Confidence, optimism, and pride, the Israel-Hamas War’s most prominent Israeli casualties, have returned from the dead.
Recent days’ blows to Hezbollah, crowned by last week’s attack on its headquarters, have turned the war’s tide. This military impression is the first of five conclusions from Israel’s most testing war as it enters its second year.
The other conclusions are that the Cold War is back, military spending will soar, ultra-Orthodoxy’s deal will have to end, and postwar Israel will face a political earthquake.
ONE YEAR ago next Wednesday, Israel was stunned. Deploying hordes of savages that never looked like an army, Hamas fooled us, unleashing 3,000 storm troopers on 32 towns along a 40-km. front, killing some 1,200 people in one of military history’s most brazen surprise attacks.
Though very different in other respects, psychologically Hamas’s raid was on par with Hannibal’s invasion of Rome, Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, and the Yom Kippur War’s twin invasions of Israel.
However, as this column noted in its first response to the massacre (“We shall overcome,” 13 October 2023), all those grand surprise attacks ended in decisive defeats: Napoleon’s army was decimated, Israel’s invaders were counter-invaded, Japan was nuked and conquered, Hitler died in Berlin’s ruins, and Carthage was razed and sowed with salt.
Now, with Hamas’s army dismantled and its leader hiding under Gaza’s rubble, and with Hezbollah’s commanders mostly dead and their leader crushed by 80 1-ton bombs, the Islamist surprise attack on Israel is also approaching defeat.
That is where we stand militarily. Geopolitically, the Israeli quest to remain neutral, as superpowers duel from Ukraine to the South China Sea, has proven futile.
In their envy and hatred of Uncle Sam, Russia and China have taken our enemies’ side, backing their atrocities here and feeding their agitation abroad. Now, as the military tide turns, Moscow and Beijing find themselves, yet again, in bed with Middle Eastern losers.
Then again, the turning of the military tide doesn’t mean that Israel’s October 7 trauma is ready to disappear. It won’t go away, and its repercussions will be seminal.
AS HAPPENED after the Yom Kippur War, the first tremors announcing the approaching political earthquake are economic.
With thousands of businesses shuttered, tens of thousands displaced, and hundreds of thousands enlisted on-and-off while Red Sea navigation is obstructed – imports and production were both disrupted. The result is shortages which made, for instance, the August consumer price index spike 0.9%, while housing prices rose 6% and tomato prices soared 37%.
Add to these the conceit of an ignorant and sectarian finance minister, who allowed the budget deficit to cruise from zero in spring ’23 to more than 8% of GDP now, and you get Moody Corporation’s decision this week to push Israel’s credit rating down two rungs.
Yes, when the war ends, supply and demand will return with a vengeance, boosted, among others, by extensive reconstruction of the North’s devastated towns, factories, businesses and farms. However, the war’s long-term budgetary effect will be redoubled defense spending. It will be a major and exorbitant economic U-turn, after an era in which the defense budget shrank from one third of national product after the Yom Kippur War to less than 5% before the current war.
Now we will spend more and also serve more. The army already extended men’s regular service from 32 to 36 months. The need for new units to be permanently stationed where they were woefully absent on October 7 will further weigh on the economy, feeding the war’s two other grand results.
The Titanic effort
THE TITANIC effort this war has demanded from the Israelis who fight has made it impossible to ignore those who do not fight.
For nearly half a century, as ultra-Orthodoxy became a pillar of the Likud’s political hegemony, its package of draft exemptions and special budgeting generated much revulsion but little public action. Now this revulsion is stoking widespread wrath, which in due course will become political energy.
Tragically, there is no sign that ultra-Orthodox leaders appreciate this sentiment’s intensity and explosiveness, much less that they are prepared to reconsider their historic deal. As they remain determined to legislate their flock’s draft dodging, they will lead mainstream Israel to revolt.
Yes, in upcoming months ultra-Orthodoxy may still make legislative gains, but before long they will learn that the October 7 War ended their deal, as mainstream Israelis, struggling to pay higher taxes while recalling their ultra-Orthodox brethren’s absence from the war’s battlefields and funerals, will demand and obtain an end to the ultra-Orthodox deal.
Moreover, the ultra-Orthodox problem will be a major feature of the political earthquake that will be this war’s aftermath. The social drama will take several years to mature. What is evident already now is that the man who led Israel into and through this war has not, and never will, change.
Benjamin Netanyahu, who in three weeks turns 75, could not bring himself to part with, or even just admit, the flaws of his alliance with ultra-Orthodoxy. While at it he shirked responsibility for the war’s outbreak; did not mourn with the kibbutzniks who were the massacre’s main victims; and failed to inspire national reconciliation, escaping instead to boastful, first-person celebrations of our military successes, while making enemies with yet another defense minister. This is besides crowding the government and Knesset with self-serving nonentities.
Any Israeli who recalls the Yom Kippur War cannot escape the analogy.
Despite the ultimate victory, what began with military fiasco exposed a veteran political establishment’s decadence and triggered its demise. It took three-and-a-half years from October 1973 for the Labor Party to collapse. Its successor’s collapse will come sooner.
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The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is author of the best-selling Mitz’ad Ha’ivelet Hayehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sfarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.