Two years of war-four lessons so far

War simplifies and clarifies everything. When one’s own life or the very survival of family, friends and country is at stake, one learns to think quick and to act straight, to sweep away routine, clichés, and dead paradigms - and stick to fundamentals. 

Even Israel, a nation which has known nothing but various states of belligerency since its creation, experimented such a simplification shock on October 7, 2023, and in the ensuing two-year war : there is a huge difference between a war one believes one knows, one believes one has tamed, and a war one has never dared to imagine.

The first lesson Israel has learned, or more precisely learned again the hard way, is that its enemies do intent to destroy it utterly – not just to crush it militarily or to strip it from its independence, but to annihilate it as a country, as a society, as a population, in the most gruesome manner. They don’t wage war; they want to reenact the Shoah.

This was apparent from the Hamas fighters and supporters’ actions on the ground on October 7 – mass murder of soldiers and civilians of all age and gender, kidnapping, sequestration, rape, torture, mutilation, humiliation -, and even more shockingly, from the way they took pride in them ; from the systematic, indiscriminate bombing and shelling of Israeli civilian areas by missiles and rockets fired by Hamas, Hizbullah, Iran, the Houthis, which led, in those instances where the Israeli antimissile systems were not fully effective, to heavy human and material losses ; from the public statements of political and military leaders, including such figures as Iranian General Hossein Salami, the commander of the Islamic Revolution’s Guards Corps, about the systematic annihilation of Israel, before and during the two-year war; from the multifaceted propaganda narrative of the Iranian regime and its proxies about the coming destruction of the Jewish State ; and, last but not least, from their most successful propaganda slogan, From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free, which means that the existing country of Israel must disappear.

The second lesson is how physically close the enemy can be.

Thaddée Diffre — a 36-year-old French senior civil servant, a practicing Catholic and a hero of the Resistance, chose to fight alongside the Jews of Palestine in their war of independence. 

Here is how he described Tel Aviv in April 1948: “People move about with an air of cheerfulness and ease, intent on their daily business. Dressed alike in khaki, soldiers and civilians are indistinguishable. 

It seems almost impossible to believe there is a war. And yet, the Arabs are scarcely five hundred meters from the Park Hotel, where the whole town comes to dance each evening. There are streets where one must hug the walls to get home, for fear of a burst of gunfire — but no one appears concerned. Life goes on.”

Seventy-five years later, Israel looked very much the same. It had won wars, consolidated its territory, and grown into a scientific and technological superpower; its population had risen ten times in eighty years, from one to ten million, and its GDP two hundred times, from $2.5 billion to $550 billion (in 2025 dollars). However, in the first hours of October 7, the enemy was still “five hundred meters away”.

Hamas bands had managed to cross the narrow no man’s land between the Gaza strip and Israeli territory at dawn to carry out their barbaric massacres in more than twenty localities. 

It is now known that Hamas had planned to press its advantage much further: advancing toward the center of Israel, where more than half the population is concentrated, mounting a raid on the Dimona nuclear facility and possibly splitting Israel in two by linking up with armed jihadist groups from the West Bank. Given the country’s compact geography, this plan was by no means unrealistic.

It is hard to fathom that Israel’s war machine — which would soon display its full might — could have failed to foresee and prevent such an attack. 

Conversely, it is just as hard to believe that the Palestinians of Gaza, who had much to gain from peaceful coexistence with Israel and everything to lose by betraying it, could have carried it out. Yet the fact remains that it did happen — and that, given the intricate interlocking of Israeli and Arab territories, and even within Israel itself between Jewish-majority areas and Muslim enclaves, similar scenarios could occur again. This will continue to lie, whether explicitly or implicitly, at the core of Israel’s self-image and its strategic thinking.

Polls consistently show that an overwhelming majority of Israelis oppose the establishment of a Palestinian State on the West Bank and in Gaza: 64 % “under any condition” according to a Tel Aviv University/Institute for National Security Studies poll released in January 2025, 81 % according to a DirectPolls/Israel Hayom enquiry in April 2025. 

Likewise, nearly 70 % consider extending Israel’s sovereignty over at least parts of Judea and Samaria. Which may explain why Avigdor Liberman’s Israel Beitenu, a major opposition party, supported a bill to that end in October 2025.   

The third lesson from October 7 and the Two Years War is that, beyond the issue of incoherent borders and ethnic intricacy, there is something inherently dangerous for a nation to be small. A small size is a form of weakness or vulnerability — and weakness almost automatically invites aggression, as Thucydides icily observed in The History of the Peloponnesian War.

Israel’s area is 22,000 square kilometers — the size of New Jersey — against Iran’s 1.6 million square kilometers, Egypt’s 1 million square kilometers and Turkey’s 783,000 square kilometers (respectively 75, 45 and 35 times smaller). 

The same ratios hold true in demographics: Israel’s ten million (or eight million if one is to focus on the Jewish population only) are less than one tenth of Egypt’s 106 million, and less than one ninths of Iran’s 89 million and Turkey’s 86 million. Moreover, two-thirds of Israel’s population are concentrated between Greater Tel Aviv and Greater Jerusalem, on less than 3,000 square kilometers — roughly the size of Long Island.

Israel’s slender size may be one of the main reasons why it has been under attack for nearly a century. A larger and more populous nation tends to believe it can defeat a smaller and less populous one — if not in a single battle, then over the course of several. It seems self-evident that a great nation can lose several wars without endangering its very existence, whereas a single defeat may spell the destruction of a small one.

This cynical albeit relatively rational perception becomes irresistible when it merges, as it is the case in the Middle East, with irrational or pulsional assumptions — such as the cult of violence for its own sake or the demonization of the Jews. 

Worse still, such third parties as the Western nations and the non-Islamic, non-Western world, may conclude that there is little sense in supporting Israel, even in the face of the most brutal aggressions. This, in turn, leads them to believe that the most “charitable” course of action is to induce Israel to some form of surrender — the sooner, the better.

One way to correct — or counterbalance — this kind of probabilistic reasoning, is to expand Israel’s territory as much as possible and to increase its Jewish or Jewish-compatible population in a significant way. 

Hence, on the one hand, the aforementioned reluctance to renounce a national perimeter that includes Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights, even to secure further peace treaties with neighboring countries or with the Islamic world at large. 

And, on the other hand, an understanding that immigration and a high birthrate must be encouraged among every group of Jews. 

Whatever the serious problems involved with the insulated ultra-Orthodox community, including its rejection of the draft as it is now, and its shunning of much of secular education, it is in demographic terms the most dynamic sector of Israeli society: even from a fully secular vantage point, a Haredi neighborhood may be better than no Jewish neighborhood at all. Conversely, even the Haredi sector may feel safer with secular, non-Orthodox, Jewish neighbors than with no Jewish neighbors at all.

The most effective way to correct smallness is however to seek and maintain a significant qualitative edge over all its adversaries. This amounts, in effect, to introducing a second equation: the probability of being annihilated in a conflict with the Jewish state must appear greater than that of destroying it.

This form of deterrence, based on the outcome of the Yom Kippur War and the realization that Israel had a strategic “nuclear potential”, convinced Anwar el-Sadat in 1977 of the need for a peace agreement with Menachem Begin. 

It provided the background of the Abraham Accords in 2019, including a prospective peace with Saudi Arabia. 

And the present projects for a regional peace under the aegis of Donald J. Trump owe much to Israel’s strikes on seven targets at least, increasingly powerful and increasingly distant: Hamas in Gaza and Qatar, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, pro-Iranian regimes or militias in Syria and Iraq, and Iran itself.

Achieving or maintaining a qualitative edge implies enormous investments in national cohesion, motivation, mobilization, training, fundamental and applied science, technology, innovation. It entails a succession as well of difficult if not impossible choices. 

Some have argued that the security lapses revealed by Hamas’s assault on October 7, 2023, were the direct consequence of the kontzeptsia — the strategic doctrine Israel had embraced since the 1990s. 

For many reasons, ranging from the Revolution in Military Affairs to mere budgetary constraints, it privileged high technology, air power, and elite formations over conventional forces, armor, and infantry, favoring “surgical” strikes to full-scale operations. Yet, paradoxically, the same kontzeptsia forged the offensive and defensive weapons that enabled Israel to regain its footing almost overnight and to secure a string of decisive victories.

What emerged from the war so far is the need for a much larger, much more self-reliant army, with both more human manpower (the ultra-Orthodox exemption must be revisited in a realistic way) and more innovative technology. 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was scolded for the “Athens and super-Sparta” speech he delivered on September 15 at the Accountant General’s Conference: namely for the contention that Israel might have in the near future to rely both on its Athenian resources (cultural vitality, intellectual brilliance, innovation) and a “super-Spartan” dimension (military strength, autarky on many fields). 

The uproar and the panic at the Tel-Aviv Stock Exchange were such that he said the day after that “he had been misunderstood”. The truth, however, is that he was too well understood and that most Israelis knew that his metaphor was an apt description of their present and coming situation.

One of the reasons Netanyahu gave for a “super-Spartan” Israel was the prospect of “a growing diplomatic and economic isolation”. 

Indeed, the fourth lesson of October 7 and the war is that no matter what, Israel “dwells alone” (to quote the Bible) and runs the risk of being betrayed by many of its “lovers” (to quote the Bible again), those nations that had hitherto promised support and protection.

This is a bitter lesson: the most bitter of all. In the wake of October 7, it was assumed that, given the barbarity that Hamas had exhibited, global opinion would swing lastingly in Israel’s favor. Quite the opposite occurred: October 7 became the starting point of an unprecedented surge of anti-Israeli hatred — not only in countries traditionally hostile or indifferent to the Jewish state or to Jews at large, but even within what might once have been considered the sanior pars of global opinion: Western democracies. 

Many leaders who had hurried to Jerusalem in the early days to show solidarity with Israel soon began to back away — and some went so far as to denounce it. 

The most sordid, or perhaps the most histrionic, example was French President Emmanuel Macron, who, during his visit in late October 2023, spoke of building an international coalition against Hamas, modelled on the one that had confronted the Islamic State a decade earlier — only to cast himself, less than two years later, as a champion of Palestine.

Naturally, the nations that have been betraying Israel, or distancing themselves from it, have tried to justify their stance. 

Their arguments boil down to two claims: that Israel’s response was disproportionate and now amounts to a war crime or even genocide; and that the criticism is not directed at Israel itself, but at its “far-right” prime minister and government. 

These claims are not serious: the Gaza genocide claims, for instance, had been voiced exactly in the same words at every limited round of fighting between Israel and Hamas in the past; likewise, every predecessor of Netanyahu has been depicted at times as an extremist, a warmonger or a fascist. Nor are they sincere: they can barely conceal other motives.

The Western governments that have turned against Israel in the past two years all belong to the left or center-left and have come to realize that their political survival depends on electorates deeply hostile to Israel, whether rooted in the far left or in immigrant communities from the Global South. 

In France, President Emmanuel Macron began to edge away from Israel once his advisers showed him that his proposal for an international coalition against Hamas had alienated immigrant voters — a demographic segment expected to expand significantly. 

His first move, after recognizing this, was to stay away from a Paris march against antisemitism attended by all political parties except the far left. Similar situations have arisen in more countries under a liberal administration: the UK, Canada, Australia, and even the United States under Joe Biden. 

The transformation of the Democratic Party, up to the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City in 2025, has been a profound shock in this respect to America’s Jews, who for many of them had viewed it as their natural home — almost a family of sorts.

In many instances, the turn against Israel is not even related primarily to electoral calculation but to sheer antisemitism, or the sheer satisfaction to be allowed again to be openly anti-Jewish. Centuries-old anti-Jewish ideas or obsessions are embedded in the collective psyche, not only in the Western and Islamic cultures, but throughout a global civilization largely shaped by Western culture; and if repressed for a long period, they are likely to come back with a revenge. 

There was a lot a naivety in the belief that, after 1945, antisemitism would not be countenanced again. It was even more naïve to take statements against racism and antisemitism at face value – and to ignore the deep psychological reflex by which identification turns into inversion, and perpetrators seize the moral identity of their victims.

Ironically, while the Western right has struggled to shed the antisemitic reflexes that once marked its worldview and has steadily drawn closer to Israel, the left — long considered immune since the Dreyfus Affair — has drifted toward new forms of antisemitism and a rabid hostility towards the Jewish state. 

When Spain’s Socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, laments that his country does not possess nuclear weapons to use against Israel, he stands amazingly close to the new Shoah fantasies of the Iranian regime and its ilk.

Can Israel break out of its isolation? Quite possibly. As much attention should be paid to the countries, governments, parties, and thinkers that have supported Israel over the past two years as to those that have turned against it. 

One should also recall that many of the states, governments, or opinion-makers who seem to have embraced the Palestinian cause are ready to revise their position — if Israel proves resilient enough, or if America holds fast to its pro-Israeli stance.

It is also, in large measure, a question of communication. Much has been written in Israel over the past two years about the country’s “Waterloo” in this domain. 

Yet the uncomfortable truth is that at least half of the arguments and materials used by Israel’s detractors originate within Israel itself — produced either by self-destructive far-left elites or by centrist and left-leaning circles persuaded that the country’s difficulties will disappear once Netanyahu and the right are gone.

Piously transmitted to liberal sectors of the Diaspora and, from there, to Israel-skeptical media, these narratives are eventually recycled by the most radical anti-Israeli propaganda. That is Israel’s true weak point — and repairing it should be prioritized.