Return of Faith in the Righteousness of the Cause

The outgoing elite refuse to understand that Israeli society has changed for the better — it is willing to pay the price, provided we do not return to being the beaten Jews of exile. Opinion

Where is the general, the division commander, the brigade commander, the battalion commander, the pilot who will say “enough” — a well-known journalist laments and explains the absence of refusal to serve by saying that the long war has exhausted those in uniform. He appropriates the army for himself and his ilk, and he does not understand (or prefers not to understand) that the army is no longer his. He interprets the chief of staff’s obedience to the political echelon not as full support for the operation, but as an attempt to buy time through slow compliance.

That journalist embodies the greatest disconnect from the army and, in effect, from Israeli society. He does not know the fighters and commanders; he is captive to a conception that the army’s leaders are the same people he knew from another era — an era in which former chiefs of staff and heads of Shin Bet, shamefully, today disparage our soldiers by claiming they are baby-murderers for sport, are conducting genocide operations, starving children, and portray the Government of Israel as embarking on a predatory war and abandoning hostages. Those filmed smiling with violent protesters see nothing wrong in it.

This anachronism characterizes many media figures who do not understand that Israeli society has changed — and with it, the army. Israeli society is seasoned in reckless deals in which thousands of terrorists with blood on their hands were released, led by the arch-murderer Yahya Sinwar. Deals that exacted a terrible price in blood. The public is determined to achieve an absolute victory, longs to see the hostages home — some are even sons of the Forum Tikva families who lead the demand for total victory. Brave families who are frantic with worry for their loved ones in captivity, but who also care for their other children and for the whole of Israel so they will not live under a constant threat of kidnappings and terror attacks. Such things would happen, heaven forbid, if a reckless deal that leaves Hamas intact in Gaza were made.

It seems those media figures refuse to acknowledge reality. They try to incite our soldiers to refuse or at least to complain about burnout. They manufacture false reports that reserve call-ups have dropped. And the truth? Even now, in the fifth round, there is over 100 percent turnout. What happened to the army in the last war is a dramatic change. The return of faith in the righteousness of the cause. From the top of the command chain down to the ordinary soldier, it is clear as daylight what we are doing in Gaza. October 7 opened our eyes to see that if we lay down our weapons, we will cease to exist. Plain and simple. All the false fantasies about a new Middle East evaporated in the smoke that rose from the communities around the Gaza envelope on that bitter and hasty day.

The changing of the elites is also reflected in the army. Today's commanders are cut from a different cloth. Graduates of secular and religious preparatory programs and of Hesder yeshivot have taken the place of the kibbutzniks for whom Zionism had run its course — a superficial, detached Zionism removed from Judaism. In their desperation, those media figures and “leftists” call the new commanders “messianic.” They try to frighten the public by claiming they are extreme fundamentalists driven by jihad. But it doesn’t work. The public, for the most part, is connected to tradition, and messianism does not scare it.

They claim that Israel has become a pariah in the eyes of the world. Indeed, it is unpleasant when European countries threaten an embargo, withdraw ambassadors, and recognize a Palestinian state. But when the public understands that the price of international popularity is leaving the threat to the State of Israel in place, it is clear what it will choose. If there is no other option, we will vacation in Eilat instead of threatening the Maldives. We will holiday at the Kinneret instead of Lake Como. But we will never allow the Jews to be returned to the terrors of the Crusades and the Inquisition, to pogroms in Tsarist Russia and the Bolshevik revolution, to the events of 1920, 1921, 1929, to the Farhud and the Holocaust. If we must pay a price for standing firm against the terror that came to annihilate us, so be it.