ISRAEL AT WAR: FAILURE AND FORTITUDE

Nine months into its war with Hamas, Israel is a nation in a state of paradox.

On the one hand, there is a deep-seated sense of failure.  Hamas, though badly mauled, still exists. Its senior leaders, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, are alive and issuing orders. The organization operates as a statelet, issuing defiant declarations while pretending to negotiate, through intermediaries, with the United States and Israel. It still holds 116 hostages, living or dead.

In the North, 60,000 Israelis remain refugees in their own country, as Hezbollah launches daily rocket attacks, rendering much of the region uninhabitable.

Beyond Israel’s borders, Houthi rebels attack Red Sea shipping.  And of uppermost concern, Iran, the chief sponsor of all this terror, moves ever closer to acquiring weapon-grade fissile material for nuclear weapons. Israel seems unable, and its main ally the United States seems unwilling, to stop Iran.

And yet, in the midst of this overarching sense of failure, something else is going on in Israel, something subtle but evident to visitors.

Israelis appear to be a happy people. As if too stubborn to acknowledge the negativity, they go about leading productive and meaningful lives.  The beaches teem with swimmers and volleyball players. Restaurants are full. Construction cranes fill the urban skylines.

The 2024 World Happiness Report, based on life evaluation interviews conducted by the Gallup World Poll, vindicates these visual impressions. It found Israelis the 5^th happiest people in the world, behind only Finland, Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden. The United States was ranked 23nd. The findings were based on evaluations conducted over a 3-year period, much of which predates the October 7 attack. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Israel’s happiness index has declined since the last Report issued. In fact, the opposite may be the case. The Report measures happiness by age group, and when only the young (under 30) are evaluated, Israel ranks as the 2^nd  happiest country in the world.  A nation whose young people are happier than its older citizens, is likely to grow happier with time, not the opposite.

A strong sense of patriotism fills the air. Wherever one goes, one sees Israeli flags hanging from apartment balconies, business offices, and residential doorways, much as one saw American flags everywhere after 9/11.

The fact that Israelis appear united in their patriotism does not mean that they are united in their politics. They are fiercely divided on party lines, with thousands taking to the streets to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Netanyahu.

But in this, as in the ubiquitous flag displays, Israelis resemble Americans in the aftermath of 9/11. Then, Americans who admired George W. Bush and those who loathed him, both pasted American flag decals on the rear windows of their SUVs.  Israel’s political demonstrations seem to be another sign of the nation’s strength.

Israelis also answer the call to military service. In Ukraine, 650,000 fighting age men have fled the country to avoid conscription over the past two years. There has been no such exodus in Israel. Instead, there has been an influx of expats. So many reservists living abroad tried to return after October 7, El Al was forced to schedule additional flights to accommodate them. Many reservists have been turned back because their units were already over capacity.

What accounts for this paradoxical mixture of failure and fortitude?

Living in peril creates its own series of simplicities. Unlike the United States, Israel has no oceans separating it from foreign threats. It has no strategic depth allowing it to retreat. This predicament carries certain benefits. Samuel Johnson noted that a scheduled hanging concentrates the mind. The same may be said of living next door to neighbors committed to your annihilation.

In 1973, Prime Minister Golda Meir told a visiting junior Senator named Joe Biden: “We Israelis have a secret weapon. We have nowhere else to go.”

There is another reason for the fortitude one sees on Israeli faces. That reason is the face of the enemy. Hamas – and the other proxies of Iran – do not disguise their intentions. There is no pretense of seeking some kind of peaceful coexistence. They seek to kill.

Nowhere was the proof of this intention more evident than the Nova Music Festival. The site had no military value and no political significance. It was not any kind of residential community populated by Zionist “settlers.” It was just the site of a music festival, a place where young people, most of them left-leaning, could gather temporarily to hear music and enjoy themselves. Hamas terrorists murdered 364 people there, nearly all of them young and unarmed. It was killing for killing’s sake.

If there was anywhere on October 7 that should have shaken Israelis’ confidence in their society, it was the Nova Music Festival. There, the adults of Israel grievously let down their children.

First, they authorized the Festival, which involved concentrating thousands of unarmed and vulnerable young people on unguarded terrain just a few kilometers from the border. Due to its closeness to Gaza, when a siren sounds, people have 15 seconds to race to a shelter.

Second, when the violence erupted and festival goers tried to escape by running toward a highway, the authorities on the scene told them to go back — where they were murdered.

Finally, the adults let down the children by the agonizingly long hours it took for the IDF to respond. By the time it did, it was too late.

With this series of fatal failures, one might expect the Nova Music Festival site to be a source of disenchantment and despair. But it is the opposite. Israelis have set up monuments to each and every victim. They flock there to pay tribute and to show resolve. It has become a sort of Gettysburg, where Israelis commemorate their honored dead, and take increased devotion to their embattled little nation.

Despite all that has happened and is happening, a visitor cannot leave Israel without renewed confidence in the nation’s capacity to survive and thrive.