What Changed After October 7
Amid these Days of Awe, we desperately need a new vision of regional peace and prosperity.
We are in the midst of the Days of Awe. In Jewish tradition, these are the ten days that begin with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and end with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and Judgement. During the Days of Awe fates are cast: who to life, and who to death? Who by fire and who by water?
At the one year anniversary of the October 7, 2023 shock Hamas attack, it is not only Israel that is in the midst of the Days of Awe, but the entire Middle East; not only individual souls that are being tested, but entire nations, regimes, alliances, and proxies.
October 7 represented a transformative tragedy. The invasion of Israeli towns and kibbutzim by some 3000 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorists—including the murder of over 1200 Israelis, mass rape, and the kidnapping of 251 hostages into Gaza’s tunnels—triggered a brutal war that has cost the lives of over 40,000 people (mostly Palestinians) and devastated Gaza. Over 70% of buildings in the strip have been damaged and an estimated 8%–10% of the population has fled the war, primarily to Egypt. The earthquake that began on the morning of October 7 has already indelibly altered the Middle East and will continue to reverberate for years, possibly decades to come.
Twelve months on, Israel is close to achieving its goals vis-à-vis Gaza, where Hamas and the PIJ have generally been dismantled as a fighting force. Another substantial sweep through the Gaza Strip by the IDF is expected over the coming months in an attempt to recover the remaining hostages and achieve Israel’s primary war aim of ending Hamas’s control of Gaza. As long as Hamas and the PIJ are not able to be resupplied with Iranian missiles through the Philadelphi Corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border, the risk of large-scale rocket fire from Gaza has been greatly diminished.
Still, the trauma of October 7 lingers. Finding themselves defenseless for a few hours in their homes inside Israel (not in the settlements) men, women, and children were attacked with a cruelty and glee reminiscent of the worst pogroms of the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries and the Holocaust. For one day, every single Israeli—and every single friend of Israel around the world—saw exactly what would happen to 10 million Israelis—Christians, Druze, Jews, and Muslims—if Israel was ever overrun by its enemies.
The trauma has already produced several effects:
The social contract between the People of Israel and the State of Israel has been broken.
The fracture was compounded over the past year by the excruciating failure to free all the Israeli hostages—101 of which, alive and dead, are still in Hamas captivity. The breach of trust was further exacerbated by the Israeli government’s abysmal performance in the delivery of emergency public services in the weeks and months following October 7. Israeli civil society rallied heroically, but the state barely functioned. Domestically, Israel will be consumed over the next decade by efforts to both understand the causes of the colossal failures of October 7—conceptual, defensive, operational and intelligence failures—and by the fundamental need to rehabilitate public trust in the state. Doing so will require a political reckoning, which is yet to come. A year ago, in the immediate aftermath of the attack, I predicted that as long as the emergency continues, Netanyahu will survive politically, but that “if the most basic mechanisms of democratic accountability still function in Israel, Netanyahu will eventually discover that the buck really does stop with him.” A year on, those mechanisms have proven weak, and it is now likely that Netanyahu will remain in power at least until the next elections, scheduled for October 2026.
Public outrage has moved the Israeli political map further to the right, though mainly to the center right.
The notion that Hamas’s massacre should instigate a process towards Palestinian statehood is now broadly seen by Israelis as an unacceptable reward for terrorism. (According to a poll released today, a full 61% of Israeli Jews believe that Palestinians do not deserve their own state.) It also makes Israelis less sympathetic to the real suffering of the Palestinians, the majority of whom are civilians caught up in the fighting in Gaza and anti-terror military incursions in the West Bank. This will make negotiating a two-state solution even more difficult than in the past, unless a credible new regional initiative addresses the Palestinian issue within a compelling broader package for regional stability. (More on that below).
The vast majority of Israelis are convinced that deterrence has failed and that living in close proximity to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and Hezbollah is no longer a tenable proposition.
October 7 turned a disastrous Israeli strategy of concessions and accommodation into a strategy of actively dismantling the “ring of fire” built by Iran around Israel’s neck. A year after the massacre, around 100,000 Israelis remain internally displaced from their homes and communities in the south, on the border with Gaza, and in the northern part of the country, on the borders of Lebanon and Syria. Anyone who knows Israel is aware that “on the border” means literally within hundreds of feet of a fence, with Hamas, PIJ and Hezbollah fighters waiting on the other side. The number one priority for the Israeli government right now is to restore enough security to persuade the 100,000 displaced that it is safe to go back home and that another October 7 massacre will not take place, despite the repeated promise of senior Hamas officials to replicate the massacre again and again until Israel is annihilated. Reassuring the displaced is a tall order when trauma is fresh and trust is low.
Iran and Israel are on a path to direct military confrontation.
The night between April 13 and 14 earlier this year was pivotal. Iran launched 350 projectiles—drones, cruise and ballistic missiles—at a range of military and civilian targets in Israel. And on October 1, as Jews in Israel and around the world were preparing to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, Iran launched at least 180 ballistic missiles at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. For two decades, Iran’s strategy against Israel—pioneered by the late Qassem Soleimani—was one of annihilation by attrition through proxies. The strategy was simple: If little Israel (economically open and dependent on Western support) could be made domestically uninhabitable, economically weakened, and internationally isolated, it would be gradually worn down and eventually become defenseless. And while Israel was busy fighting an endless war on multiple fronts, the Ayatollah would be free to continue oppressing the Iranian people and building a nuclear bomb. Defeating Israel would be achieved not by one decisive blow, but by a million cuts from multiple proxies nurtured by Iran and housed in failed states across the Middle East. October 7 triggered a process that removed the veil of plausible deniability from the Iranian puppet master, and we are now at the beginning of an Iran-Israel War.
Away from the region itself, Israelis, like Jews all over the world, are still horrified by the ghastly scenes of celebration and “exhilaration” that exploded on elite university campuses in North America and Europe after October 7.
Calls to “globalize the intifada” and annihilate Israel—“We don’t want no two states, we want all of ‘48!”—were accompanied by physical attacks and intimidation of Jewish (not Israeli) faculty and students. To witness some of the most privileged, “progressive,” and free young people in the world openly siding with some of the most barbaric, oppressive, and cruel terrorist organizations in the world was no less shocking than the events of October 7 itself. Israelis know that these displays of ignorance and bigotry are at odds with American values, and that the vast majority of Americans, including the majority of college students, want nothing to do with a worldview that pretends mass murder and rape is “legitimate resistance.” But they also know that shockingly few influencers came to their defense as their hostages were being brutalized in Hamas’s tunnels and as they were facing a multi-front war. The silence of human rights activists and feminist organizations was particularly deafening. The moral inversion of accusing Israel (not Hamas) of “genocide” simply serves as proof to most Israelis that they can only rely on themselves. The consequence of the last year is that virtually all Israelis—and the majority of Jews in other countries—now understand the world to be far more ominous, far more callous, and far more antisemitic than they suspected before October 7. This plays straight into the hands of the far right in Israel. It will make Israelis wearier of efforts at outside intervention and determined to become more powerful and strategically self-sufficient.
One year on from October 7, what comes next?
The past few weeks have shifted the balance of fear from Rafah and Tel Aviv to Beirut and Tehran. Yet tactical military successes—even spectacular ones—do not in themselves translate into strategic gains, let alone long-term changes in geopolitical realities. If war, to paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, is politics by other means, then military victories only matter if they are subsequently leveraged for constructive changes in economic, social, and political conditions on the ground. The United States and its allies currently lack a positive, forward-looking strategy for the future of the region. Unless rectified, that vacuum will continue to be exploited by Iran, Russia, and increasingly China, at great cost to the peoples of the region and American interests.
To counter what Ambassador Dennis Ross has called Iran’s “Axis of Misery,” we urgently need to articulate and pursue an alternative vision of peace and stability in the Middle East—what we might call a Middle East Peace and Prosperity Pact. Such a pact, which can learn from the European Union’s 1999 Stability Pact for Southeastern Europe, would be built on four main pillars. First, it would involve a determined strategy of rollback and containment to counter Iran and its proxies. Second, it would double down on Middle East peace-making, building on the nearly half a century of Arab-Israeli peace negotiations. Third, it would set out a concrete vision for Palestinian national (not religious) self-determination, based on co-existence, demilitarization, deradicalization, and performance-based progress towards statehood. Fourth, it would deepen security cooperation between Israel and pragmatic Sunni Arab states, as well as some European states, and would facilitate massive investment in economic development, environmental resilience, and innovation. The Iranian people would be offered the prospect of joining the Pact if Iran gets free of the Ayatollah regime and subscribes to the Pact’s terms.
Barring such a positive, forward-looking agenda, we are virtually guaranteed to continue on a downward spiral of war, instability, refugee flows, and state disintegration in the Middle East. This will only play into the hands of the radicals in the region and serve Iranian and Russian interests, undermining American ones. These are Days of Awe indeed.
Amichai Magen is the director of the Program on Democratic Resilience & Development at Reichman University. He is a Visiting Professor and Fellow in Israel Studies at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.
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My heart is broken today so I apologize in advance for my bitter response: I think this is a naive response to the true problem. Islamic Jihad is a cancer on the world. Looking too closely at the problems in Israel is to miss the greater problem. The goal of jihad is to annihilate Israel first and then progress to foisting more life negating evil on the world from there. The West and Western theologians in particular have a duty to end this insanity. End the infection at the heart of Islam that spreads. Their is deep cowardice in the jihad rejection of life. Life takes courage; death is cowardice. They tell us again and again and again what they intend to do: love death, die and be killed. Just because this insanity does not align with what we believe does not in any way mean they do not believe it. Think of who they killed at the Nova Festival: the very Israelis who had helped them, the very people who made personal sacrifices to help them, the most peace loving people in the world who offered them their hand. Instead they shot them in the face, and beheaded and raped them, and filmed it and shared that depravity with the world. Islamic jihadists are proud of their depravity. What happened on October 7 was not a momentary lapse of morality. It is their morality. They hate life. They say it openly and behave accordingly.
While I have been grieving for the past year over the many Israeli dead and maimed--and for the hostages and their families--and I have also been appalled at the celebrations of Hamas' actions which are war crimes--I also grieve for the many thousands of innocent Palestinians who have been killed. They were human beings too. That factor receives scant mention in the author's list of horrors. Whether you accept the label of "genocide" or not, this is an overwhelming fact. Was it absolutely necessary to resort to these heavy measures to achieve goals (which to this day have not really been achieved)? Doesn't anyone think beyond their nose? This has poisoned almost any chance for Israelis and Palestinians of good will to come together to find some mode of living going forward. It will take generations for the bitterness to go, if at all. And of course, these heavy measures have rendered Israel practically a pariah state in the eyes of many in the world. The support coming from Western countries and certain Arab countries will not last forever, for even these countries and sizable sectors of their populations are demanding a stoppage of that support. In the contemporary interconnected world, with its international law (particularly as developed after World War II) few states can survive on their own, in defiance of everyone else and of international law.
Israel certainly cannot survive on its own--and it is entering into pariah-ship. And its population has widely coarsened--a state of affairs that its leadership has responsibility for, in addition to any Palestinian terror. Was all this necessary? Does the author have any idea how to move the Israeli public to understand the harm caused to everyone--Palestinians and themselves--by the measures pursued by Israel's current toxic government? I am not only talking about the attempted judicial overhaul which incensed so many people but to what always gets left out: the settlements/occupation, the settlements/occupation, the settlements/occupation--it can't be said enough, yet in the prescriptions of the author's final paragraphs, he can't bring himself to say this explicitly. All this is illegal by international law, but continues on with stupid, brazen defiance because no one among leadership or general public--or pundits writing prescriptions--will address it adequately. I have been struggling against settlements and occupation for 55 years with Israelis much better than me who have repeatedly reached out to all the Palestinians willing to see two states--and we have failed. And as ever more land was eaten up by the settlers and an increasingly brutal occupation went on, those willing Palestinians have lost heart. It was impossible to get beyond the wall of general apathy among Israelis, even in relatively peaceful times. And yes--all this is directly related to what happened on Oct 7--because the settlements and occupation are part of what fueled Hamas in spite of their being guilty of war crimes. There will probably always be terrorism coming from extremists--but by following international law, not to mention by engaging in human decency, we have a chance to gain traction to lessen that. But how will we do that with this: "On Israeli Apathy" (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/07/opinion/on-israeli-apathy.html )? Does the author have any idea of what to do explicitly about that?