Israel’s darkest day. What now?

Oct. 7, 2023, is objectively the darkest single day in Israel’s history. The full scale of the devastation will be revealed over time. But we already know that not even on the opening day of Egypt and Syria’s 1973 Yom Kippur attack on Israel; not even on the day of the Dolfinarium and Park Hotel massacres during the misnamed “Second Intifada”; not even during the massacre of Israeli athletes in the 1972 Munich Olympics; and not even when Gush Etzion fell to the Jordanian Legion in 1948 did Israel suffer such atrocities by an Arab, and especially Palestinian, enemy that invaded Israel to murder soldiers, shoot civilians, burn families in their homes, take hostages, kidnap old women, young girls and mothers with children and mutilate the dead on the scale that we saw on Oct. 7.

Why is this happening? The overarching reason is that Arabs in general, and the Palestinians in particular, have been waging a century-long war of attrition against Zionism, against the Jewish right to have a nation in the land of Israel.

The Arab Palestinian struggle has never been limited to goals such as ending Israel’s “occupation” or the building of settlements in the West Bank. It has always been against Zionism. This is not in itself a judgement, although I clearly stand on the side of the Jewish right to self-determination. Rather, it’s a description.

The conflict is, and always has been, between Zionism and anti-Zionism, between the universal right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their land, and the Arab, and especially Palestinian, view that the Jewish possess no such right in any territory and within any borders.

Some think that Arab ant-Zionism is entirely justified, but it does not change the fact that this is the essence of the conflict. And since this is the essence of the conflict, all manners of brutalizing Jews in Israel are ennobled in the perpetrators’ minds.

Why is it happening from Gaza? One cannot understand the repeated cycles of war launched from Gaza against Israel and its inhabitants without understanding that the vast majority of Gaza’s residents consider themselves as refugees from Palestine despite having been born in Gaza and never been displaced by war.

They are the descendants of Palestinians who were displaced by the utterly unnecessary war they waged in 1948 in a failed effort to prevent the partition of the land into an Arab and a Jewish state, because it meant that the Jews would have a state of their own in even half of the land. A Jewish state in any territory was anathema them, as it remains today.

To those Palestinians, Gaza is not their home, and they have no intention of making it their home, which is why it matters not that Israel retreated fully from the Gaza Strip in 2005. For Palestinians in Gaza, this newly acquired territory was not an opportunity to build a sovereign prosperous state, but rather a literal launching pad from which to take “back” (in their minds) the territory of the state of Israel itself. 

But why now? Opportunity and a sense of Israeli weakness created by domestic fissures probably played a role. But the strong reasons for the timing was highly influenced by increasing signs that Israel and Saudi Arabia were on the path to normalizing relations. Palestinians, and especially the Iran-backed terrorist group Hamas, which governs Gaza, shared a strong interest in doing everything possible to prevent such an eventuality. Iran is a determined foe of Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinians have viewed every peace agreement between an Arab country and Israel, going back to Egypt, as a betrayal of Arab support for the cause of implacable anti-Zionism.

After all, if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had ever been just that, a conflict between Jews and Arabs in the territory between the River and the Sea, that conflict was over in April 1948 just before the British left and their mandate ended. It then became the Arab-Israeli conflict as multiple Arab armies invaded the territory to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state.

Without the support of tens of millions, and later hundreds of millions, of Arabs, which also brought Islamic, Soviet and developing world support, the Palestinians would not have been able to sustain their war against Jewish self-determination for so many decades.  

So, what now? Most everyone in Israel and many around the world feel that an attack of such scale and savagery cannot yield a regular retaliation, of the kind that characterized the Gaza wars since Israel’s retreat. But can Israel do something that will truly end the century-long Palestinian battle against Zionism?

Egypt continues to celebrate the Yom Kippur “October War” as a victory because of the devastation Israel suffered, despite Israel ultimately being victorious. Hamas will clearly do the same. But the 1973 war also marked Egypt and Syria’s last military wars and invasions of Israel.

All we know now is that for Israel, this day will live in infamy — and pain, terrible heart-wrenching pain.  

Einat Wilf, PhD., is a former member of the Israeli Knesset and the author of “We Should All be Zionists” and co-author of “The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream has Obstructed the Path to Peace.”