Bret Stephens
“Three days before I got released, the Hamas commanders came to tell me, ‘Listen, Avinatan, say hi to your family, then pack your things and move to Europe or the US. Because as long as Israel exists, we will do Oct 7 over and over again.’”
Avinatan Or, a 33-year-old electrical engineer for Nvidia, recounted this anecdote near the end of our long conversation about the 738 days he spent as a hostage in the Gaza Strip, almost all of them in solitary confinement in a stifling underground tunnel. On the 409th day, he was caught in an elaborate escape attempt that involved pilfering a pickaxe from a nearby storage room, getting behind the sandbags that formed the back wall of his cell and digging his way upward through more than 30 feet of earth, rock and concrete until he broke the surface, breathed fresh air and, for an exhilarating if fleeting moment, saw the stars.
For his audacity, Hamas tied him to a chair, whipped and clubbed him for a week, then chained him to his cell for close to 11 months. At his lowest point, he told me, he lost more than 80 pounds. Why, I asked, did he take the risk of trying to escape in the first place? “I will not let other people decide my destiny,” he said. “Soldiers outside are fighting for me; I have to fight, too.”
Or, whose Hebrew-language memoir “Through the Ground” has been an instant bestseller in Israel, believes there will be no peace for either Israelis or civilians in Gaza (toward whom Or expresses abundant sympathy) until Hamas is permanently defeated. It hasn’t been, even after three years of war. That fact, in turn, is a result of two deep and possibly unbridgeable divisions: the first within Israel; the second between Israel and the world.
The division inside Israel, in the broadest sense, is between the spirit of entitlement and the spirit of service. That’s the basic choice Israelis face when they go to the polls late this month.
On the entitled side: the leaders of the fast-growing ultra-Orthodox population, who believe their voters are owed welfare from the government along with a categorical exemption from military service, even as the army groans under an acute personnel shortage. Also, the far-right Messianics, who are convinced they have a divine right to the entirety of the West Bank, along with an exemption from legal consequences for bullying and terrorising their Palestinian neighbours.
Most entitled: Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister has real achievements to his name, above all, his willingness to confront Iran head-on rather than fight only its proxies. But he also thinks he can stay in office forever by assembling coalitions of the entitled, seeking legal impunity, dividing the country against itself, resisting calls for an independent commission of inquiry into Oct 7, blaming his own senior security and ministerial officers for the catastrophe, and taking credit for achievements against Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and other foes that remain tenuous.
On the other side are the service Israelis, done with their regular army service but still in the reserves, who have spent hundreds of days in uniform and in combat, away from families. They are the spouses of those reservists, who have raised children, gone to work, kept up appearances of normality and prayed they won’t be left bereaved. They are the Israeli passengers who last week rushed the cockpit of the almost-hijacked Flydubai flight, unhesitatingly. They are the thousands of Israelis who have lost loved ones in this war. That includes Gadi Eisenkot, the former army chief of staff and leading opposition candidate, who spent 41 years in uniform and lost a son and two nephews in the fighting in Gaza.
“Ancient Israel’s political collapse was spawned by a dozen civil wars,” Amotz Asa-El, author of ‘The Jewish March of Folly,’ said, reminding me that the Roman Empire’s sacking of Jerusalem in 70 CE was preceded and facilitated by brutal Jewish factional infighting. Israelis are now waking up to the fact that they run the risk of a new kind of sacking, this time at the hands of a moral calumny and economic boycott campaign from abroad.
Thus the second division, between Israel and the world. In Britain on Sunday, the Green Party voted to declare Zionism a type of racism (a throwback to a UN resolution from the 1970s) and endorse “a single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine” with “equal rights for all.”
There will be more where that came from. And while some of it builds on legitimate objections to Israeli policy, it also builds on a mixture of wilful idiocy and cunning defamation that aims not to change Israel’s policies but to destroy the state itself. The experience of Israelis is that every time they vacated territory, whether in southern Lebanon in 2000 or Gaza in 2005, they have gained neither international grace nor physical security.
Instead, their retreats created staging grounds for the kind of horror that Israelis experienced firsthand on and after Oct 7 — horrors that many of the world’s so-called humanitarians and justice-seekers chose to celebrate, downplay or deny.
There’s a reason Netanyahu, in his UN speech, aimed his rhetorical fire at Zohran Mamdani, the New York mayor: The prime minister was playing to a political base that believes that the whole world is against Israel and that the state must therefore respond with the most uncompromising policies possible. In a country where, as political philosopher Micah Goodman told me, “the only swing state is the centre-right,” it’s a political tactic that could yet keep Netanyahu in office.
All of which is why stories like Avinatan Or’s and the Flydubai passengers’ are so instructive. At the ballot box this month, there’s one more cockpit the people of Israel need to rush.