My most recent visit to Israel overlapped with its election in October, but that was a coincidence. In 10 days of discussions with generals and intelligence officers, entrepreneurs and university students, I was reminded of what Moshe Dayan’s biographer Shabtai Teveth wrote about Israel’s famous one-eyed soldier and diplomat: “His one eye glimmered with an enormous lust for life, his other eye was extinguished beneath the black patch, dead. At times he seemed to symbolize Israel itself, in which life and death are close partners.”
I had visited Israel in November 2023, while the horrors of the Hamas onslaught were still fresh—more than 800 civilians and 300 soldiers killed, 251 hostages seized. I saw the room where one disabled old woman had been burned alive in bed; the house where a father was killed in front of his children, the scattered toys and playthings. Only the bloodstains had, in accordance with Jewish ritual, been painstakingly removed. It was a country in deep and open trauma.
The trauma is no longer on the surface. The traffic jams are back, the restaurants are reasonably full, and the collective settlements along the Gaza envelope are being rebuilt by those who’d fled them, along with new volunteers. The trauma, however, is now like an artesian river: running below the surface, but immensely powerful.
The election offered proof of that. Although important substantive issues were at stake—efforts to restrict the independence of the judicial system, or the question of universal national service, for example—the election was about personalities: whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was to be loathed or trusted; whether the ultraright leaders Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich would retain a place in government; whether Israel should trust Gadi Eisenkot, an admired and respected retired general but a political novice, who had lost a son and two nephews in the fighting.
[View: Flying across the world to vote]
Foreign and national-security policy were not major concerns. Israelis are far harder than they were more than three years ago. Those who believe that a two-state solution is achievable in the near term, rather than a modus vivendi with the Palestinians, are found only on the political margins. The aggressive establishment of buffer zones in Gaza and Lebanon—roughly 10 kilometers of devastation in southern Lebanon, as the civilian population is pushed out—receives general approval. Such restraint in the use of force as most Israelis favor is based on the narrowest considerations of prudence rather than on foreign opinion.
Israelis do not give a damn about criticism from European leaders, or feeble and performative gestures, such as their recognition of a Palestinian state whose rulers have not called an election in two decades. Israelis ignore foreign politicians who make statements and proclamations but do not bother to visit their country. Young Israelis compete to get into elite units in the Israel Defense Forces; when a war breaks out, the planes coming home are jammed with Israelis returning to serve in the IDF, while the ones leaving carry mainly foreigners. Thus, Israelis have little use for students in distant lands who are innocent of the experience of war, wearing keffiyehs and blocking campuses.
They despise those who call their campaign in Gaza—which was indeed ferocious—genocide. Nearly 500 members of the IDF have been killed in Gaza since October 8, 2023, and many thousands more wounded. Israelis know that humanitarian aid has been flowing into Gaza through their territory; that Gaza’s population has actually grown over the past 10 years; and that Hamas, although no longer possessing an army of 25,000 well-equipped infantry exploiting the biggest military tunnel network in history, is still in charge in Gaza, still fighting, and still clinging to its ultimate goal of destroying their state.
In many ways, Israelis have turned inward, and the results may be dangerous for them. They do not pay a great deal of heed, for example, to the waves of anti-Semitic rhetoric and criminal attacks that have swept countries where they would once have been unthinkable, such as Britain and the United States. To the extent that they do, they merely see it as confirmation of their belief that the world’s oldest hate is at work, rather than a reaction to anything they’ve done.
Worse, this grim view leads many of them, including military and political leaders, to give up on public diplomacy as hopeless. They do not understand how much the thuggery of some West Bank settlers brutalizing local Palestinians has damaged their country’s standing. They do not fully appreciate the significance of the collapse of support in both American political parties, or the alienation of some of their previously committed supporters in the Jewish and evangelical-Christian communities. “The whole world is against us,” once the refrain of a mocking song from the past century, seems to them a given. Proud, possibly overly proud, of their deepening relationships with some parts of the Arab world and with states such as India, they run the risk of losing their most valuable security and trading partners in Europe and the United States.
They see renewed bouts of battle approaching. On the Lebanon border, in particular, Hezbollah has reconstituted and begun rearming. But although it had planned, before 2023, an assault along the border similar to but on a larger scale than that of October 7, it is shifting its approach. The drone wars of Ukraine and the Persian Gulf are coming to Israel, with fiber-optic-guided drones that render the new buffer zone less relevant. Israelis know that Iran is still waiting for its opportunity, and has new weapons that can pierce their country’s sophisticated, but nonetheless limited, defenses.
Thus far the black eye patch. But there is another side as well. Israel’s economy has, astonishingly, continued to grow at 4 percent annually. Many Israelis—not just the ultra-Orthodox—continue to have families of three or more children, a stark contrast to the birth dearth of advanced societies in Europe and Asia. Israel ranks eighth in the world happiness index, just behind Norway but ahead of Switzerland, Ireland, and Canada.
Israel may be a start-up nation, but the key to its strength is social cohesion. An American businessman I asked about the difference in organizational culture noted with a grin that in the New York financial world, where he had worked, employees ate at their desk. Here, his company gives chits to workers so that they can go out together for a proper lunch. Extended families, secular as well as religious, gather for Friday-night dinners. When I waited with a colleague at a road junction near the Lebanese border to meet another friend, every car that passed—without exception—stopped and asked if we needed help.
[Graeme Wood: Israel can’t postpone its reckoning forever]
My trip began with a visit to Reichman University, Israel’s only private university. Uriel Reichman, its founder, is a former dean of Tel Aviv University law school who hated Israel’s stodgy higher-education bureaucracy. He created, over 30 years, a spectacular campus with state-of-the-art studios, classrooms, and laboratories. Reichman, now the president emeritus, is hard at work building a medical school. His modest office, and that of the current president, sits in a small, spartan one-story building on the gleaming campus. By design, he and his successor bump into students and faculty, and they into them. There are nice cafeterias on campus, but no faculty club.
My visit coincided with a memorial ceremony for Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister assassinated in 1995, who had been the victorious chief of staff during the 1967 Six-Day War. The lanky provost, a lawyer whose expertise lies in mergers and acquisitions, gave a powerful speech to the assembled students, a cheerful and fit-looking lot, even those with missing limbs from their military service. Nearby stood memorials to their fallen fellows, including one who had been taken hostage in Gaza.
He quoted Rabin’s speech given barely two weeks after the Six-Day War, while receiving an honorary doctorate from Hebrew University. The victories had been spectacular; Rabin’s tone, however, was somber. He’d asked:
What is there in common between military activity and the academic world which represents civilization and culture? What is there in common between those whose profession is violence, and spiritual values?
For Rabin, the answer lay in “the unique spirit of the entire Jewish people.” He’d continued:
We find, increasingly, a strange phenomenon among our fighters. Their joy is not total, and more than a little sorrow, and shock, permeates their celebration. There are those who do not celebrate at all. The warriors in the front lines witnessed not only the glory of victory but also its price—their comrades who fell beside them, bleeding. And I know that the terrible price paid by our enemies also touched the hearts of many of our men deeply. It may be that the Jewish people never learned, never accustomed themselves to experience the thrill of conquest and victory, and so we receive it with mixed feelings.
Hovering over the Israelis of 1967 were the horrors of the Holocaust. Today the living memories of those events are almost gone. New demons, however, haunt an Israel that has lived through more history—some of it sordid, some of it horrible—since Rabin gave his speech. The country has more things to be ashamed of, and a greater amount of things to be proud of. But surprisingly, beneath it lies, including in the living spirit of Rabin’s sober speech, more solid common ground than one might think.
Leave a Reply