Could the unremitting fury over October 7 be the end of Israel?

A year after the atrocious terrorist attacks by Hamas, Israel’s vengeance, far from stabilising its future, has returned it to a besieged state on the brink of an existential crisis, says Mark Almond

There used to be plenty of peaceniks in Israel. But that was before 2006, when Hamas terrorists won Palestinian legislative elections and refused to renounce their violence. The missile attacks have barely stopped since.

If such aggression has slowly choked off a once widespread Israeli acceptance that it must withdraw from the West Bank, the 7 October atrocities sparked a fight-to-the-finish mood, even among anti-Netanyahu types.

One year on from the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, a persistently cruel and previously unimagined conflict has precipitated across the Middle East – one that has caused Israel to revert back to the besieged state it was for decades after its independence in 1948.

Back then, the United Nations was able to broker a ceasefire when, as soon as the country was born, five Arab nations invaded. For decades, the IDF could defeat threats quickly and decisively. But its wars of attrition – of the kind now playing out in Gaza and southern Lebanon – have taken their toll.

Now, all sides in the seemingly ever-expanding conflict prompted by 7 October have suffered enough as to make compromise unimaginable. What is now Israel’s longest war by far risks becoming “normal”.

But for how long can Israeli society, the Palestinians and their Arab neighbours sustain this “normality”?

The Abraham Accords – Donald Trump’salternative peace model which, in 2020, normalised diplomatic relations between Israel and some Arab countries – have proven to be a false dawn. Bypassing the Palestinians to promote “normalisation” between Israel and the wider Middle East encouraged Hamas to throw a bloody spanner in that process.

Meanwhile, in the minds of Israel’s settler fringe – closer to the balance of political power than ever – fantasies of a Jewish-majority state between “the river and the sea” seem closer than ever. But far from stabilising Israel’s future, its relentless military response to 7 October has killed any chance of deeper rapprochement in the region, even threatening existing peace with neighbours like Egypt and Jordan.

According to the Jordanian foreign minister, an influx of Palestinian refugees would be taken as “a declaration of war” by Israel.

Ignoring lessons of history could yet lead to cruel parodies of the past. Even if a ceasefire that pacified Gaza could be agreed by both sides, a new Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”, a reference to the mass displacement caused by the establishment of the state of Israel), however provoked, could lead Palestinians to try to internationalise the conflict, as the PLO did in the 1960s.

Hijacking planes and bringing the Arab-Israeli dispute to Israel’s European and American friends backfired then – but do people ever learn from history?

Israelis, too, may be trapped by their past. Understandably, the Holocaust still underscores the uncompromising thinking about Israeli security. But for outsiders, as Nazi mass murder slips from daily consciousness in the West, the daily diet of the devastation of Gaza, as seen on the smartphones of younger generations, is becoming the defining horror of modern history.

Since 1948, the existential threat faced by Israel has shape-shifted; its mortal enemies are now the likes of Iran, the Iranian-backed Lebanese terrorists Hezbollah – whose shadow war was dealt a heavy psychological blow last month when thousands of its members’ pagers and walkie-talkies were detonated remotely – and Yemen’s Houthis, who can strike over its borders with missiles and drones.

The Iron Dome, Israel’s formidable missile defence system – which intercepted almost 200 Iranian missiles during last week’s retaliatory barrage – has proven remarkably effective, so far. What if technological innovation shifts to favour the so-called Axis of Resistance, the loose network of autonomous militant Islamist groups?

The cost of ensuring Israel is one step ahead is draining the country’s economy, killing trade and tourism – and causing emigration. As of May, more than 60,000 Israelis had emigrated in the previous 24 months, which represented an approximate 25 per cent increase in recent emigration from February 2023.

For decades, Arabs told themselves that Israel would be as temporary a state as the Crusader kingdom there a thousand years ago. That comparison is deeply offensive to Zionists, but moral indignation is not a viable military strategy for either side. The precedent haunts the region. Extraordinary Crusader castles were the Iron Dome of medieval military technology.

When outside support dried up, the Crusader state imploded. If young Americans and Europeans become alienated from Israel, their own states’ military support for it will wither, too. Another Nakba would then threaten.

Mark Almond is director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford