In 1956, a group of armed Palestinian and Egyptian men ambushed a young Israeli officer in the wheat fields of Nahal Oz, a kibbutz in southern Israel, near the border with the Gaza Strip. They shot him, dragged his body into Gaza, then returned it, mutilated, to the kibbutz. The next day, Moshe Dayan, the Israeli military’s chief of staff, delivered a short but searing eulogy, standing over the officer’s grave. “The quiet of a spring morning blinded him, and he did not see the stalkers of his soul,” Dayan said. Alluding to the Biblical story of Samson, he added, “Have we forgotten that this group of young people dwelling at Nahal Oz is bearing the heavy gates of Gaza on its shoulders?”
At 6:31 a.m. last Saturday, the heavy gates of Gaza tore open again. Some fifteen hundred Gazan fighters led by Hamas bulldozed the border fence, stormed into Israel, and perpetrated some of the worst atrocities in the country’s short but bloodied history. In Nahal Oz, a thirteen-year-old boy who had gone on an early-morning run returned home to find his parents and his two sisters slaughtered. Many neighboring families were murdered with similar brutality. Others were abducted and taken into Gaza, the injured displayed like spoils of war. At the nearby kibbutz Kfar Aza, the bodies of residents, including children, were recovered on Tuesday; there were “cribs overturned,” an eyewitness said. A scorched smell still hung in the air. “It’s something I never saw in my life, something more like a pogrom from our grandparents’ time,” an Israeli commander told reporters.
Within days, that trauma and outrage had come to coexist with a bombing of Gaza and an enormous civilian effort to provide survivors from the border communities with food and shelter. The Israel Defense Forces summoned roughly three hundred and sixty thousand reservists, and many more have volunteered for service—laying aside, for now, the deep divisions that have roiled the country since January, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist government introduced controversial steps to curb judicial oversight of its powers.
As Israel struck Gaza from the air in full force—and cut off all food, water, and electricity to the coastal strip—and as the fate of an estimated hundred and fifty hostages remained unknown, there were growing calls in Israel to “pulverize” Hamas, as one security analyst put it. The rage is understandable; the implications of such statements, less so. The newspaper Yediot Ahronot reported on Wednesday that Israel has been mobilizing for a possible ground invasion, under the command of a former head of its Gaza Division. Sixteen members of Netanyahu’s coalition signed a letter this week calling for “total Israeli control of the Gaza Strip.”
In 2005, after years of repeated attacks and violence, Israel withdrew its military from Gaza and uprooted Jewish settlements there. A military reoccupation now would only incur further mass casualties at a time when Israel is still counting its dead. It would also play directly into the hands of Israel’s archenemy—Iran—by taking an unimaginable toll on Palestinian lives. This could force Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, to enter the conflict, potentially dragging the wider region into war.
Israel faces an impossible dilemma: how to restore a measure of security and deterrence while also insuring the safe return of the hostages. But it risks falling victim to the optics of war by sending troops to reinvade Gaza, thereby creating an illusion of victory. As Israel’s former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett—hardly a dovish figure—put it on Tuesday, “We shouldn’t dance to the tune of Hamas, of Iran. We shouldn’t do the obvious.”
The problem is that, in Netanyahu, Israel has a leader who has repeatedly placed his own political survival above the good of his country. As Hamas launched its devastating assault on Saturday, it reportedly took him less than an hour to scuttle an offer from the opposition to form an emergency unity government. The Prime Minister did not visit the sites of the atrocities. He does not appear to have gone to the hospitals to comfort the grieving families, and he did not take responsibility for his part in the colossal intelligence failure. He did not mention that in the days leading up to the attack three military battalions had been diverted away from the southern communities and into the occupied West Bank, to guard Jewish settlers there.
Instead, Netanyahu sent an emissary to speak to the media—Yossi Shelley, the director-general of the Prime Minister’s office, a man few Israelis had heard of before. Asked to explain the government’s slow response to the attack, Shelley said that the attendees of a music festival in the desert—two hundred and sixty of whom were slain—had “contributed in a significant way to the chaos.”
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden spoke out forcefully against the atrocities. “Infants in their mothers’ arms, grandparents in wheelchairs, Holocaust survivors abducted and held hostage—hostages whom Hamas has now threatened to execute in violation of every code of human morality,” he said. The Pentagon ordered a Navy carrier strike group to the eastern Mediterranean, to protect Israel. Nadav Eyal, a columnist for Yediot, praised Biden’s speech for projecting what had been missing from Netanyahu’s response—empathy. The next day, Netanyahu finally agreed to the terms of a unity government with the centrist leader Benny Gantz. Those terms leave Netanyahu’s far-right partners in the government but create a war cabinet that includes only Netanyahu, Gantz, and Israel’s relatively moderate defense minister, Yoav Gallant. By day five, the Israeli military had retaken control of the last of twenty-two sites to have come under attack. Some communities had been entirely vacated, with surviving inhabitants saying that they’re not sure they will ever go back. In Kfar Aza, the scenes of massacre inside homes were belied by the picture of an idyll that somehow still prevailed outdoors: tidy lawns, strollers, picnic tables.
When Dayan delivered his eulogy in 1956, he warned kibbutz residents on the Gaza border against a false sense of complacency. “Beyond the furrow of the border, a sea of hatred and desire for revenge is swelling, awaiting the day when serenity will dull our path,” he said. It’s hard to imagine serenity ever returning to the area. But the desire for revenge should not overflow. ♦
