RUTHFULLY YOURS

Over the past two years of war in the Middle East, I have often quoted the famous Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz. Among his most famous insights about the art of war was that an army should attack its opponent at its opponent’s center of gravity. On October 7, 2023, it appeared to me that Hamas had done what terrorist groups are so good at doing, which is to add a type of jujitsu into the art of war.

Today you do not attack your enemy at their center of gravity because if you do, in this non-Napoleonic era, you are likely to lose. Instead you try to unsettle your enemy’s advantages by tackling them at their weakest points—by hitting them at their most vulnerable place, throwing them off balance. That is what Hamas terrorists did two years ago this morning when they struck not the headquarters of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) or the nuclear plant at Dimona, but peaceful kibbutzim and a dance party.

It has been my privilege during the past two years to spend a lot of my time with the people of Israel and with Jewish communities around the world. That has, among other things, given me the opportunity to rethink, listen to other voices, and make alterations or refinements to points I have tried to make. One such example came recently, after a woman who had read my book on this conflict reacted to my Clausewitz point. “You know, I think you’re wrong,” she said. “I think they did hit us in our center of gravity that day. Not in the military sense but in our soul.” And I think she was right.

Two years on from that day, similar attacks have happened again and again. When a young couple were shot to death on the streets of Washington, D.C., in May by a man shouting “Free Palestine,” the media focused on the fact that the two—Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky—happened to be staffers at the Israeli embassy. The more salient point was that it could have been anyone who had been exiting the event they had been at. The event was being held at the Capital Jewish Museum. In Boulder, a Holocaust survivor was burned by an assailant with a flamethrower at a rally to secure the release of hostages. In April, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s home was firebombed by a suspect motivated, he said, by what Shapiro wanted “to do to the Palestinian people.”

Countries that used to be seen as safe refuges for Jews—Australia, Canada—now see routine shootings and firebombings at yeshivas and synagogues, the vandalizing of Jewish-owned businesses, and repeated efforts to attack not the hardest possible targets but the softest and often the most meaningful ones.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas chose to attack the Jewish state on the Jewish religious festival of Simchat Torah. This year it was a jihadist named Jihad al-Shamie who chose to launch an attack in Manchester, England, as Jews were going into synagogue to observe the festival of Yom Kippur.

Many who are outside the Jewish community hear about “the war” and think of Israel. But in fact, two wars have been raging over the past two years.

The first is the war that the state of Israel has been fighting against its enemies, including Iran and its proxies in the region. The second is the war that has been fought against Jews in the wider West. One of those conflicts is in the process of being won. The other feels like it is being lost.

First, the good news. In just under two years Israel has managed to accomplish a bewildering number of military victories. Contrary to the expectations of much of the world’s media, Israel’s military and political leadership reacted carefully to Hamas’s assault. Given that Hezbollah joined the war on October 8, Israel faced the possibility from the start of having to fight a war on two fronts. So the country’s leadership decided to take the war in stages. That was a wise decision.

They focused first on Gaza, putting intense military pressure on the leadership and membership of Hamas in Gaza. After achieving military control over most of the strip and killing Hamas’s leadership—including the architect of the massacre, Yahya Sinwar—the Israel military turned its attention to Lebanon, where the arsenal of rockets that Hezbollah had built up since the end of the 2006 war were significantly neutralized. By the first anniversary of October 7, not only was the leadership of Hamas mainly dead, but the head of Hezbollah, Hasan Nasrallah, was killed in a bunker in Beirut. This happened just days after he had seen his own friends and colleagues collapse when Mossad managed to pull off their pager operation against Hezbollah’s membership—one of the most successful and targeted anti-terrorism operations in history.

That was the moment when the first war started to turn around. Or as one Israeli friend memorably said to me, it was “the moment when we could hold our heads up again.” Because October 7 had been not just an atrocity but a trauma; a trauma centered in the fear that the whole promise of Israel—that here at least was a country where Jews could be safe—had suddenly had a question mark put over it.

With Hamas and Hezbollah decimated, in June of this year, Israel turned its focus on these terror groups’ paymaster, Iran: In a 12-day campaign, Israel—with America’s intervention in its final stage—struck right at the heart of the top existential threat to the Jewish state: the Iranian Revolutionary Government’s nuclear program. The success of that operation has been debated but there is no question that the program has been set back, and the regime weakened.

So in a sense, the war that Sinwar unleashed has been catastrophic for him and his true believers. He and almost every one of his colleagues are dead. And at the time of this writing, the remains of Hamas are negotiating a ceasefire.

That ceasefire includes Israel achieving both of its war aims: the release of the remaining hostages and Hamas giving up control of Gaza. That is a historic achievement not just of the IDF and Israel’s other security apparatus, but of the country’s political leadership. In a country with eight million or so would-be prime ministers and millions of other people around the world who seem to believe they know what they would do, the achievement of the country’s war aims is something that should be lingered over and celebrated.

But there is another war that Sinwar unleashed on October 7, 2023. And that is the one that he and his allies have sadly been winning. That is the war outside of the region: the war to turn Israel into a pariah state, and to turn Israelis and any supporters of the Jewish state into pariahs, too.

It is not necessary to rehearse the vast litany of insanity and anti-Jewish hatred that has been unleashed in the West since October 7. The Free Press has charted this as well or better than anybody. But in every country I have been in since October 7, the story has been the same. In Canada, America, Britain, France, South Africa, Australia, and elsewhere, countries that seemed to have been safe havens for the Jewish people, places where Jews had contributed and felt secure for years, were suddenly places where the same question was asked everywhere: Is it time to leave?

This is not the result of Jewish paranoia. It is a reflection of reality. It is a reaction to the fact that each of these countries has seamlessly slipped into a permissive attitude (at best) toward the world’s oldest hatred.

Even 10 years ago it would have seemed impossible that Ivy League universities in America would have become epicenters of support not for the Palestinian cause but for Hamas. If you had told me 25 years ago, when I first visited Princeton, that students at the university in the 2020s would be found chanting “Glory to our martyrs,” even in my most pessimistic moments I would have accused you of being an alarmist.

Why did the lie that Israel was committing—and indeed intended to commit—“genocide” in Gaza take root? Why did some of the world’s most prominent politicians, podcasters, pundits, and others take the charges of the most intense anti-Israel activists and repeat these claims as accepted fact? Why did many of the most educated people in the West take the side of death cults from the very moment that Hamas attacked Israel? How was it that in every major city across Europe the streets have been clogged up with anti-Israel protests week in and week out, but that a brave young Iranian holding up a sign stating British government policy in London (“Hamas are terrorists”) should be repeatedly detained by the British police?

Why, within two years of October 7, should the governments of France, Britain, Australia, and Canada abandon their claim that they stood with the victims of Israel and instead reward Hamas’s aggression with their unilateral recognition of a nonexistent Palestinian state? Why should it be that on the streets of Milan, a mob of demonstrators should have recently started smashing up buildings because their government—the government of Giorgia Meloni—had not similarly recognized this entity?

Israel has been winning its war. But in the wider war—the war for our civilization—we are losing.

It seems to be in the nature of many who support the Jewish state to imagine that if we refine our arguments, find a better way of explaining the history, or counter each piece of misinformation, we will be able to change hearts and minds.

But at some stage you have to admit that this tactic has largely failed. We may have the facts on our side, but the facts have become meaningless to so many.

When Charlie Kirk was assassinated last month it took erstwhile friends of his a matter of days to start speculating that the Jews or Israel killed him. These podcasters and others dishonored his memory by claiming that the person caught by the FBI for carrying out the shooting could not have done it, or could not have acted alone. Soon a full-on twenty-first-century stampede was in operation. When the Israeli prime minister issued a video saying that of course Israel had nothing to do with the murder of one of its most prominent American conservative supporters, those who spread the libel doubled down. “I never have to admit not to have killed someone I haven’t killed,” they trilled. Because of course if an Israeli prime minister did not make a statement on this then the Jews could be accused, and if he did deny it then the Jews could be accused.

Why do people do this? Not because of a dearth of facts or knowledge, but because they like to watch Jews squirm.

People of good character see what these propagandists are doing. They may not have the audience of the same size, but they have truth and morality on their side.

It is these people who give me the most hope. The Jews and Christians of all ages who have seen that this is a time to engage at a deeper level. I know Jews of all ages who have responded to the horror of October 7 and the hatred that has poured out since not by trying to hide their faith and culture but by engaging in it more fully and more deeply. I think of a friend in New York in his 50s who has finally decided to learn Hebrew, and slogs through the prayers at the back of his synagogue. I think of the young Jews and Christians I have met who are suddenly engaging with their holy books again.

I have found myself thinking about scripture and quoting scripture more often in the past two years than perhaps at any other time in my adult life. And I have become especially fond of quoting my favorite book: Ecclesiastes. But I now have a lot of rabbis in my life—more than most Jews I know. And one of the blessings of that is that I get to learn from them, onstage and off.

I was recently speaking at a fundraiser in Baltimore to rebuild the kibbutz of Nir Oz. It is a community with a special place in my heart because I saw what had been done to it on that horrible day. The kibbutz of 400 people suffered the greatest loss per capita of any community; around a quarter of its residents were either killed or kidnapped into Gaza on the day.

But almost two years on I had gathered with friends, including two families from the kibbutz who had suffered terrible loss but intended to rebuild their lives there. They included Gadi Moses, who had been held hostage in Gaza for 482 days.

I was compelled during that gathering to quote one of my favorite passages in Ecclesiastes, about there being a time for everything. But the rabbi added to what I said and thought, as so many people have done over the past two years. Did I know Yehuda Amichai’s take on this, he asked? I didn’t, and so he recited it to me. It has stuck with me. And so I do here, what Jews and friends of the Jewish people have realized in recent years is the one thing we can do, which is to pass it on. To not be thrown off or lose our own center of gravity. However hard that can be, and however hard our enemies try.