However the war in Gaza ends, Israel has already lost

BY Avraham Shama 

Regardless of how the Gaza war unfolds, Israel has already lost, Hamas has won and the U.S. has emerged as the only sane global leader capable of moderating the flammable situation. There is a glimmer of hope that cease-fire, and possibly peace talks, between Israel and the Palestinians could emerge from the devastation.

The surprise Hamas attack on Oct. 7 killed more than 1,300 Israelis, wounded 3,000 and abducted more than 222 people. Relative to the size of the population, the number of Israelis killed amounts to about 40,000 Americans.

Since then, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have left their homes in the north and the south, moving to the relatively secure center of the country. Many go to sleep in their safe rooms or public shelters, or wake up in the middle of the night to watch the latest news. Schools are out, employees work part time or not at all, and the economy is limping. 

But Israelis have suffered another kind of loss — deep, profound and long-lasting. This one injured their psyche, their sense of collective self and well-being. You can hear it in their voices, note it in their choice of tentative words and see it on their faces — the feeling of “we have been had.”

Before the Hamas attack, Israelis exuded confidence and bravado. They believed that a surprise war, like the 1973 Yom Kippur War, could not happen again, and that, if it did, their army would nip it in the bud. Then came the Hamas attack, almost exactly 50 years later, sending the nation into a deep trauma, the way Japan’s surprise attack on U.S. warships in Pearl Harbor instantly changed the American mindset.

On the other side, Hamas has won the war despite the loss of more than 8,000 Palestinians — some unknown combination of fighters and ordinary Gazans. Hamas — a terrorist organization of about 20,000 members — was able to invade a country of more than 9 million people with a powerful army, kill indiscriminately, create chaos, shatter the Israeli psyche and bring the Palestinian fight for statehood to the global fore.

But the war between Israelis and Palestinians has been going on-and-off ever since Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, when most Palestinians living in what had become Israel fled to the Gaza Strip and to the West Bank. Since then, new generations have emerged and a national Palestinian identity has evolved. Palestinians want a state of their own, the way the desire of the Jewish population before 1948 turned into the independent state of Israel.

Now the Israeli government, and especially Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, seems determined to avenge the blood of their fellow citizens seemingly without having a clear idea what it wants to achieve beyond that. But obliterating Gaza with indiscriminate killing is no way for the prime minister to redeem himself from his abject failure to perform his most important job: to keep Israel safe.

Fortunately, the U.S. and several Western European states are having a moderating effect on Israel. President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and many others have engaged in around-the-clock shuttle diplomacy to temper Israel’s plan for a massive ground war in Gaza, while still assisting it militarily. 

Biden has emerged from this crisis as the world’s sage statesman who can moderate Netanyahu’s need for disproportional response; help to open the Rafah Border Crossing with Egypt to allow some food, water, and medical supplies flow to Gazans; and who sent carrier ships to the east Mediterranean to signal to other countries not to intervene. Such actions left Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping to lick their diplomatic wounds of defeat as they watched their roles on the world stage diminish. 

Hamas’s unimaginable atrocities have brought the Palestinian struggle for statehood to the world stage. Perhaps this time, Israelis and Palestinians — having both already suffered devastating losses — with the help of global leaders, can finally realize and accept that a peaceful solution is better than killing each other and setting the world on fire. While this is a very complicated route, the alternative may have become unacceptable.