By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
Family and friends of Israeli soldier Captain Eitan Itzhak Oster, killed during an Israeli ground operation in Southern Lebanon, attend his funeral at the Mount Herzl Military Cemetery. Jerusalem, Oct. 2, 2024. (Oren Ben Hakoon/Flash90)
Nearly one year into the Israel-Hamas war we find ourselves in a kind of Middle East purgatory, consigned to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous stasis – hostages being murdered in Gaza tunnels, pagers and handheld radios exploding by the thousands to the north in Beirut – but no improvement in the lives of Israelis trapped in this cycle of perpetual despair.
October 7 was a seismic blow to Israel and Jews worldwide. Twelve months later we are still feeling the aftershocks: the nation we hold so dear, for decades lauded as the region’s only true democracy, now is broadly regarded as a pariah state. The Israeli government, defined by a fragile coalition comprising the most extreme of far-right personalities, constantly lurches from confusion to catastrophe. Its prime minister, the onetime “Mr. Security,” clings to power while under criminal indictment.
A year ago, did anyone seriously believe this war would still be prosecuted? Did any of us contemplate that a multitude of hostages – alive and dead – would remain confined in the dank blackness of Hamas’s underground stronghold. Yet many more tunnels remain intact, testifying to the Sisyphean nature of a conflict where the boulder representing elusive “total victory” keeps rolling down Gaza’s intractable hill.
Israel is not accustomed to protracted all-out conflicts. The 1967 war was over in six days; 1973’s Yom Kippur War lasted for 19 days; the 2006 Second Lebanon War, 34 days. Compared to these, the current war in Gaza is an anomaly – an anomaly looking more and more like a slog in which nothing except misery and death triumph.
In Gaza, despite killing thousands of Hamas terrorists and disrupting its command structure, the IDF has been unable to eviscerate its opponent. Yahya Sinwar still sits at the top of Hamas’s Gaza hierarchy, eluding an entire department of the Shin Bet security service devoted exclusively to killing him. With no credible counterforce available to administer a post-war Gaza, Hamas continues to exercise a measure of domestic authority. It is a repeated assertion of depressing reality.
Meanwhile, the hostages languish, potential agreements between Israel and Hamas for their release dangled one moment, snatched back the next. It is a grotesque display of regional mutual suspicion and political gamesmanship. Caught in the middle are the hostages’ families, subjected to what amounts to psychological torture of the cruelest kind.
And as each day passes, principal attention is clearly shifting from the South to the North, from the Gaza to Lebanon. Hezbollah, an order of magnitude more dangerous than Hamas, has become the true existential threat to Israel.
What has been a low-level, tit-for-tat conflict is rapidly accelerating. Rendering pagers and radios into miniature bombs was an undeniable technical coup by the Mossad and related entities, throwing Hezbollah (and much of Beirut’s citizenry) into collective trepidation, if not outright panic.
The threat level jumped further on Sept. 20, when Israel carried out one of its highest-level targeted assassinations, killing Ibrahim Aqeel, an upper-echelon Hezbollah commander long sought by the U.S. for planning a series of deadly bombings during the 1980s that killed 300 Americans. This wasn’t a battery of IDF artillery lobbing a few shells across the Lebanese border. It was Israeli military jets leveling a a Beirut high-rise building, a foreground-profile operation in the heart of a foreign capital.
And then, on Sept. 27, a torrent of Israeli 2,000-pound bombs killed the ultimate target of all: Hassan Nasrallah, who’d led Hezbollah since 1992 and molded the militia into one of the world’s most formidable armed forces. This was followed, four days later on Oct. 1, by the unprecedented act of Iran launching more than 180 ballistic missiles into Israel (which managed, with help from U.S. naval assets, to shoot most of them down). What was a simmering conflict is now poised to erupt into hot, region-engulfing warfare, as Israel has launched ground operations in southern Lebanon (with eight IDF soldiers losing their lives in a single day’s fighting).
This kind of escalation reflects a mindset in Israel’s leadership that Hezbollah must now be confronted directly. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is said to be on the verge of firing his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, among the few (relatively) sane voices in the governing coalition. It’s a reflection of what is deemed most vital in official policy, a policy in which the hostages slip further and further from the political foreground.
Is this all we can look forward to: perpetual war? Perpetual calling up of beleaguered reserve forces? Perpetual relocation of families – thousands of them – compelled to evacuate from their homes in the vulnerable north and occupy cramped hotel rooms for what feels like an eternity. Will Hezbollah be pushed back far enough from the border to allow those families to safely return? Or will they be consigned to infinite displacement, refugees in their own country?
October 7, 2023, soon to give way to October 7, 2024. Of course, we hope and pray for the safe return of the remaining hostages, and for a path to an enduring peace, not just a tenuous respite. Perhaps year 5785 will bring with it a genuine breakthrough.
Still, we must not be naïve. Because as we close out this annus horribilis, the calendar – in the best of times a means to mark junctures of celebration – instead pointedly reminds us that war is a looming presence, day after day after day.
Andrew Adler is Managing Editor of Community.