![]() Netanyahu’s right-wing government appears to be in a deep hole, facing agonizing decisions over how sweeping the Israeli retaliation in Gaza should be. But within four years, in 1977, the Labor government that had run Israel since its foundation was defeated, a right-wing Likud government took power with a landslide victory, and Labor has scarcely recovered in the almost five decades since.Ĭertainly, Mr. The Yom Kippur war, an equally profound psychological shock for Israel, did not immediately turn national politics on its head. Distracting, too, were the wild settler projects in the West Bank backed by hard-right government ministers. There have been no such threats since the Hamas attack. ![]() Such were the Israeli protests against the government program that the military had to deal with more than 10,000 reservists threatening to refuse service, a major distraction. Its focus on a fiercely contested judicial overhaul that would weaken the independence of the judiciary, and so compromise democratic checks and balances, appeared to leave the situation in Gaza as a low priority. Dismay that the Israel Defense Forces, the revered institution at the core of the nation’s security, could allow such a multipronged Palestinian assault to happen - and then appear slow to react - has been compounded by a widespread sense that the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was fatally distracted. This blow to Israel comes at a time of deep internal unease. You would expect a state this strong to prevent such things, yet 75 years from Israel’s creation the government has failed in its principal responsibility: the protection of the lives of its citizens.”Īs with the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, disbelief has mingled with anger at a colossal intelligence failure.Ĭertainly, heady talk of a transformative normalization deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel, brokered by the Biden administration, seems optimistic as a result of the Hamas attack. ![]() “There is outrage at Hamas, but also at the political and military leadership that allowed this to happen. “Israelis are shaken to the core,” said Yuval Shany, a professor of international law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. But 75 years, and a half-century, respectively, from those conflicts, the sight of villages once again overrun, hostages seized and desperate civilians being killed by Palestinian militants has awakened a kind of primal dread. The war that began with a Hamas assault that has taken as many as 600 Israeli lives is not an existential struggle for the survival of the Israeli state itself, as were the 1948 war triggered by Israel’s foundation or the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The most sweeping invasion of Israeli territory in decades, conducted by a Hamas force that had been widely seen as a ragtag collection of militants, has delivered a psychological shock to Israel so great that its very foundations are being questioned: its army, its intelligence services, its government and its capacity to control the millions of Palestinians in its midst.
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