Israel awakened

Just as 9/11’s terrible toll changed America, so too is the terrible toll of Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack changing Israel. The attack’s savagery—the sheer magnitude of the 1,200 murders, the added horrors of the rapes, the torture, the mutilation of the dead—has shocked and traumatized Israel.

But the Jewish state is far from paralyzed. With a cold fury, it has acted on the imperative to restore deterrence. The war will not be short. And it is unlikely to be limited to Gaza. In the past few days, Israel has warned that rocket attacks by Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist group on its northern border, might soon prompt strong measures to restore security.

The profound changes in Israel wrought by the Oct. 7 attack have been astutely described by Times of Israel senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur, who has charted them in his columns and in interviews, especially his weekly appearances on Dan Senor’s podcast “Call Me Back.”

Clear-eyed Rettig Gur describes the emergence in Israel of an implacable resolve: such a murderous killing spree of its civilians cannot happen again. This necessarily means no enemy encampments run by fanatics will be allowed to remain within striking distance of Israel’s civilians living in its north and south.

Stronger than ever is the resolve that Iran must never be permitted to gain the ability to produce a nuclear weapon. For the world can no longer deny—based on the lessons drawn from Hamas, an Iranian proxy militia—what the crazed rulers in Tehran would do with such a weapon. They would kill as many Jews as possible, no matter the cost to them and the world.

The Jewish state is now awake to what Hamas, or Hezbollah, could and would do “again and again,” to quote a Hamas spokesman regarding more Oct. 7-style attacks.

Washington’s foreign policy professional class has not caught up with this fundamental change in Israel—yet. It will take years and years to understand all the consequences of the Oct. 7 attack, but the immediate and obvious result is a renewal of the old conviction: Never again.

That is why the world must take seriously the possibility of a new front opening in this conflict. On Saturday, Israel’s national security adviser Tzachi Hanegbi spelled it out. Referring to Hezbollah’s elite killing team, he said, “We can no longer accept [the] Radwan force sitting on the border” and capable of unleashing its own pogrom.

He said the volatile situation at the northern border “must be changed,” preferably by diplomacy, but he doubts it will be possible. In which case, he said, Israel will be compelled “to impose a new reality.”