The war of 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.

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.

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.