle. The problem here is that Israel isn’t actually what Hamas thinks we are and we won’t ever react to anti-colonial violence in the way they expect. In fact, using such violence against a more powerful population that self-identifies as indigenous and having nowhere else to go is actually a sure fire way to get brutally crushed.
Israelis today are uniting from across the political spectrum. None of the internal cultural tensions or political disagreements have been resolved. Our various tribes still have radically different visions for what the State of Israel should look like in 20 years. But Hamas has reminded us of the intolerable dangers of a divided Israel.
As the psychological state of arrogant strength and security vanished and Israelis entered a different psychological state of wounded desperation, Israelis have rediscovered a ferocity most of us haven’t tapped into for decades.
What remains to be seen is whether or not most Israelis are able to come to the conclusion that our “experts” were wrong and that the only way to stop yesterday’s horrifying experience from ever happening again is to retake the Gaza region and bring it under full Israeli sovereignty.
