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A Wounded Israel Is a Fiercer One

(Times of Israel) Haviv Rettig Gur - It was a horror. Hour after hour, families sat huddled in their homes awaiting rescue from the Hamas fighters streaming through their towns and villages. Families were butchered in cold blood. In one home, a terrorist shot the parents dead, took a child's cellphone and started broadcasting it all in a livestream on their Facebook account. Grandmothers were pulled in wheelchairs to waiting vehicles ready to carry them as hostages into Gaza. Then came the mothers carrying babies. Footage circulated on social media, put there by Hamas, of an Israeli child asking his mother if the gunmen that surrounded them were going to kill them. A tectonic shift has occurred in Israel's psyche. Where Hamas had always seemed an implacable but ultimately containable enemy, it had now proven it could bring the danger into Israeli homes, could slaughter children and kidnap grandmothers. Hamas was once a tolerable threat. It just made itself an intolerable one. Analyst Avi Issacharoff tweeted, Hamas "success may turn into a Pyrrhic victory. It seems to me there's now a consensus in the Israeli elite and among the public that what was won't be anymore." As a result of the raw cruelty of the assault and the impossibility of ever satisfying the assailant's demands, Israelis are uniting, from left to right. None of the political problems have been resolved, but Hamas brought home to Israelis the intolerable weakness of a divided Israel. Israelis believe they have been left no choice but to fight desperately to ensure Saturday's images never return. These heirs of a collective memory forged in the fires of the 20th century cannot handle the experience of defenselessness Hamas has imposed on them. A safe Israel can spend much time and resources worrying about the humanitarian fallout from a Gaza ground war; a more vulnerable Israel cannot.
2023-10-08 00:00:00
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