I spent last week in Israel, my second visit since the October 7 massacre. Thanks to the Jerusalem Press Club, which hosted a small group of English-speaking journalists, I spent time in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, the “envelope” around the Gaza Strip and the Lebanon border region, meeting heroes who had saved dozens of lives, relatives of those taken hostage and many others from diverse walks of life.
It was not a comforting experience and it left me convinced that the dangers facing the Jewish state are now even greater than when I was there in early January.
Back then, many Israelis were deriving solace from the hope that, terrible as the Hamas attack had been, it had gone a long way to heal the deep social and political rifts exposed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt to “reform” Israel’s judiciary. They also believed that although the war had been dreadful, it was probably nearing its end.
Five months later, both those aspirations look like distant goals.
In January, Israel appeared to have eliminated Hamas as an organised fighting force from all but Gaza’s south. The terror group’s last strongholds were located in Rafah, the town on the Egyptian border to which more than a million Palestinians had fled, and although Israel was facing mounting international pressure to allow more aid and reduce civilian casualties, it still seemed reasonable to think that a final military push might soon realise Israel’s twin war aims: The release of the remaining hostages and the eradication of Hamas.
Well, after months of hiatus, in the face of strong opposition by America, operations in Rafah have finally begun. Last weekend, they appear to have caused the deaths of dozens of Palestinian civilians who had sought refuge in what was supposed to be a safe area, an outcome Netanyahu has described as a “tragic mistake”. Yet Hamas has not only been launching rockets from Rafah aimed at Tel Aviv, it has returned in strength to parts of northern Gaza, which has seen fierce fighting for most of this month.
Meanwhile, up on the frontier with Lebanon, the slow-burning conflict with Hezbollah is getting more intense and there is currently no prospect of the 100,000 Israelis displaced from their homes there being able to return. I met some, eking out a wretched, rootless existence in what would normally be a holiday resort on the shores of Lake Kinneret. They were far from happy.
As for the hostages, since the truce in November the only signs of them have been seen in grisly Hamas propaganda videos. Following the discoveries of some of their corpses, many Israelis I spoke to suspect most of them are dead.
And that reborn national unity? The centrist component of Netanyahu’s coalition led by Benny Gantz has threatened to depart because of the absence of anything resembling a plan for the “day after” the conflict, a move that would increase Bibi’s dependency on the far right, which is widely reviled in Israel, by Jews in the diaspora and by the country’s allies.
Unlike President George W Bush after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, there was no post-terror boost in the polls for Netanyahu: his approval rating has barely budged at around 30 per cent. But now, as the grim reality of the war continues to permeate, the divisions that were so visible in 2023 are back with a vengeance, focused especially on the perceived lack of action to bring the hostages back.
One of the most sobering conversations I had was with Sarit Zehavi, a former military intelligence lieutenant-colonel who runs the Alma Centre think tank a few miles from the Lebanon border. The evidence from old videos produced by Hezbollah demonstrates, she said, that the invasion, murder and kidnapping plan enacted by Hamas on October 7 had actually been devised originally by their northern terrorist siblings.
The anti-tank projectiles and other weapons being launched by Hezbollah every day do not, of course, amount to an attack on anything like that scale. But according to Zehavi, “Hezbollah’s strategic goal is to create fear among Israelis, so those of us who have been displaced don’t come back”, and the knowledge that Hezbollah is just as ready to perpetrate Hamas-style atrocities intensifies it.
Iron Dome can deal with most of the rockets being fired by Hezbollah now. But if Israel launched an all-out war, aimed at driving Hezbollah back to the Litani river in accordance with UN resolution 1701, it would likely deploy much bigger, faster, precision-guided missiles capable of reducing landmark buildings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to rubble. Is there something short of that which would restore Israeli deterrence and permit the residents of once-paradisical northern border kibbutzim to feel secure?
In January, Zehavi said, she thought there might be, especially if Israel had meaningful support from its allies. But now she is more pessimistic, not least because Israel’s diplomatic isolation continues to deepen: “We’ve taken out a few Hezbollah commanders. But that’s nothing like enough.” As a mother, she went on, what she feared most was a “peace” deal imposed at America’s behest that left Hezbollah still intact and entrenched in southern Lebanon – and ready, when the moment came, to pounce.
Israel has had to fight many wars in its 76-year history and most have been short: one, famously, lasted just six days. The current conflict is already almost 40 times as long and in both the north and the south is bogged down in a stalemate, which this week’s civilian deaths in Rafah are certain to make worse.
I always feel a little sad when I board my plane home from Israel. This time, I felt fearful.
