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Zones of Denial

In the flush of military success in Iran, Israelis entertain visions of a new Middle East—even as the public tries to look away from the devastation in Gaza. David Remnick reports from a nation buoyed by triumph and haunted by the question of what comes next. 

On June 13th, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched the first in a series of attacks that his military and intelligence establishments had been preparing for more than a decade, striking at the heart of Ayatollah Khamenei’s nuclear program.Photo illu

On June 13th, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched the first in a series of attacks that his military and intelligence establishments had been preparing for more than a decade, striking at the heart of Ayatollah Khamenei’s nuclear program.Photo illu

One night, not long after a ceasefire between Israel and Iran took hold, I was sitting at the bar of a crowded restaurant north of Tel Aviv, a place buzzing with high-spirited talk and laughter, jokes shouted over bottles of wine. All at once, every phone in the room lit up with alerts. One read:
 

BREAKING: The I.D.F. has identified a ballistic missile launch from Yemen toward Israeli territory. The Israeli Air Force is operating to intercept the threat, the I.D.F. said.

 

The news came with a map scarred with a blob of angry red, covering nearly all of central Israel—including, as far as I could tell, the bar where I sat with a burger and a beer. For a moment, everything seemed to pause.

Starting on June 13th, with the onset of Israel’s prolonged bombardment of Iran’s nuclear facilities and the aerial assassinations of many of its military and intelligence chiefs and nuclear scientists, Israelis had regularly been warned by wailing sirens and bulletins on their phones that ballistic missiles and drones of retaliation were headed their way. They had just a few minutes to clamber out of bed, wake the kids, and get to municipal bomb shelters or to a mamad, a safe room equipped with steel doors, reinforced concrete, and blast-resistant windows. Through twelve days of war, schools and most businesses closed. The streets were nearly abandoned.

In the early days of the war, the Israel Defense Forces estimated that between eight hundred and four thousand Israelis would be killed. In the end, the number of dead was twenty-eight. Physical damage, to be sure, was widespread. Windows were blown out at the headquarters of Mossad. Missiles had hit the Soroka hospital, in Beersheba; several buildings in central Tel Aviv close to the Kirya, the country’s military nerve center; the Bazan oil refinery, in Haifa; the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Rehovot; the Tel Nof airbase; the Zipporit armor-and-weapons-production base; and a ten-story building in Bat Yam, where nine people were killed, including five members of a Ukrainian family. Not far down the road from the restaurant, in a northern neighborhood of Tel Aviv called Ramat Aviv, I’d checked out an apartment complex that a ballistic missile had left uninhabitable. A few kids climbed on a teetering stanchion to gawk at the ruins. They took selfies with the caved-in concrete as background. Throughout the country, thirteen thousand people were left without homes. The damage in Israel, however, was modest compared with that in Iran, where the death toll was more than a thousand people, around half of them civilians.

In the restaurant, the alerts lingered on our screens. Yet after a moment it was clear that nobody much cared about the Houthis in Yemen or their impertinent missile. The conversation resumed; the laughter echoed. People stashed their phones, poured another glass, ordered another plate. The missile could have been a stock-market fluctuation—distant, routine, ignorable. Part of it was danger fatigue, and part was confidence in Israel’s air defenses, which, for twelve days, had intercepted the vast majority of Iran’s missiles and drones. That Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, not much more than an hour down the coastal highways, was still raging, the body count among Palestinians rising by the dozens nearly every day, seemed not to dampen the mood, either. That war, which had begun some six hundred days earlier, was the moral nightmare that everyone tried to ignore, aside from the shared hope of bringing home the twenty living hostages presumed to remain in the airless tunnels of the Strip.

In Israel and well beyond, people were calling the conflict with Iran the Twelve-Day War—an echo of the Six-Day War of 1967, which itself was an echo of the six days of creation. Euphoria was in the air. Earlier, I’d spoken with Michael Oren, a former Knesset member and Israeli Ambassador to Washington, who, two decades ago, published a book about the Six-Day War. Like many who once served under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Oren had since become a critic, but that didn’t stop him from praising Netanyahu’s decision to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities—and the “coup de grâce” of persuading Donald Trump to send B-2 stealth bombers to drop thirty-thousand-pound bunker busters on the installations at Natanz and Fordow, while targeting Isfahan with two dozen Tomahawk missiles. Despite Trump’s morning-after declaration that the nuclear sites had all been destroyed, Oren conceded that the true damage report could easily be more complicated and many things could still go wrong. Yet he couldn’t shake the sense of history unfolding. “There is a very good chance,” Oren said, “that you won’t be able to understand the twenty-first century without understanding the Twelve-Day War.”

Oren, like many I spoke with in government and the security establishment, allowed himself to imagine that what had begun nearly two years ago in horror might end in a sweeping transformation of the Middle East. In the “optimistic scenario,” as he described it, the region would settle into a new era of stability and Israel would finally enjoy a far less embattled existence. Egypt and Jordan had signed treaties with Israel decades earlier, and that cold peace still held. Now the Abraham Accords—the U.S.-brokered normalization pacts between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan—might expand to include the most powerful Sunni Arab state, Saudi Arabia. That would likely require, as Prince Mohammed bin Salman insisted, some yet to be defined movement toward justice for the Palestinians.

The possibilities didn’t end there. With Hezbollah, Iran’s most formidable proxy, crushed as a military force, Lebanon could become more stable and independent. Maybe the new leader of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, would shed his jihadi past and guide the country toward a pacific future. And maybe, this line of thought continued, the Islamic Republic of Iran—its main clients hobbled, its economy failing, and its theocratic leadership losing support—would finally cut a nuclear deal with the United States, or implode altogether. Then, at last, phones would no longer light up with missile alerts to respond to, or even to ignore. The Startup Nation’s best minds would stop fantasizing about Palo Alto and choose to stay. Such was the peaceable dreaming, the end-of-history thinking, in the wake of the Twelve-Day War.

In earlier periods of crisis, Israeli writers stood at the moral center of the nation, whether forging its myths or exposing its delusions. In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, the poet Natan Alterman, famous for “The Silver Platter,” a poem about the founding of the state, described a people “drunk with joy” as they celebrated the lightning victory and marched into the Old City of Jerusalem, which for two decades had been under Jordanian rule. The messianic fervor was such that General Shlomo Goren, the chief rabbi of the I.D.F., implored his commanding officer, Uzi Narkis, to blow up the Dome of the Rock, a Muslim holy place situated on the Temple Mount. “Tomorrow might be too late,” Goren said. Fortunately, Narkis rejected the plea. Alterman used his cultural eminence to exhort the Israeli government to hold on to the territories taken in the war. Together with S. Y. Agnon, Haim Gouri, and other prominent literary artists, Alterman created the Movement for Greater Israel. “We are hereby loyally committed to the wholeness of our land,” they declared in a manifesto, “and no government in Israel is entitled to relinquish this wholeness.”

In those same intoxicated days, Amos Oz—a young novelist who was raised in Jerusalem under British rule and served in a tank unit during the Six-Day War—emerged from the fighting wary of expansionism and the abuse of power. He divined the cost of victory. In a newspaper article, he urged Israel to avoid the role of occupier and to begin peace negotiations with the Palestinians of the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem. Zionism, he said, was about the redemption of a persecuted people, not about clinging to “dust and stone,” sanctified bones and ancient ruins. “We have not liberated Hebron and Ramallah and El-Arish,” he maintained. “We have conquered them, and we are going to rule over them only until our peace is secured.” If Alterman’s ecstatic nationalism prevailed, Oz warned, the Middle East would become an unending “battleground of two peoples, both fighting a fundamentally just war.”

Years later, when I came to know Amos Oz, those memories still haunted him, as settlements kept spreading unchecked. “I couldn’t help thinking of my own childhood under the British in Jerusalem,” he once recalled at his home in Arad, a desert town near the border with Jordan. “As a child, I had nightmares—genetic, family nightmares—of uniformed aliens coming to our little street to kill us: the British, the Arabs, the Romans, tsarist soldiers, anyone from the long Jewish martyrology. My father bowed to the uniformed British, the same way he had in Lithuania. In 1967, suddenly I was the uniformed alien. I was in the West Bank in uniform, with a submachine gun, released for reserve service, and those Palestinian kids were willing to kiss my hand for chewing gum.”

Oz died in 2018. Today, the only novelist with comparable moral authority is David Grossman, now in his seventies. Since October 7, 2023, Grossman has spoken out occasionally, and always with anguish. He has described the country’s tenuous sense of security and the global surge in antisemitism. “Only when it comes to Israel,” he has written, “is it acceptable to publicly demand the elimination of a state.” Grossman has also written, as he has for decades, about the government’s cruelty toward Palestinians, and the nation’s collective guilt “for the thousands of children we have killed.”

Such gestures, however, carry little moral weight for most Israelis now. Since the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the rise of the second intifada, the activist left has almost vanished. Labor, the party of Yitzhak Rabin, is a shell of what it was, holding just four seats of the Knesset’s hundred and twenty. The other left-leaning parties barely register. Public debate, especially on television, is often marked by racist and reactionary rhetoric. After October 7th, no leading politician outside the Arab parties has dared propose anything concrete for the Palestinians. Yair Golan, a former I.D.F. deputy chief of staff and the leader of the left-leaning Democrats Party, told me, “We are fucked. We have two million Palestinians in Gaza and three million in the West Bank. Are we headed toward separation or annexation?”

Gestures toward universalism invite sanction and worse. Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian Israeli member of parliament who is fond of invoking Martin Luther King, Jr., posted during a ceasefire that he welcomed the release of both Palestinian prisoners and Israeli hostages, and that “both peoples must be freed from the yoke of occupation.” The result was impeachment proceedings, which he barely survived. Earlier this month, right-wing protesters in the town of Ness Ziona surrounded and attacked Odeh’s car, shouting “Death to Arabs!,” as he arrived to speak.

In the seventeen years that Netanyahu has been Prime Minister, he has waged a culture war against those to his left and transformed Israel’s political climate. Backed by secular conservatives, Russian émigrés, settlers, religious nationalists, and the ultra-Orthodox, he has been the main force behind the creation of right-wing media outlets. He has pushed to diminish the Supreme Court’s power and has forged a ruling coalition with the help of far-right zealots. Above all, he has postponed any reckoning with an occupation that has lasted fifty-eight years. Netanyahu and his circle speak MAGA fluently—“deep state,” “wokeness,” and “fake news” have all made their way into political Hebrew—while his son Yair, an Israeli version of Donald Trump, Jr., rails against “post-national, globalist” leftists and lauds Viktor Orbán, Nigel Farage, and Jair Bolsonaro. Netanyahu’s outlandish obeisance to Trump, from posing with a “Trump Was Right About Everything!” cap to nominating him for a Nobel Prize, underscores the alignment.

In such an atmosphere, Etgar Keret just might be the emblematic writer of today’s Israel. It’s not that he represents the spirit of the age; it’s that his sensibility helps interpret it. Keret is a Tel Aviv liberal, as familiar to listeners of “This American Life” as to readers of Haaretz. The son of Polish Holocaust survivors—his mother watched her mother and brother die at the hands of the Nazis; his father hid for six hundred days in a hole in the ground—Keret writes with irony, woundedness, and, sometimes, an accent of defeat. His family, scattered across the spectrum (with a brother who regularly attends peace demonstrations and designs save-the-world websites, and an ultra-Orthodox sister in Jerusalem), mirrors the country’s fragmentation. He lays no claim to prophecy or to moral leadership on the grand scale.

Keret is a miniaturist, known for stories that are super brief, often funny, always enigmatic. He began writing just two weeks after his closest Army friend shot himself—leaving Keret, at nineteen, to find him. The result was “Pipes,” a story about a factory worker who crawls inside a pipe to find a way out of this world. “Writing is like the ‘Superman’ movie when Superman takes a lump of coal and crushes it into a diamond,” Keret told me. “The process of writing, to me, is taking a piece of painful crap and doing something to it so it becomes something endurable.” When Keret turns to politics, he does so without the high-mindedness of Oz or Grossman, instead offering an allusive, prismatic relationship to current events. In his own estimation, he is a failed polemicist—he’s written ten stories about Netanyahu, he says, “all of them bad.”

We met for lunch by the beach in Tel Aviv, at a place called Manta Ray. Keret, in his mid-fifties and modest of stature, is a conversationalist in the sense that a howitzer is a gun: a long lunch with him is a near-monologue, punctuated only by Keret ending one tale and then asking, “May I tell you another?” His anecdotes, by turns elliptical and jagged, can resemble Kafka’s fragments, though his tone is pop-eyed and modern in a way that suggests two of his other passions, Kurt Vonnegut and the Coen brothers.

Keret, for all his twitchy volubility, seemed exhausted. He and his wife, Shira, hadn’t been sleeping much. The sirens still rang in their ears. They do not have a mamad in their apartment, and so, in the middle of the night, they had to respond to the alarms by running a hundred yards down the road to a kindergarten. Soon, Keret gave up the midnight dashes and took his chances. “I studied math,” he said. “If I am in the mamad and there is a direct hit, I am dead anyway. Going to the mamad is like riding a bike with a helmet. It’s very important, but I don’t bother. My head gets too sweaty. Stupid, huh? In the shelter, there was this fat boxer dog that was breathing heavily. He had hemorrhoids and was rubbing his ass along the floor. I looked at him and I thought, He is me. I’m on a leash. I’m breathing heavily because I’m in a small room and I’m asthmatic. I see that the dog wants out. I thought, That dog is me, and I never returned to the shelter.”

As we ate, gulls stopped by to inspect our orders, and Keret’s talk came in bursts: “The sense of continuity, of any agreed-upon set of facts or story, is gone. If you were to try to write ‘War and Peace’ today, you would start in rhyme about something, then show a canary in a bathtub, then move to fiction—and then end up with a big fish.” Or: “The genius of Trump is that he has internalized social media and how it works. He knows that saying something is no different than doing something, that it’s just one damn thing after another and nothing matters. Trump realized you don’t have to do things. You just need to say things and then it’s all wrapped in one big burrito of dream and fantasy.”

Keret teaches at a university in Beersheba, the largest city in the Negev. Gaza isn’t far away. A colleague at the university, Ravit Levin, told him that as a child she wasn’t able to join her classmates on a trip to Auschwitz because her father was disabled and she couldn’t afford to travel. Many years later, when she was in her forties, her father finally scraped together the money and urged her to go. While she was in Poland, an Iranian missile destroyed her house and everything in it. For several days, stranded in Poland with no flights home, she stayed calm. Only when she arrived at Ben Gurion Airport and learned that her suitcase was lost did she break down. The airline employees tried to reassure her: it’s only a suitcase. “You don’t understand,” she told them. “This is the only thing I have left.”

Most Saturday nights, Keret and his wife join demonstrations in downtown Tel Aviv. Some protesters hold up pictures of the hostages and call on the government to end the war and bring them home. Others, including Etgar and Shira, hold photographs of Palestinian children killed in Gaza.

“You can’t cut yourself off,” Keret said. “When we go to the beach, you can hear the booms from Gaza. When you eat a lollipop or an ice cream, you hear things being blown up.”

One outcome of the Twelve-Day War, Keret said, is that Israel is now a proxy of the United States. “It’s the opposite of the Biden era, when the government here was basically telling him to fuck off,” he said. “With Trump, it’s like the Purim story and Queen Esther. We send Ron Dermer”—a close confidant and emissary of Netanyahu’s—“on secret missions to Washington, and he brings Trump a pretzel and a pickle and says, ‘Donald, do us a favor. Throw a bomb on Iran.’ Trump finds the treat enticing and agrees. So now Israel is a collective proxy to the United States. Now we have Trump telling Israel to drop Netanyahu’s corruption trial. What could be a more internal issue? When Macron says something about Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, our leaders tell him, ‘Fuck off! It’s an internal issue!’ But when President Trump gets involved in our legal system that’s fine!”

Amos Oz once told me that he dreamed of being Prime Minister. The prospect would seem beyond absurd for Keret. “We are doing horrible things, and it’s important for me that people know I oppose this,” Keret said. But he knows his own limits and how much Israel has changed. As for his tribe of liberals, he said, “it feels like it’s nonexistent.” He does the best he can, all the while knowing that he can do only so much. Just after October 7th, he visited survivors whose kibbutzim had been incinerated. One day, he encountered a woman from Kfar Aza with an infant in her arms. Keret introduced himself and asked what the baby’s name was. “I don’t know,” she replied. “Ten minutes before you came, a woman was breastfeeding her. Then someone told her that her husband had died. She gave me the baby and fainted.”

We listened to the waves for a while. Then Keret said, “Not only is reality horrible, you also don’t know what the real story is.”

In the early-morning hours of October 7th, as Hamas fighters streamed into southern Israel, the group’s top leaders—Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, Marwan Issa—dispatched a secret communiqué to Beirut and Tehran. Their message, which was eventually discovered by Israeli intelligence and published in the newspaper Maariv, was intended for Hassan Nasrallah, of Hezbollah, and Mohammed Saeed Izadi, of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. It was both an apology and a desperate plea: Forgive our secrecy, but now is the time to join the fight. The hope in Gaza was that, with Israel reeling, Hezbollah’s élite Radwan force would strike from the north, transforming a Hamas raid into a regional war.

That hope was swiftly dashed. Nasrallah hesitated; the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, held back. In the days that followed, Hezbollah’s military volleys amounted to symbolic support—enough to empty towns along Israel’s northern border, but a far cry from the full-blown, two-front assault that Hamas had imagined. The “axis of resistance” proved, at the critical hour, to be anything but a unified war machine.

For Israelis, the sense of betrayal and exposure came from the failure to anticipate and respond to the October 7th attack. Intelligence had long suggested that Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran saw Israel as divided and fragile, and there was no shortage of threats—the eliminationism touted by Hamas’s original charter and the rhetoric of its leaders over the years; Nasrallah’s boast that Israel would prove to be “weaker than a spider’s web”; the Ayatollah’s declaration that Israel would be destroyed by 2040. Even so, the reality of the breach was stunning: the agencies and the armed forces had dismissed evidence and ignored warnings, and when the attack began they failed to act with coherent urgency. For many hours, in some places a day or more, civilians were left to fend for themselves.

In a country created to vouchsafe the safety and liberty of a people persecuted for centuries, the security collapse remains a source of trauma and shame. Many senior military and intelligence officials have resigned or been forced out. Privately, officials spoke to me in the most abject terms about their own guilt. “Everyone was to blame—it was a collective failure,” one former analyst told me.

The one official who has refused to acknowledge responsibility, or display a sense of fellow-feeling, is the Prime Minister. Even many of his supporters find this hard to stomach. It was only in early July, six hundred and thirty-six days after the attack, that Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, visited Nir Oz, a kibbutz so savagely hit that one in four residents was killed or kidnapped. At the gate, a sign called him “Mr. Abandonment.” Survivors spoke openly of their grief—and their fury at what they saw as a photo op, not an apology. “My dead family is not your P.R. backdrop,” Reuma Kedem, an elderly kibbutznik who had lost multiple family members at Nir Oz, said. “You won’t get the closure you seek––not on the blood of my children.”

Netanyahu’s lack of evident remorse contrasts with the behavior of earlier Israeli leaders. Golda Meir, after the Yom Kippur War, resigned under public pressure. Menachem Begin, after the failure of the first Lebanon war, told his Cabinet ministers that he would “ask for forgiveness, absolution, and atonement”; he soon resigned and withdrew from public life. But Netanyahu has insisted that any independent inquiry be deferred (until “after the war”) and has sought to keep all eyes focussed on enemies elsewhere.

In some quarters, this cynicism has bred its own theology. Aryeh Deri, who leads the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, went so far as to declare that October 7th had “saved the nation.” He said, “I see in this what the Prophet Isaiah said in his prophecy: ‘For a small moment have I forsaken thee, but with greater compassion will I gather thee.’ ” In Deri’s view, the Hamas attack was a day when God forsook Israel briefly, only to gather it back with greater compassion. By forcing Israel’s hand, Sinwar had delivered an unlooked-for blessing: the chance to destroy Hamas, decimate Hezbollah, and expose Iran.

One retired senior security official told me that this way of thinking is not an aberration. “A lot of people in Israel think we need to change the date of Independence Day,” he said tartly. “Suddenly, Israel got the license to go and kill our enemies.”

Even after the Twelve-Day War had concluded, the memory of October 7th as well as the frequent reports of soldiers being killed and wounded in Gaza haunted public life. At Ben Gurion Airport, portraits of hostages, living and dead, lined the walkway leading to the gates. Their faces loomed from billboards everywhere, along with signs reading “Bring Them Home Now.” In group chats, Israelis traded accounts from released captives—stories of shackles, fear, and abuse.

Yet the horrific scale of suffering among Gazans is nearly invisible in the Israeli media, aside from the liberal paper Haaretz and a few smaller outlets. Media executives seem convinced that they will alienate audiences if they give the subject much attention. Though the fighting long ago shifted from all-out assault on Hamas to a grinding, sporadic campaign, hospital officials in Gaza report dozens of Palestinians—sometimes more than a hundred—killed on most days. They’re killed in their homes or in the streets. They’re killed lining up for a sack of flour or a jerrican of water at aid stations. They perish of starvation. Or as “collateral damage” during targeted strikes. Often enough, the “targets” surpass understanding. While I was in Israel, the country’s Air Force dropped a five-hundred-pound bomb on the Al-Baqa café, a two-story seaside refuge with cool drinks and internet access. Saher al-Baqa, the owner, was killed. So were forty others, many of them women and children. Among the dead were Mustafa Abu Umeira, a celebrated soccer player; Malak Musleh, known as the most promising female prizefighter in the Strip; and Ismail Abu Hatab, a photojournalist and a creator of an exhibition that appeared in Los Angeles, Chicago, and elsewhere. An I.D.F. spokesman promised to review the bombing but maintained that “prior to the strike, steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians using aerial surveillance.”

In periods of conflict, it is exceedingly rare for people to acknowledge the humanity of the other side or the inhumanities perpetrated by their own side. That Americans have a long record of averting their gaze from the dead in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan is sometimes ascribed to distance. But in Israel there is no geographic remove. To look away is an act of both will and denialism, a form of self-preservation.

A precise death toll is elusive. In late June, Gaza’s Health Ministry distributed an updated list of the dead, a thousand pages complete with names and family records: more than fifty-five thousand killed, seventeen thousand of them children—nine hundred and thirty-seven less than a year old. Israeli officials, and many citizens, reject these numbers out of hand, because the Health Ministry is under the control of Hamas. In fact, the Health Ministry’s numbers are based mainly on bodies that have been brought to hospital morgues, and researchers say that many more dead might be found later under the rubble. Whole cities in Gaza—Rafah in the south, Beit Hanoun in the north—have been flattened. The U.N.’s World Food Programme has declared that a third of the population is going without food for multiple consecutive days, and the World Health Organization has reported that ninety-five per cent of households are struggling to access water. The readiest comparison is to the Nakba, the great catastrophe of dispossession suffered by the Palestinians, in 1948, but the images of ruined villages of that era have been eclipsed by the scale of today’s devastation, the hunger, the casualties—whole families and neighborhoods gone. One Israeli source who has repeatedly visited Gaza compared the landscape of the Strip to “ten little Hiroshimas.” The vast majority of buildings have been damaged or destroyed. The military deploys Caterpillar D9 bulldozers—known as doobim, or “Teddy bears”—to level the remnants.

“The Strip is a pile of rubble,” Mohammed Mhawish, a Gazan journalist who has lost family and friends, told me. “Every sector of life has been destroyed. Schools are now shelters, hospitals are nearly inoperable. Every day is a fight for survival: children go hungry, parents risk their lives just looking for food.”

In June, Haaretz published an investigation reporting that Israeli soldiers stationed around aid-distribution sites had been ordered to shoot at Palestinians “to drive them away or disperse them, even though it was clear they posed no threat.” The sources for the story were Israeli officers and soldiers. More than five hundred people had been killed near the aid centers and U.N. food trucks since late May, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. (It is unclear how many were killed by I.D.F. soldiers.) One soldier said, “It’s a killing field. Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force—no crowd-control measures, no tear gas—just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. . . . Our form of communication is gunfire.” Netanyahu and his Defense Minister dismissed the claims as a “blood libel.” No matter. In the weeks since the Haaretz article appeared, hundreds more have been killed.

Some commentators were quick to dismiss the investigation or shift the blame, saying that Hamas fighters had been stealing aid shipments and selling the food and medicine at wildly inflated prices, or claiming that Hamas had been firing on Palestinians. And yet one former security official I spoke to didn’t dispute the substance of the report; rather, he compared it to other instances in history of soldiers who were enraged, vengeful, afraid, exhausted, trapped in an aimless war. “They say Israel has ‘the most moral military in the world,’ ” he told me. “Bullshit. The way young soldiers and commanders sometimes use their weapons is terrible. They don’t care about the rules. They think, Kill them all! They deserve it after what they did to us, they are not human beings, don’t ask your commander.”

Most members of the Knesset and commentators on television have rallied behind the I.D.F. But as the war has dragged on, as the number of deaths has risen, and as images of devastation have circulated worldwide, protest has hardly been limited to demonstrators abroad. Two hundred and fifty former officers in the intelligence establishment, including three ex-chiefs of Mossad, signed an open letter of protest. In another open letter, almost a thousand Air Force veterans and reservists stated that the continuation of the war is risking the lives of hostages, soldiers, and innocent civilians “without advancing any of the declared goals of the war” and “serves primarily political and personal interests.” Moshe Ya’alon, a former Defense Minister under Netanyahu, said that the government was carrying out a policy of “ethnic cleansing.” Omer Bartov, a leading historian of the Holocaust and a veteran of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, said that it was a “misnomer” to call Israel’s operation in Gaza a “war”; instead, he writes of “genocide” and of Israel’s attempt to “wipe out Palestinian existence in Gaza.”

“What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians,” Ehud Olmert, a former Prime Minister, wrote in Haaretz. He said that his country was guilty of war crimes. “We’re not doing this due to loss of control in any specific sector, not due to some disproportionate outburst by some soldiers in some unit. Rather, it’s the result of government policy—knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated.”

Hamas launched its October 7th attack with the knowledge that it would provoke an immense Israeli reprisal. To regain control of historical Palestine for the Palestinians and to eliminate the Zionist state, Sinwar once remarked, “we are ready to sacrifice twenty thousand, thirty thousand, a hundred thousand.” He knew that the war could bring horrifying casualties; he had helped construct, with Iranian and Qatari money and the cynical complicity of the Israeli government, a militarized landscape of tunnels and outposts embedded in schools, homes, hospitals, and U.N. sites. The suffering of Palestinian civilians wasn’t merely a foreseeable consequence; it was an integral part of the strategy. It is only faintly remembered now, but in the immediate aftermath of October 7th Joe Biden not only threw his arms around Israel but also counselled its leadership not to act out of “an all-consuming rage.” On the nightly news, Israelis have scarcely seen the ruins, the atrocities, the outcome of that rage as it has been unleashed for nearly two years.

“Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence,” George Orwell wrote after fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. “Unfortunately the truth about atrocities is far worse than that they are lied about and made into propaganda. The truth is that they happen.”

Before October 7th, Netanyahu, like much of the Israeli security establishment, regarded Hamas as a problem to be managed, not as an existential threat. A nuclear Iran was the obsession: the shadow on the wall. For more than half a century, Israel has been the region’s only nuclear power. This reality underpins Israel’s doctrine of deterrence, and its deepest anxieties. It has kept Iran at the top of every Prime Minister’s agenda, no matter how many rockets fell from Gaza. Iran covets what Israel has; Israel fears what Iran could build. The irony is that Israel’s nuclear advantage began with a different kind of crisis entirely.

In 1956, after Egypt’s President, Gamal Abdel Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal—ousting the British and French as colonizers—the evicted powers asked Israel to invade Sinai. Britain and France were looking for an excuse to intervene as “peacekeepers” and regain control of the canal. Shimon Peres, then director general of Israel’s Ministry of Defense—and decades later a Nobel laureate for his role in the Oslo Accords—helped hammer out the deal: in return for Israel’s part in the operation, France agreed to supply nuclear technology.

The Sinai campaign was a disaster, but the French Prime Minister, Guy Mollet, kept his side of the bargain. “I owe the bomb to them,” he said. The Israelis soon established a nuclear program at Dimona, a village in the Negev. In a bit of global fakery, David Ben-Gurion claimed that the reactor was for desalination, to make the desert bloom. President John F. Kennedy was unconvinced, and alarmed by the prospect of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. But, after Kennedy’s assassination, American opposition subsided. Today, Israel has a substantial stockpile of nuclear bombs but does not acknowledge it. Instead, Israeli officials maintain a policy of amimut, or strategic ambiguity. Recently, I was interviewing a retired leader of one of the intelligence agencies. After he described the power of Israel’s arms and its ability to cope with its adversaries, he added, with a thin smile, “And, of course, we possess, according to foreign sources, other strategic advantages.” “According to foreign sources”: that’s always the phrase.

At the same time, Israel—which has been threatened since its inception—has taken pains to deny its adversaries such “strategic advantages,” backing vigilance with force. In 1980, Menachem Begin and his intelligence services had to reckon with the fact that the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein, was building Osirak, a reactor in an isolated outpost near Baghdad. For Begin, whose father, mother, and brother were murdered by Nazis, this augured a second Shoah. He told his military chiefs, “This morning, when I saw Jewish children playing outside, I decided: No, never again.” Despite the ardent warnings and objections of Peres and other officials in his government, Begin won support in the Cabinet and, in June, 1981, dispatched eight U.S.-made fighter jets to drop sixteen bombs on the Osirak reactor. Israel was condemned in the United Nations, including by the United States.

Begin, ordinarily protective of Israel’s relationship with its American patron, believed that he was duty bound to strike Iraq. In a letter to President Ronald Reagan, he wrote, “A million and a half children were killed by Zyklon B gas during the Holocaust. This time, it was Israeli children who were about to be poisoned by radioactivity.” The attack on Osirak became the foundation of the Begin doctrine, which held that no adversary in the region would be permitted to obtain a nuclear weapon. If one tried, Israel would act.

In 2007, Mossad agents broke into the Vienna apartment of Ibrahim Othman, the head of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission. According to a comprehensive account by David Makovsky in The New Yorker, the agents extracted conclusive evidence from Othman’s computer: Syria was secretly building a plutonium reactor, Al Kibar, with help from North Korea. The Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, brought the findings to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who decided to attack before the reactor went “hot,” lest radiation leak into the Euphrates.

The Israelis were eager for American backing, but the George W. Bush Administration, still reeling from the debacle in Iraq, was hesitant. “Every Administration gets one preëmptive war against a Muslim country,” Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense, told an aide, “and this Administration has already had one.” Condoleezza Rice and other senior officials, mindful of Israel’s faltering war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, worried that an Israeli strike would spark an even wider conflict. Meanwhile, Israeli officials looked back at failed global efforts to stop North Korea and Pakistan from acquiring nuclear weapons as a matter of “too early, too early—oops—too late.” They were convinced that they couldn’t afford to wait. The signals between Bush and Olmert were purposefully vague. Olmert didn’t ask for a green light, and Bush didn’t give one—but he didn’t flash red, either.

Around midnight on September 5, 2007, eight Israeli jets crossed into Syria and dropped seventeen tons of explosives on Al Kibar. Syrian state media claimed that the aircraft had been confronted and driven off, “after they dropped some ammunition in deserted areas without causing any human or material damage.” Once the jets had landed safely, Olmert called Bush and said, “I just want to report to you that something that existed doesn’t exist anymore.” In the weeks that followed, Bashar al-Assad denied that Israel had struck anything of consequence in Syria. The Israelis, for their part, maintained their silence. This “zone of denial,” as security officials called it, allowed Assad to avoid public humiliation and kept him from retaliating.

Netanyahu has been warning about an Iranian bomb since 1992. Back then, as a young Likud member, he told the Knesset that Iran would have the capacity to build a nuclear weapon “within three to five years.” Since then—in speeches to the United Nations and Congress, in books, in Cabinet meetings—he has sounded the alarm about nuclear imminence at every opportunity.

There are many reasons to distrust Netanyahu: his habitual lying; his willingness to prop up his coalition with religious zealots and racists; his brutal, protracted prosecution of the war in Gaza, a strategy that seems motivated in no small measure by a desire to cling to power. It seems clear that he has sometimes exaggerated the speed of Iran’s progress toward becoming a nuclear-threshold state. But the reality of Iran’s ambitions can’t be dismissed. Iran has repeatedly called on its own scientists and turned to the network of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s atom bomb, for help. It has systematically flouted international inspections, and developed a far more sophisticated, dispersed, and hardened program than Saddam Hussein or Assad ever managed—learning from the Israeli strikes on Osirak and Al Kibar and making a single knockout blow nearly impossible.

Israel’s anxieties cannot be easily dismissed, either. It is, after all, rare for one member state of the United Nations to threaten another with elimination. I was present at a New York press breakfast of bagels and lox that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hosted in 2006, at which he described Israel as a “fabrication,” a passing disturbance that would be “eliminated” in due course. In less decorous settings, Ahmadinejad said that the Holocaust was a “myth” and that Israel should “vanish from the page of time.” A previous Iranian President, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, judged that Israel was small enough to be “a one-bomb country.” In September, 2015, Khamenei was clear: “Israel will not exist in twenty-five years.” A few years later, the regime installed a digital clock in Tehran’s Palestine Square, counting down the days to 2040 and the anticipated victory over Israel.

No matter how much American Presidents have come to resent Netanyahu—Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden, and Trump have all had their moments of fury with him—none have doubted the presence or the peril of the Iranian nuclear program. And none have protested loudly as Israel has carried out a series of clandestine missions, including, in 2018, the theft of Iran’s nuclear archive and, in 2020, the assassination of Iran’s chief nuclear scientist, with a remote-controlled gun operated by satellite link.

The last time Netanyahu seriously threatened to send bombers to Iran was during the Obama Administration. In 2012, I travelled to Israel to meet Meir Dagan, who had just stepped down as the head of Mossad and was now leading an unofficial opposition from his new perch in retirement. Although Netanyahu and his Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, favored striking Iran’s nuclear facilities, Dagan—along with a remarkable number of senior intelligence and military officials—was firmly opposed to it.

Netanyahu invoked the Holocaust and Tehran’s eliminationist rhetoric; Dagan, himself a child of the Shoah, insisted that the mission was reckless. He had been born on a train carrying his family from the Soviet Union to a Nazi detention camp in Poland, and in his office he kept a photograph of his grandfather—an old man draped in a tallit, kneeling before Nazi soldiers about to execute him. As a young intelligence officer, Dagan infiltrated terrorist cells and killed Palestinian operatives with chilling efficiency. (Ariel Sharon once said, “Dagan’s specialty is separating an Arab from his head.”) As the Mossad chief, he oversaw Israel’s campaign of sabotage against the Iranian nuclear program, including the Stuxnet cyberattack, which was deployed around 2007.

Dagan was bald, round, and not much more than five feet tall. When I visited him at his apartment, in Tel Aviv, he waddled around wagging his finger at the absent Prime Minister. “Don’t be mistaken—I am not a liberal by point of view,” he said. “If I thought the use of brute force on Iran would stop the nuclear threat in the region and to Israel, that would be one thing. I am judging things from a practical point of view. . . . You have to take into consideration the following questions about an Israeli attack: What would be achieved? What about five minutes after? And what are the consequences of such an attack?” He answered his own questions with a stark logic that resonates today. “It would galvanize Iranian society behind the leadership and create unity around the nuclear issue. And it would justify Iran in rebuilding its nuclear project and saying, ‘Look, see, we were attacked by the Zionist enemy, and we clearly need to have it.’ ”

Tamir Pardo, a specialist in cyber warfare, succeeded Meir Dagan as the head of Mossad—and was just as wary of launching an attack. Appearing before his commanders, he said that the development of a nuclear project was a political decision, and that it could be reversed only with a political decision. For Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions, he said, its leaders would have to conclude that investing in education, health, and agriculture served their interests better. Israel’s intelligence and military services, he acknowledged, have vast capabilities, “but we should be very careful that whatever we do does not ignite them and have them running for a nuclear weapon.” To humiliate an enemy, he warned, is to provide it with a vendetta.

Netanyahu also faced determined resistance from Barack Obama, who had won the Presidency in 2008 largely because, unlike Hillary Clinton, he had opposed the Iraq War. Obama’s hope was to use diplomacy to stave off yet another bloody confrontation in the Middle East. “It would be profoundly in the interest of citizens throughout the region if Sunnis and Shias weren’t intent on killing each other,” Obama told me in 2013. “And although it would not solve the entire problem, if we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion—not funding terrorist organizations, not trying to stir up sectarian discontent in other countries, and not developing a nuclear weapon—you could see an equilibrium developing between Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf states and Iran in which there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare.”

Netanyahu dismissed this kind of thinking as naïve, and pressed Obama to support a strike. He got nowhere. Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, told me recently, “We told him it was a bad idea, but he could have done it.” Obama and his team argued that an attack would merely push Iran to take its program further underground. “Even the most successful strike,” Rhodes said, “would set them back only a year.”

Instead, Obama pursued the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—a multilateral agreement with Iran that offered sanctions relief in exchange for more scrupulous inspections and limiting its nuclear program to civilian purposes. Talks began in secret in 2012, in Muscat, Oman, and the deal was signed in 2015, with many provisions set to expire in October, 2025. Critics in the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere said that the J.C.P.O.A. failed to address Iran’s ballistic missiles or its support for proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah. They argued that the inspections regime was too lax, and that the “sunset” clauses lifting some restrictions after a decade made the agreement precarious. In these objections, Netanyahu would find an ally in Donald Trump, who, two years into his Presidency, scrapped the deal—leaving nothing in its place.

This year, when Netanyahu again pressed his case for striking Iran’s nuclear facilities, he did so in the language of imminence: thresholds, red lines, breakaway points. In reality, he was exploiting a series of openings. Rather than bow to the majority of Israelis, who, a year earlier, were demanding an end to the war in Gaza—or betray even a glimmer of moral uncertainty to the outside world—Netanyahu refocussed the country’s anxieties and ambitions on Iran. Partly, it was political calculation: changing the subject from Gaza to a crisis abroad. But it was also about timing: Iran’s defenses were unusually weak.

Military and intelligence officials told me that Hezbollah made a fateful mistake on July 27, 2024, when it launched an Iranian-made Falaq-1 rocket that landed on a soccer field in the Druze community of Majdal Shams, in the Golan Heights. The blast killed twelve children and teen-agers and wounded dozens more—the most serious Hezbollah attack of the conflict. Netanyahu seized the moment, escalating the fight and setting in motion a chain of events that would cripple his enemies and redraw the map of the Middle East.

Three days later, Israel struck a building in Haret Hreik, south of Beirut, killing Fuad Shukr, a senior Hezbollah commander, along with five civilians, including two children. In September, Netanyahu authorized an attack nicknamed Operation Grim Beeper. In an intricate scheme carried out over many years, Mossad had managed to plant explosives in the communications equipment of thousands of Hezbollah fighters. The losses were devastating and the message was unmissable: Israel’s reach inside Hezbollah was total.

Yet, even as the assassinations mounted, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, remained in denial about his own vulnerability. “Nasrallah didn’t understand that these assassinations were not a limited campaign, but that they would come for him, too,” Michael Milshtein, a former defense-intelligence analyst, told me. “He thought he understood Israel and its logic. But, like Sinwar, he didn’t fully understand Israel.” According to another well-informed source, Israeli intelligence even hacked a call between Nasrallah and his intelligence chief, who warned, “Listen, if you keep firing at the north, Israel will have to go to a full-scale war and kill you.” On September 27th, Israeli jets struck a Hezbollah headquarters in Dahieh. Nasrallah’s body was found under the rubble. While Israel was conducting its war in Gaza with a merciless bludgeon and no conception of an ending, its tactics against Hezbollah—setting off the beeper bombs, wiping out its missile stocks and weapons depots, killing its military and political leaders—proved far better targeted. As a fighting force, Hezbollah, the most powerful of Tehran’s proxy forces since 1982, was defeated.

The Iranian regime seemed slow to grasp the nature of Netanyahu’s escalation. On April 1, 2024, Israel struck an Iranian consulate annex in Damascus, killing several senior commanders of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps along with a Hezbollah official. In response, Iran launched a combined salvo—around a hundred and seventy drones, thirty cruise missiles, and a hundred and twenty ballistic missiles—against Israel, though few landed or caused serious damage. In strikes later that month, and in another exchange of missile and drone attacks in October, Israel succeeded in destroying much of Iran’s air defenses. This was the first time that Israel and Iran had engaged in open armed conflict since the Islamic Republic had come into being, in 1979. With its nuclear and security establishments thoroughly infiltrated by Israeli and Western intelligence agencies, and with its defenses in a state of radical disrepair and its economy in tatters, the regime appeared to be newly vulnerable.

This year, Netanyahu caught three further breaks. For one thing, the Presidential election in the U.S. had gone his way: Kamala Harris would never have matched the uncritical support offered by Trump. Although Netanyahu worried that Trump, unpredictable as ever, was tempted by the prospect of a dramatic deal with Iran—one that might serve his own ends, whatever Israel’s objections—those talks, which began in April, quickly stalled, to Netanyahu’s relief. And then, on June 12th, the International Atomic Energy Agency, for the first time in two decades, declared that Iran was out of compliance with its nuclear obligations. Iran had amassed four hundred kilograms of uranium enriched to sixty per cent.

It wasn’t just the right wing that saw opportunity in the moment. “Liberals are always reasonably anxious about the use of force in the region,” Ari Shavit, a centrist journalist and the author of “My Promised Land,” told me. “First, because it is associated with Netanyahu. Second, because it is associated with Trump. And after Iraq—to say nothing of Vietnam, Afghanistan, and more—we are reluctant.” And yet, Shavit went on, “there was once a ‘nuclear club’ of five, and then the breakouts: Pakistan, North Korea, India. If there is a complete collapse of nonproliferation, the twenty-first century will be a catastrophic mess.”

On June 13th, Netanyahu launched an attack that his military and intelligence establishments had been preparing, on and off, for more than a decade. With Iran’s air defenses and missile launchers already degraded, the Israelis had an “open highway” to Tehran; not a single Israeli fighter pilot was lost. At first, Trump refrained from blessing the war publicly. But as Israeli successes mounted he quickly shifted to using “we” and made it clear that he was more than willing to be a partner in the campaign. “Whether it was a green light or a yellow light or a yellow light with sparkles, it’s hard to say,” Eyal Hulata, a former head of the Israeli National Security Council, told me. In the end, Trump sent the U.S. military to join in the attacks on Iran’s nuclear sites at Natanz, Isfahan, and Fordow, and triumphantly declared that the heart of Ayatollah Khamenei’s nuclear program had been “obliterated.”

One evening after the fighting, I visited the studios of Channel 13, one of Israel’s main television stations. After a panel discussion on the war, Alon Ben David, the channel’s chief defense analyst, stood in the parking lot, basking in the moment. His sense of victory was unalloyed. “This is bigger than the Six-Day War, particularly in operational terms,” he said. “Even the war planners didn’t expect it to be so successful, so easy. In twelve days, we became the regional superpower. Iran was the demon we always feared, and it was so easy!”

Brigadier General Amir Avivi, a retired officer and the founder of HaBithonistim, a group of several thousand conservative reserve officers, had also appeared on the panel. A bald bullet of a man in his mid-fifties, Avivi represents the ascendant right in the security establishment. He, too, saw the recent campaigns in Beirut and Tehran, as well as the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, as the dawn of a new era. “Israel is about to enter its golden age!” he told me, eating from a container of cookies that his wife had baked. His vision lacked Michael Oren’s to-be-sures and caveats: without qualification, he anticipated the country enjoying peace and untold prosperity, becoming “the world’s Singapore.” As for the Palestinians, he foresaw their “voluntary relocation,” claiming that “Gazans are interested, even excited about that.” Meanwhile, Netanyahu would only grow stronger, while his rivals—Naftali Bennett and the rest—would fade into irrelevance.

Some version of this kind of thinking is widespread in Israel. Amit Segal, perhaps more than any other journalist, captures the temper of the country as it is now. He grew up in Ofra, a settlement in the West Bank; his father was a member of the Jewish Underground. Segal is forty-three but looks ten years younger, and he’s everywhere—writing for one of Israel’s most popular newspapers, Israel Hayom, appearing on television, posting ceaselessly on social media. There’s talk that he’ll eventually enter politics. Netanyahu considered him for Minister of Justice. Segal can be variously acidic and charming. As a right-winger on the more liberal Channel 12, he describes himself as the network’s “pink panther, a strange animal from National Geographic.” But it’s no mystery why Channel 12 brought Segal on board: the Tel Aviv liberals who once dominated the airwaves no longer represent the majority of the country. Segal says that he agrees with Netanyahu “about seventy-five per cent of the time,” though his dissents can run to the right as well as to the left of the Prime Minister. He regrets Ariel Sharon’s dismantling of the Jewish settlements in Gaza, in 2005, and wouldn’t oppose resettling the Strip, at least in its north. The settlements that have proliferated across the West Bank since 1967, he insists, are there to stay.

When I met Segal for coffee, in Jerusalem, he was clearly delighted by the results of Netanyahu’s war with Iran. “I don’t live under the illusion that peace will come to the Middle East, but I do think that what ended was the second era of big wars,” he said. “The first era was against secular Arab dictatorships—Egypt, Syria, Jordan—and now we sort of ended the war against Iran and its proxies.”

Segal reserves particular disdain for the denunciations of Israel’s campaign in Gaza. He opposes any talk of a ceasefire or an armistice. The Army, he says, needs just a few more months to finally defeat Hamas. The compounding misery in Gaza hardly registers. “I don’t know of any precedent on earth in war when one side provides the other side with constant humanitarian aid,” he said. “Such aid only prolongs the war, and more people are killed.”

Segal talks to Netanyahu with some frequency. When I asked whether Netanyahu would declare victory and give up power, Segal said, “I don’t think he has that feature in his system to resign. ‘Power-addicted’ is a strong term, but I don’t think he can leave and be without the power to shape the Middle East or the world. The excuse he gives himself is that he still has a way to go with peace agreements with Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia.”

Even as most Israelis exulted in the aftermath of the Twelve-Day War, I found skeptics inclined to take a longer view. One recently retired official with deep inside knowledge of the security establishment scoffed at Netanyahu’s ostensible casus belli: he didn’t think that Iran’s Supreme Leader was exactly racing toward the bomb. “After two years of war, all the stars were in place,” he told me. “But we needed to create some narrative. It was all a bunch of bullshit. . . . It’s easy to tell stories about things. Ninety per cent of the people are not interested in details. Are they a huge threat or not? Nuclear or not? Ceasefire or not? Look outside! This is Israel one week after the war. The stock market is jumping!”

Nahum Barnea, a columnist at Yedioth Ahronoth who is widely considered the dean of Israeli journalism, detects “a big smell of hubris.” He supported the attacks against Iran, but, he told me, “when it comes to the lessons we should learn from it, the danger of celebration is much bigger than the benefits.”

The experts I spoke with in Israel and the U.S. were in general agreement: no one could say for certain that the Iranian nuclear program had been damaged to the extent that Netanyahu and Trump claimed. Their worries recalled Meir Dagan’s warnings, back in 2012, about the risks of a strike. Ariel (Eli) Levite, a longtime Israeli civil servant currently at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noted that Iran effectively expelled international inspectors—and that no one knew for sure where those four hundred kilograms of enriched uranium had gone. “The Iranians can say it is buried under the rubble, and we will be living with considerable anxiety until we have a rude awakening,” Levite said. Shavit, the journalist, put it more bleakly: “There is still the chance from Iran of a Samson option because we are at war, after all, with four-thousand-year-old Iran. It’s definitely not over. They are still there.”

There’s a persistent illusion in Israeli and American circles that the Iranian people would somehow welcome regime change imposed from abroad. It’s not the first such fantasy: the Israeli government once thought that the Christian militia commander Bachir Gemayel could be both its protector and Lebanon’s savior; the George W. Bush Administration had similar delusions about Ahmed Chalabi in Iraq. Ben Rhodes, the former deputy national-security adviser, is in regular touch with Obama, and he was confident that the former President shares his concerns that the bombing campaign in Iran will ultimately resolve nothing. “What drove Obama insane,” Rhodes told me, “was that the same people who complained about the ten-year limitation” of the J.C.P.O.A. “are celebrating setting things back for a year with bombs—with no verification and sending them underground.”

Rob Malley, a lead negotiator for the J.C.P.O.A. who later served as Biden’s special envoy to Iran, was cautious, too, when I spoke to him. “The day of reckoning for the regime is approaching,” he told me. “Every investment they made—in nukes, in ballistic missiles, in relations with China—it all amounted to a hill of beans. They lost everything. Their nuclear program is in shambles. And Russia, which was prepared to give them drones? Russia gave them nothing! Every bet they made turned out to be the wrong bet. Clearly, Israel faced an Iran that had no means. They saw a window of opportunity that may not be as wide open again.” And yet, Malley warned, “you can argue that all the dominoes will fall the right way. But this is a long movie. We are not even done with the opening credits.”

Malley and Hussein Agha, who was once a peace negotiator for the Palestine Liberation Organization in the era of Yasir Arafat, have written a coruscating book, “Tomorrow Is Yesterday,” that surveys the folly and missed chances of Israeli-Palestinian relations, and expresses deep despair over the brutality of the Gaza war and its implications. “The Israelis are more powerful and feared now than you and I can remember, but there’s a clear line between fear and acceptance—which is what the whole normalization process with the U.A.E. and the Saudis was about,” Malley said. “Officials in the Middle East won’t deny their anxieties about Iranian hegemony. But that doesn’t mean they welcome Israeli hegemony.” As for the Palestinians, he said, the war in Gaza has produced a people “who have lost everything and feel only humiliation and abandonment—and despise hypocritical Western moralism. This will feed future militants, and how they behave will be shaped by old grievances and new technologies—which Israel masters today, but they could master, too.” In the familiar pattern, today’s resolution is tomorrow’s tinderbox.

For all the triumphalism, for all the talk about an imminent golden age, Israel’s future is still shadowed by the ugly persistence of occupation, the long and bitter memory of its enemies, and the deepening moral cost of Gaza. The battered, nearly levelled cities of the Strip look like a reckoning deferred. Iran’s regime may be chastened, but it is not gone, and the nuclear question may resurface before long.

Meanwhile, the cafés and bars of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem are packed and noisy, as if the country could celebrate its way to safety. I recalled Etgar Keret’s remark that “the sense of continuity, of any agreed-upon set of facts or story, is gone.” Or maybe it’s that the story never quite resembles the narratives issued from the offices of Presidents and Prime Ministers. Israel has shown, time and again, that it is better at winning wars than at winning what comes after. The celebrations are real, but so is the dread—about the next missile, the next front, the next generation raised amid the rubble and the rage.

Published in the print edition of the August 4, 2025, issue, with the headline “Zones of Denial.”        

Source: The New Yorker

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