The war of resurrection
By defying the Biden administration to secure Israeli victory,
Israel showed the American people that the “plucky little Israel” they
had long admired was back in business.
By Caroline Glick
JNS
Dec 23, 2024
Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip, January 2024
In a special cabinet meeting marking the
first year since the Palestinian invasion on Oct. 7, 2023, Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented a draft decision to his ministers
to rename the war, which until then had been dubbed “The Iron Swords
War” by the Israel Defense Forces, the War of Tkuma. Tkuma is
one of those Hebrew words that taps the ancient chords of Jewish
memory. Its literal translation in English is “rebirth” or
“resurrection.”
Netanyahu’s draft decision passed unanimously.
Why did he pick that name? Why resurrection? What had we died from?
On the surface, it could simply refer to
the 1,200 Israelis who were murdered on Oct. 7. Israel arose from the
ashes of that one-day Holocaust to destroy the enemy who perpetrated it.
But there is a deeper meaning to tkuma
that speaks to the cause of that day. The deeper meaning refers to the
spiritual or ideological disposition of the nation of Israel. What lay
dead in the ashes on Oct. 7 wasn’t only the men, women and children
killed that day, but a 50-year doctrine of dependence.
The day Hamas led the Palestinians of Gaza
on their orgy of mass murder, torture, rape and abduction, the Israel
they entered was marking not only the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur
War but the 50th anniversary of Israeli strategic dependence on the
United States. Similarly, they entered an Israel that had recently
entered its 32nd year of dependence on the Palestinians.
In the days and months that followed that
invasion, as Israelis recovered from the initial shock, the delusions
that had directed Israel’s strategic policies for two generations were
exposed for what they were. The first that fell by the wayside was the
delusion that Israel could peacefully coexist with a group of people who
defined themselves by their collective goal of annihilating the Jewish
people.
That idea had already been discarded by
65% of Israelis when Oct. 7 rolled around. But even though a mere 35% of
Israelis still supported Palestinian statehood on that Black Shabbat,
Israel’s national policy was still to enable Hamas to run a terror state
in Gaza and for the Palestinian Authority to run terrorist enclaves in
Judea and Samaria.
The reason that was the case was America.
In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the United
States saved Israel from destruction by airlifting desperately needed
weapons to the IDF after initial supplies were all but exhausted. In the
years that followed that war, Israel’s security brass gradually
embraced strategic dependence as their guiding light. For these
generals, whose dominance in the ranks increased over the decades,
national independence and strategic freedom were dangerous concepts.
They didn’t believe that the indomitable
will of the Jewish people, the courage of IDF soldiers, the ingenuity of
Israeli scientists and the power of the Israeli economy (not to mention
the God of Israel) were the forces working to procure Israel’s
survival. Over time, they came to believe that it was the largesse of
the U.S. State Department, coupled with America’s foreign and defense
policy establishment, that secured the existence of the Jewish state. As
they saw it, if Israel didn’t subordinate its strategic policies to
U.S. preferences, it would endanger its very existence.
The strategic dependence on America that
Israeli generals and their cohorts in the media developed and cultivated
began as a psychological side effect of their near failure to save
Israel in October 1973. But over time, it became apparent that their
doctrine of dependence served the ideological and political interests of
the Israeli left. And once that became clear, their psychological
dependence was presented as responsible strategic wisdom.
Israeli soldiers operating in eastern Rafah in the Gaza Strip on May 9, 2024.
U.S. opposition from the get-go
Beginning in the 1990s, U.S. support for
the PLO and the establishment of a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria,
Gaza and Jerusalem became increasingly central to U.S. Middle East
policy. It naturally followed that the notion that Israel couldn’t
survive without American support became the chief national security
argument for Israeli concessions to the Palestinians, even as the
Palestinians themselves showed they had no intention of ever peacefully
coexisting with Israel.
Since the generals insisted that the only
guarantee of Israel’s survival was the United States—and since the
United States supports Palestinian statehood in Israel’s strategic and
national heartland, as well as its capital city—it naturally followed
that anyone opposed to this U.S. policy endangers Israel’s national
security. Anyone who supports defeating the Palestinians in war is
similarly a danger to national security. And obviously, anyone who
openly opposes Palestinian statehood is a menace to national security.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal
over the weekend, Netanyahu explained how the Battle of Rafah laid
waste to the dependency doctrine, opening the path for Israel to win the
war.
Oct. 7 proved incontrovertibly that a
Palestinian state is an existential threat to Israel. The Hamas forces
who led the invasion of Israel that morning were the representatives of
the sovereign Palestinian state in Gaza that Hamas had led since 2007.
From the very outset of the war, the Biden
administration made clear that it opposed an Israeli victory because
from the earliest days after Oct. 7, President Joe Biden and his
advisers insisted that the war would lead to a reinstatement of
negotiations towards the establishment of a Palestinian state not only
in Gaza but in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem as well. And since Israelis
realized that a Palestinian state next door is an existential threat to
Israel’s very existence, over the initial months of the war, it began
dawning on them that strategic dependence on the United States, which
insists on the establishment of such a state, is also a threat to
Israel’s survival.
In the face of the Palestinian atrocities
of Oct. 7, during the first months of the war, Israel—dependent on U.S.
munitions—was able to bob and weave with the administration by avoiding a
discussion of the goals of the war. However, once it was clear that
Rafah had to be taken, the illusion of U.S. support for Israel began
disintegrating.
For three excruciating months, from
February through May, Jerusalem agonized over whether it dared to take
Rafah. The military necessity of seizing control of the town and the
border with Egypt was glaringly obvious. As long as Hamas retained
control over the border zone, its logistic trains for resupply remained
open. And as long as they remained open, Hamas could not be defeated
either as a military force or a political force. What’s more, so long as
Hamas held the international border it was in a position to spirit
hostages out of Gaza, rendering them unreachable by Israel, perhaps
forever.
Despite (or perhaps, because of) the
self-evident military necessity of taking Rafah, the Biden
administration led the international charge to prevent Israel from
acting. Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and their top advisers
threatened Israel in every way they could think of.
They threatened to impose an arms embargo
on Israel if it seized Rafah. They threatened to condemn Israel and
impose a ceasefire through a binding U.N. Security Council resolution.
They gave credence to claims that Israel was causing famine in Gaza,
thus setting the path for the International Court of Justice’s decision
to try Israel for genocide, and the International Criminal Court’s
decision to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and then his defense
minister, Yoav Gallant. Biden issued an unprecedented Executive Order
ordering the sanction of Israeli Jews who, in acting lawfully in their
country, were deemed to be undermining the administration’s preferred
policy of establishing a Palestinian state. All of these actions were
aimed at intimidating Israel’s leaders into opting not to fight for
victory and instead recommit to the establishment of a Palestinian
state.
Israel’s leadership was split in its
response to the administration’s animosity. On the one side, the IDF
High Command, and then War Cabinet members Benny Gantz, Gadi Eizenkot
and Gallant called for capitulating to the administration. They advanced
a “day after” plan that would reinstate Palestinian independence in
Gaza through the Hamas-supporting Palestinian Authority. The three
ministers, plus the IDF High Command, carried out a campaign of leaks
against Netanyahu, accusing him of destroying Israel’s relations with
Washington and undermining the chance of reaching a hostage deal. They
were supported by the media, opposition leaders in the Knesset and the
brigades of anti-government activists led by former security chiefs and
PR executives.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a joint session of Congress on July 24, 2024.
Rafah the key to strategy and psyche
On the other side, insisting that the
operation in Rafah was essential and that the Palestinian Authority must
not be given a foothold in Gaza stood Netanyahu, the rest of the
members of his government, the division and brigade commanders fighting
in Gaza, and the majority of the public.
In his interview with The Wall Street Journal,
Netanyahu discussed the stakes of the internal debate during the
interminable months of waiting. “The Americans said to me, ‘If you go
into Rafah, you’re on your own, and we’re not going to send you the
critical arms,’ which is tough to hear,” Netanyahu said.
To the concern that Israel couldn’t risk a
U.S. arms embargo because it was too dependent on U.S. munitions to
fight while under embargo, Netanyahu allowed: “That’s a legitimate
case.”
But then he explained the true stakes of the battle and of the war itself.
“But if we don’t go into Rafah, we can’t
exist as a sovereign state,” he said. “We’d become a vassal state, and
we won’t survive. The question of arms will fix itself, but the question
of our independence will not. That’s the end of Israel.”
By going into Rafah, the prime minister
changed the course of history. By defying Biden and his administration,
Netanyahu first and foremost ensured that Hamas would be defeated
because without resupply, sooner or later, Hamas would lose all residual
military capability and its political power would be destroyed. To
date, Washington has preserved Hamas through its demand for
“humanitarian aid.” But the incoming Trump administration has already
stated that the policy will be over in a month.
By going into Rafah, Netanyahu
demonstrated to the Palestinians, Hezbollah, Iran and its other proxies,
as well as to all the states of the region, that it is not a vassal
state. It is an independent power. And if they want to deal with Israel,
they need to go through Jerusalem, not Washington.
Netanyahu also secured support. By defying
the Biden administration to secure an Israeli victory, Israel showed
the American people that the “plucky little Israel” they had long
admired was back in business. The enthusiastic support Netanyahu
received from U.S. lawmakers two months later during his July 24 address
to a joint session of Congress was a testament to the renewed respect
that Israel earned in the United States for its willingness to put
everything on the line to secure victory.
While all of these consequences were
critical for Israel’s victory in this war, the battle of Rafah’s most
important impact was the one it had on the Israeli psyche. Israel’s
determination to fight and win freed the public from the debilitating
delusion that there is an alternative to strategic independence, to
self-reliance, to Zionism.
The media scoffed at the government’s
decision to rename the war. And the IDF Spokesman’s Unit is ignoring the
decision, continuing to call the war the “Iron Swords War.” But the
official name is the one that will be remembered because it is the
proper name of this war.
Over the past 15 months, faced with the
destruction of long-held delusions, Israelis resurrected their faith in
Zionism. As Zionism became a socially acceptable antisemitic slur
throughout the Western world, the people of Israel reinvigorated their
faith in themselves. And as the world community united against them, the
people of Israel united to stand up to them and to win this war on
their own as a free and independent people determined to remain one. It
is the resurrection of strategic independence—of Zionism—that will
secure Israel’s future for the next hundred years.
