Now that Hamas and Israel have entered into a ceasefire, everyone seems obsessed with who won and who lost. The Jerusalem Institute for Security and Strategy has just emailed me telling me that, “Since war is about inflicting pain, winning can be evaluated by two separate pain parameters” and claiming that Israel won on that basis.

I’m not convinced that this description of war passes muster. It wouldn’t with Carl von Clausewitz, the soldier whose book On War defined the study of warfare from 1832 right up to today. He calls war “an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfil our will”. A more philosophical ancient Chinese general, Sun Tzu, claimed that, “to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.”

But what if life is war and enemies are eternal? What if your life consists of constant struggle against adversity to succeed in your own goals? By what measure can we decide whether an individual skirmish is a success?

This makes the articles I’m seeing about who “won” the latest round of violence rather galling. No one won. There was no war and there is no peace.

The latest flare up between the two sides is almost perfect as a metaphor for the Jewish experience. After having no peace, we fought. The fighting finished and now Jews, within Israel and without, have to wait in fear for the next round of fighting.

Talk of winning and losing belongs to the same mode of thinking as those who talk about a “solution” to the conflict as if it will all just go away once a piece of paper is signed or a magic wand is waved.

Dr Toby Greene of Bar Ilan University recently wrote that, “military force will not bring strategic change…Regardless of the tonnage of bombs dropped, and the number of ‘high value’ targets destroyed or killed, the degradation of Hamas’s capabilities, the deterrence effect, the interval until the next round, is temporary, and each time Hamas has returned with enhanced capabilities. In 2014 they fired a hundred rockets a day. Now they can fire five hundred.” 

This is true but some other things are also true. Israel’s gross domestic product has grown from 310.05 billion dollars in 2014, the year of the previous Israeli Hamas clash, to 446.71 billion dollars in 2021. Israel’s unemployment rate stood at just below 6% in 2014 and had dropped to a record low of 3.4% in February 2020 when Covid-19 hit (it has since risen to 5.4%). In 2014 male Israeli soldiers were conscripted into the Israel Defence Force for three years; that has since dropped to two and half, further reducing the burden of military service.

The recent Abraham Accords that saw a normalisation of relations between Israel and several Middle Eastern countries have withstood the test of a conflagration between Israel and Hamas. Meanwhile Gaza, ruled over by Hamas, continues to be run into the ground.

Jewish people outside Israel, from London to New York City to Paris and back again, have watched antisemitic incidents take place online and in our streets. These are not the best of times. At a demonstration for Israel organised by the Zionist Federation here in London, our community sang songs of peace while at a counter demonstration opposite a man shouted, “we don’t care about death, we love death.” We’ve seen chanting for “Muslim armies” at pro-Palestine demonstrations and a car in a convoy flying Palestinian flags broadcasting antisemitic hatred. We’ve seen this and more.

But while we have seen the faces of those who hate us over the last days we also saw condemnation of that hatred from the prime minister and politicians of all stripes. The home secretary and communities secretary stopped in at Daniel’s bakery for a bagel and to give a welcome show of support for our community. The police took what must be an unprecedented step in deploying a helicopter in pursuit of the car shouting antisemitic insults and four people were quickly arrested. More arrests are likely on the way for a variety of crimes committed against Jews.

Here in Britain we thrive. We build businesses, we grow our families, we live our lives the way we wish. We’ve just seen off Jeremy Corbyn who is no longer able to represent in parliament the party he led to ruin. The man for whom antisemitism was never far away was eviscerated by the great British public who wanted no truck with him.

Over in Israel we’ve seen the Jewish state thrive to become an economic powerhouse offering freedom to its citizens on a level that is rare to find not just in the Middle East but around the world. Antisemitism is not now, nor has it ever been, a winning formula.

And so perhaps winning and losing for Jews and the Jewish state is an intertwined issue. While weighing it up I find myself thinking back to the three words that we chanted over and over again in the B’nai Brith Youth Movement. We chanted them, we sang them, we even danced to them. It was a statement of our endurance, of our continued survival as a people. Three small words.

Am Israel Chai.

And perhaps so long as the people of Israel live, even thrive, we win.