The View From Israel One Year After October 7

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

A year has passed since Hamas’s October 7 assault on Israel sparked a brutal war in Gaza, one that is now spreading north into Lebanon and threatening to reel in bigger powers, including the United States.

“But the war has always been bigger than Israel and Hamas,” writes Ari Shavit in a new essay for Foreign Affairs. In his view, and in the view of many Israelis, the main threat not only to Israel, but also to the free world, is Iran backed by Russia and China. Shavit, a leading Israeli writer, has spent decades trying to make sense of his country’s identity, its democracy, and its role in the Middle East. I spoke with him on October 4 about how Israelis are thinking about the conflict as it enters its second year and what it will take to bring about peace.

Ari, thank you for being here, and thank you for the powerful piece that you just published in Foreign Affairs on the one-year anniversary of the October 7 attacks.

ARI SHAVIT

Thank you so much, Dan. It’s a pleasure to be with you.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I actually want to start not by talking about what’s happening now, but by looking backwards, given the week we’re in. What, as you see it, does the rest of the world miss about the effect of October 7 on Israelis, or, put differently, about how the attacks reshaped Israeli security objectives, fears, politics? And how has that changed the sense of the event and its significance in the past year?

ARI SHAVIT

Look, one cannot overestimate the importance of the trauma of October 7, 2023. I think, in a sentence, it ended a 50-year golden era of Israeli relative security. With all the problems we have, and we always have problems, but for nearly half a century, there was no real, immediate, existential threat to Israel. And with all the problems of our horrible politics, life here was great. There was prosperity. Israel joined the world. We literally joined the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development]. Israelis endorsed a kind of sushi and NASDAQ culture, where we really thought that we are like an extension of Manhattan. And what October 7 did is take us back in time. I mean, October 7 was in one way a pogrom. It took us back to our traumatic Jewish past. It was the worst atrocity since the Holocaust. And in an Israeli way, it really took us back in time to 1948 or 1950 or something, when we were a small, intimidated nation.

I’m not saying that this is the case, but emotionally we were suddenly confronted with our tragic, existential condition. The Israeli condition is a tragic one. We are indeed a frontier democracy that tries to live the life of a liberal democracy in an impossible surrounding. We are indeed a kind of oasis of liberty in a region that has no liberty. We are surrounded by tyranny and fanaticism. And for decades, our relative success—our economic success, our high-tech success, our military success—enabled us to ignore all that. So we really thought that we lived like you guys.

I have two younger sons, and they are globalized kids. They are at home in New England or California because their lives are like the lives of young American boys. And suddenly, we became Jewish again, and we became intimidated in a fundamental way. And what made it so much worse is the atrocities, because atrocities really turned it from just a horrible security event into something demonic. I mean, there was something about the raping of the women, the kidnapping of the children, the beheading of the men, the burning families alive—that’s medieval stuff. That’s not 50 years back in time; that’s a thousand years back in time. The shock—to this day, by the way—I think that this country, this nation, is in trauma. The pain, the human pain here is incredible. But the essence of it is really that suddenly we realized that our life is very different than we thought—that we lived in a kind of illusion, and we have to go back to basics.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I think we last met in Tel Aviv in early 2020, and that was certainly the part of Israel where you can feel like you’re in New York or in a European city. And I was struck when we spoke then that there was some discussion in Israeli politics of some of the regional security threats: Hezbollah, Iran at that point. But the Palestinian issue, which is in some ways at the core of that tragedy, had almost completely fallen out of political discourse. There were things happening on the ground in the West Bank. There was annexationist pressure and settlement development and everything else. Before October 7, of course, conditions in Gaza were not exactly idyllic for lots of reasons. But that was not a particularly salient issue in Israeli politics.

ARI SHAVIT

Absolutely. I’ll say this: I think that part of this state of mind was that Israelis felt they managed to escape the Middle East. I think there was some sort of illusion here. We lived somewhere between Mykonos, Ibiza, Amsterdam, and New York. And suddenly, the Middle East was here. Now, regarding the issue you referred to, there was blindness all around.

Now, regarding the Palestinian issue, there was right-wing blindness and there was left-wing blindness. The conservative blindness is to see the Palestinians are here; and with all of Israel’s success, the situation is unbearable, unacceptable, and you have to do something about it. Most conservative Israelis ignore that, and they believe that because we are strong and prosperous, we can somehow ignore the existence of the Palestinians and the Palestinian issue. The liberal blindness was to see that sadly, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not about settlements, and it’s not about the West Bank, and it’s not about Israeli occupation. It’s about the very existence of a Jewish democratic state in this land.

And what was October 7? It was, one, an attack on the Jewish state—on the very idea of a Jewish state—because it happened just in the one place where Israel withdrew to the 1967 lines and dismantled settlements. And rather than to get peace, we got the worst terror attack ever. And it was an attack on peace-loving Kibbutzniks and life-loving clubbers, festival-goers, which is an attack on the idea of liberty—of freedom of the life that we want to live. So the conflict, sadly, is an existential and deep conflict about the very existence of a Jewish democratic state.

Now, if I can combine it with what we just said, October 7 is 9/11 on steroids. Imagine America being attacked on 9/11, but with al-Qaeda controlling Mexico and Iran in Canada and 10,000 Americans kept in tunnels, in captivity.

I’ll tell you something personal, if I may. Now, we lived a sheltered nice life in the suburb of Tel Aviv, and so we were not immediately affected, thank God. But for weeks and months, my wife, my dear ones, my neighbors, they kept seeing Nukhba Hamas terrorists in our gardens. The feeling was that nothing is safe, that there is no safety whatsoever. And for a country that accomplished so much—I mean that gave the Jews liberty, sovereignty, dignity, prosperity in the way they never had before for many years—this was a horrible shock. And to this day, I think that’s a shock for all of us that we are still trying to deal with.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

If you could go back to a year ago and tell yourself then where things stand now—both the situation in Gaza, the fact that the hostages are still in tunnels and the war continues, and the extent of Palestinian suffering in Gaza, the regional dimensions, the fact that Bibi is not just in power, Prime Minister Netanyahu is not just in power but gaining in popularity—what would surprise you and what would not?

ARI SHAVIT

I think there were three phases to this year. I think in the first phase, which is the last quarter of 2023, with all the agony and shock, Israel reacted in a remarkable way. I mean the social solidarity here, the civilian heroism. The army recovered, society united, we had a unity government. So there was a feeling that, faced with this terrible trauma and danger, we do come together, and you saw the greatness of the people of Israel. Look, I am very critical of our government and our prime minister. In a sense, we fought this war as orphans. I mean, we didn’t have a real leadership to follow. And the strength that came out of Israeli society—young people, soldiers, the hostages’ families, the people who became refugees—it was incredible. There was a shock, but there was amazing resilience and internal human strength.

The first half of 2024 was very bad because everything that I’ve just described gradually was eroded. We were back to petty politics. The government didn’t function. The army lost its sense of direction. There was no strategy. So there was growing despair. I think that the last month or two, within ten days, between September 17 and September 27, Israel changed its image in the region and in the mind of its own citizens. I mean, the success, what happened in the north, we don’t know yet where it’s going. But the fact that after having so much failure in every way—political failures, strategic failures, military failures in the south—suddenly the war in the north was handled with amazing intelligence, with mind-boggling accuracy and technology. And Hezbollah, that seemed much more dangerous than Hamas and probably still is, was hit in such a way that suddenly there is a new feeling of strength, first of all regarding our neighbors and our enemies. Israeli deterrence is back.

I mean, Israel cannot live without very strong deterrence. And deterrence was cracked on October 7, and we didn’t manage to rebuild it. Now it’s back. There are a lot of dangers; there are great risks ahead. Now, I try to tell my fellow Israelis, “Beware, don’t become too euphoric. Don’t become too vain again. Don’t think that we can do everything.” But in a sentence, there was such a feeling of danger and almost helplessness, which is contrary to the Israeli DNA, and now there is a sense that definitely the army and the capabilities of Israel are back.

The political problem is still there. So definitely one of the many things that surprised me is the fact that the government, Netanyahu’s government, is in power, that there is no political change inside. If you had told me that 1,200 people will be slaughtered in such a way, we’ll have a year-long war, and still we will have the same government and there will be no political change, I think that’s a shocking surprise.

Israel is a very confusing country. It’s a very complex, human, historical phenomenon. One of the striking features of Israel is that, what I call real Israel is amazing. People here, society, economy, innovation, courage, solidarity: it’s amazing. Israel has a kind of combination of individualism with community values that gave it amazing strength. But political Israel is even worse than political America. So the gap between the strength of real people, real society, real Israel and the weaknesses and the dysfunctionality of political Israel was striking before the war, but now it’s just mind-blowing.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You suggest that the government thinks it’s in a pretty good position now, that its strategy is playing out more or less the way it wanted. I saw senior Israeli officials in New York the day that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed. And you could see the degree of assurance and confidence they seemed to have in that moment. You argue in the piece that that confidence is unwarranted, that despite a lot of those successful strikes, despite everything that they would point to as having restored deterrence, that the strategic picture when you really step back looks quite grim. What’s the cause for pessimism?

ARI SHAVIT

So, one of my claims in the piece is, you cannot win a war and you cannot survive when you are an intimidated nation like Israel without a national strategy. And we don’t have a national strategy. We didn’t have one before, that’s led to October 7, and we actually didn’t forge one until now. My claim, if I may say, is the following: We all have to understand that this is not about Israel and Hamas. That was just the symptom that erupted.

What we have here is a three-tier war, in a sense. You have the local level or sphere of Israel-Hamas. You have the regional level of Iran. And you have the global level of the Chinese, Russian, North Korean, Iranian axis attacking world order. And Israel went down into the local level. So in my mind, the real significance of October 7, beyond the Jewish and democratic aspect, is that it was an attack on the free world. It should have been perceived as Ukraine, too, at the very least, because you have a systematic attack. What you see now, that Iran is the source of instability, and I would even say the source of evil in the Middle East. Iran, I’m talking about the regime, not the people. I’m a great believer in the Iranian people. I think there is a lot of hope and promise in the Iranian people and their culture and their nation. But the regime in Iran proved to be much more dangerous than we all thought. And their idea was—and they were serious about it—really to destroy the Jewish state, to enslave the Arab world, and to confront the West. Now, many people in the West thought, “This is fantasy. This is not serious.” It’s dead serious. It’s dead serious.

So the real significance of October 7 is not only for Israelis and Jews, it’s for the entire free world that was suddenly faced with a coalition. And again, you had the radical, brutal barbarity of Hamas, but that was supported, funded by Iran. And Iran is supported by Russia, which is supported by China. So I think that you didn’t have to be Israeli or pro-Israeli, Jewish or pro-Jewish. Forget about that. This is a global issue, and it was the greatest failure, in my mind, of my government that it failed to tell that story, because it was so preoccupied with a military campaign against Hamas that it totally overlooked the Iranian dimension and the global dimension of this conflict. And in my mind, as, sadly, the war begins its second year, this is the time to redefine it. It should not be Israel against Hamas. It should be the free world against the forces attacking them.

Now, in order to do that, Israel, my government, has to deal with the Palestinian issue. Because there is no way that the West, that North America and Europe and like-minded nations will be our allies in a war to protect democracy when we are perceived as an occupying power. Now, never mind what’s right and what’s wrong about the issue of occupation. We can discuss that. Israel should have, a year ago, and it must today, do something on the Palestinian issue. Not because that can be solved tomorrow, but we have to prove that we are really part of the free world, that we fight this war in the name of liberty and for liberty for real, not as propaganda.

Israel has to bring into this alliance a real willingness to deal with the Palestinian issue in a realistic and creative way. And America and NATO and the West have to understand that this is not some local battle of two tribes in the Middle East. This concerns every family in Pittsburgh, and in Portland, Oregon and in Austin, Texas. It’s true, it’s not some sort of Israeli propaganda. And I’m shocked by the failure of my government, specifically my prime minister, to tell that story. And in a sense, I think that that’s what drove me to write this piece. Because I’ve been living with this frustration for a year—beyond the grief, fear, drama—that there is a story here that was not told, which to me seems self-evident.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

One dimension of this, and I want to get to the Israeli-Palestinian issue more broadly, but just focusing on Gaza specifically, there’s been frustration when you look at the international conversation, but also the frustration among American officials about what they see as at times an indifference on the Israeli part to the suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. And some of that’s been fights about humanitarian access. There was reporting in The Washington Post this week and the last few days about how much pressure it took from Washington just to allow basic food assistance and other aid to get into Gaza. There’s been, I think you can argue about the specifics of these numbers, but a sense that targeting has not been as careful as it might’ve been, and that there’s just a disconnect on that question of civilian casualties and civilian suffering in Gaza. To support that narrative that you are pushing, you would think that Israeli officials would be more attentive to that disconnect and more active about addressing the civilian harms in Gaza.

ARI SHAVIT

So, if I may say something in defense of my country and then critical of the policies of my government. So in defense of my country, I want to remind anyone listening to us that when President Obama led the campaign against terror, thousands and thousands, I think more than 20,000 civilians, were killed by American drones and American-supported activity. War is not pretty, and war against terror, against people who hide behind civilians, is a challenging war. And in Mosul, American-supported forces killed, I think, 9,000, 10,000—no one knows to this day how many in order to defeat ISIS. So I find it disturbing when some people don’t accept the fact that when Israelis have to defend themselves, bad things happen. So I ask people to judge Israel in the way they would’ve judged other democracies fighting such a war.

I think that my main criticism of my government is the fact that it didn’t give a horizon of peace to this war. When you are going into such a cruel, brutal war, you have to promise your own people, your neighbors, and the world that it’s leading somewhere. If the Netanyahu claim is that the Hamas people are the new Nazis—and I think he has a good point—so if you want to fight in the same way that America fought Germany in 1944, you have to promise an Adenauer future. You have to promise where it is going. You have to promise that you are going to free the Palestinians themselves from the tyranny of Hamas. You have to put it as part of a larger campaign for the good. And then people will understand the fact that you find yourself having to do brutal things because they know, at heart, that you’re fighting for peace and for goodness and for a better future.

The failure of the Israeli government to put such a horizon is, in my mind, a major mistake and a moral failure. I think that the future for Gaza—I think we need to rebuild Gaza after the war, and we need to rebuild a demilitarized and deradicalized Gaza. Hamas is totally unacceptable. These people are too dangerous, too brutal. We need a post-Hamas regime, but we have to offer a future for the people of Gaza with all the suffering they are experiencing.

So I am a great believer in the United Arab Emirates. I think that MBZ [UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed] is one of the most promising leaders in this region because he deals with all this radicalism in a very sober, intelligent, insightful way. And I think that if we had a kind of Emirates-led Arab coalition that will be responsible for the rebuilding of Gaza, that Israel can hand it over to them because, one, they and the other Gulf countries have the resources. They have the billions and tens of billions of dollars needed to rebuild Gaza. Two, they know how to build. We saw the miracle that happened in the Gulf in the last 20 to 25 years. And three, which is probably the most important of all: they know how to deal with radical, so to speak, religious forces.

I would begin the rebuilding of Gaza with building 500 shining, moderate mosques. You need to address the identity and religious issues. So you have to give the people of Gaza, you have to give them life, you have to give them livelihood, prosperity as much as possible. But you also have to offer them something that brings a promising—there is so much impressive moral, moderate Islam all around. Bring that into Gaza, because Gaza will not become Denmark, and it will not be San Francisco. The horizon for Gaza will be Dubai. I think that’s the best we can hope for. Don’t get me wrong, definitely, you will need a Palestinian element there. But I agree that the Palestinian Authority—which I’m happy they are in the West Bank and helping us fight terror and helping their citizens—I don’t think they are strong enough to rebuild Gaza.

So the good news in the Middle East is Arab modernity, moderate Arab modernity—it’s amazing good news. The bad news: we’re in a competition between radical Tehran and all of the Arab modernity all around us. If we give Gaza to the moderate Arabs to work with moderate Palestinians to build a moderate Palestinian entity in Gaza, I think we’ll know what we are fighting for. And I think we’ll be giving everybody all around some hope. And again, the main point has to be that we must free the Palestinians themselves from the radicalism and brutality of Hamas.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

When I hear you talk about a political future, a political horizon for Palestinians, I think when most Americans and U.S. officials hear that, their minds go to a two-state solution. That, to the rest of the world, is the essential ingredient to any better path, and that’s true for Israel’s security; for its identity as a Jewish democracy, as you said earlier; for Palestinians; for U.S. interests; for this enormous strategic prize for Israel of normalization with the Arab world. And yet that seems like a third rail to Israelis at this moment. There’s very little political support. There’s little chance of it getting any traction and this whole question of how you framed the narrative that you laid out earlier.

ARI SHAVIT

We all have to understand: on the one hand, Israelis have to understand that with all the pain and the suffering and the trauma they went through, they cannot ignore our Palestinian neighbors and think that just power and force will solve all their problems. But the international community has to acknowledge the fact that the attempt to bring about the old two-state solution as it was framed in the 1990s didn’t work. So this theory was tried so many times and it failed. I think it calls for creative thinking. We have to understand that on the one hand, we have to prevent the one-state disaster. One state is morally flawed, politically flawed. They tried one state in Syria, they tried one state in Lebanon. It doesn’t work. The attempts from the extreme right and extreme left to endorse the one-state solution is totally wrong. But those of us who believed in the two-state solution have to understand that what we offered and what we believed in had some flaws when it came to reality.

So we need some creative ideas of how to go in that direction. We hope that from such a deep, cruel conflict, you can jump to a total peace of two states that tomorrow morning will live in peace. We tried that. It didn’t work. You will need a profound political conversion with both people in order to have peace. Right now, we are in a very bad situation. So Palestinians will have to definitely reject extremism and radicalism, but also to acknowledge in a profound way the legitimacy of a Jewish democratic state in this land. And Israelis will have to get out of their blindness, those Israelis who don’t see it, and see that we have neighbors here in this country that we have to find a way to coexist with in a fair and respectable way.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let’s turn to the regional picture, and I do this with some hesitation given how much the situation could change within hours, let alone within days. Part of the disconnect that you’re getting at here is that when lots of people outside of Israel look at what has happened over the last year, they see it narrowly in terms of Israelis and Palestinians. And Israel in that context is clearly the more powerful party. Israelis look at a region that is full of threats, in the ways that you laid out, and big countries who talk about its destruction regularly and maliciously with tens of thousands of precision weapons on Israel’s border, and that of course leads to that sense of insecurity that you laid out.

Israel at this point has of course its own nuclear weapons, the only nuclear weapons state in the region at this point. It has the qualitative military edge from the United States. What is the theory of reversing that sense of insecurity, as you see what the Israeli government’s doing now in Lebanon vis-à-vis Iran, as we see whether we’ll respond to the missile attacks of this week? What is the theory of changing that dynamic?

ARI SHAVIT

So again, one is to address the complexity. And the complexity is that on the one hand, occupation is unacceptable and should be dealt with. But you have to understand that Israel is an intimidated nation. So both occupation and intimidation are unacceptable. If Israelis would really feel safe, believe me, we’ll have an overwhelming majority here for peace in whatever way. So the first thing, if you want Israelis to move forward, to take a leap of faith again, you have to address their legitimate fears to understand this almost tragic Israeli condition. But if you look at the Middle East and in international affairs, you have to understand that without Israel being very strong, we will never have peace. Anywhere in the world you need strength in order to survive and succeed. In the Middle East, it’s essential. You cannot survive a day.

I am a great admirer of David Ben-Gurion, the founder of Israel, and he talked about the two elements: we need strength, but we need justice. We need justice on our side, or in our terms today, we have to be on the right side of history. We have to capture the moral high ground, but at the same time, we have to be strong. If we will be weak, we will be massacred. And if October 7 taught us something, that it’s not a metaphor, it’s not a cliché. If Israel will be weak, we will all be slaughtered. Look, Israel is at the forefront and we’re in danger more than anyone else right now. But this phenomenon of radicalism, that when you have people who are willing to do what the Hamas people did, when they acquire nuclear weapons, the golden era of the post-World War will be all over.

And this is why the issue of the Iranian nuclear weapons is crucial, not only for Israel but to everybody. Because you see that there is this extremism and radicalism that really indeed attacks our world. We have to understand that if Iran goes nuclear, it won’t be Iran going nuclear. Within a year or two, Saudi Arabia will go nuclear, Egypt will go nuclear, Algeria will go nuclear, Turkey will go nuclear. You will have a multi-nuclear system—something we never tried before—in the world’s most unstable region. And that will spread to Third World countries, to Africa, to Asia. So I think that actually, my prime minister was right when he talked about the Iranian nuclear issue for many years. His major mistake: that he made it an Israeli issue. It’s not an Israeli issue. This endangers all of us.

So if we take the tragedy of October 7 and understand what was exposed and revealed on that terrible Saturday, I think it will somehow give meaning to this fight because it’ll be a wake-up call for all of us that we must unite, get over our differences, and fight evil. We are faced with evil. And I do believe that if we do wake up now we have enough power together and enough wisdom to overcome an unprecedented challenge.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me close by getting at the theories of victory that would get us to that outcome. What do you think Prime Minister Netanyahu’s theory of victory is? If he succeeds over the next six months in doing what he hopes to do, what would that look like? What would that achieve in terms of Israeli security going forward? And then how would you change that? If you could adjust the theory of victory that your own country’s government has at this point, what would you adjust?

ARI SHAVIT

I actually think that I’m very critical of a lot of his leadership in many ways. But I think that actually, in a sense, what he wanted as victory is not that different from many other players. Because I think Netanyahu really wanted the peace deal with Saudi Arabia. He did the Abraham Accords, and he should get the credit for that, and he wanted to complete that with a peace agreement with Saudi Arabia. He felt that that will give Israel prosperity and security, and that that will encircle Iran, and put Iran on the defensive. And in this sense, the Israeli center-left] the Israeli military and strategic establishment, and Mr. Netanyahu are not that much apart. The problem is that the crazy Israeli politics, the fact that he’s kept hostage by Mr. Smotrich and Mr. Ben-Gvir doesn’t allow him to pay in Palestinian currency, which is so essential to have that deal.

So we are stuck with petty, extreme politics not allowing us to do the right thing. I think that had we had in Israel a proper unity government, if we had a center-right government, it would have gone in that direction. But we are kept hostage by ten percent of our people who have a political veto because of our dysfunctional politics. Again, I would not call for a regime change in Iran immediately because we know that it has problematic connotations. But we have to understand that we will have peace and stability in the Middle East only after Iranian radicalism is defeated. I’m not saying it should be done militarily, God forbid. But I’m saying if we all unite, if America, Europe, the moderate Arabs, Israel, India, Australia, Japan, all like-minded nations, we unite in trying to deal with the Middle East issue, so at the end of the day the Iranian people themselves will rebel against their regime. It’s not that far away. Most Iranians, at least half Iranians, don’t like their regime. Iran is very dangerous and aggressive on the one hand, but it’s vulnerable and weak on the other hand. So it’s very much up to us.

So as I said, regarding Hamas and Gaza, we need to rebuild Gaza, deradicalize it, and demilitarize it. Regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, we need some sort of third way approach. Regarding the region and the world, we have to deal with the Iranian threat. If we will acknowledge the Iranian threat, it’s not too late to stop it. If we will wait and Iran will get nuclear, the price of stopping it will be ten times, one hundred times higher. So in my mind, to talk about the theory of victory, the theory of victory and the theory of peace are the same. We need a new Iran, a non-radical Iran. That the moderate Arabs and moderate Israelis will be able to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with all other issues in the region after defeating this radical dragon that is endangering everybody.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Ari Shavit, thank you for the piece you wrote for Foreign Affairs. It’s called “What Israel Lost.” And thank you so much for joining me today.

ARI SHAVIT

Thank you very much.