A Hundred Years’ War for Our Time

A year has passed in Israel and Gaza like some nightmare from which there is no awakening. Hatred is the only winner. It towers over the corpse of a two-state Israeli-Palestinian peace and threatens to spread across the Middle East.

“Bring them home now” say ubiquitous posters in Israel, alluding to the roughly 100 hostages, many dead, still held by Hamas. Gaza lies in ruins as Israel exacts a terrible price in Palestinian life for the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack that killed more than 1,200 Israelis, and summoned in Jews every devouring specter of the Holocaust. War spreads to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, to Lebanon and to Iran, defying the futile peacemaking efforts of a rudderless world.

Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport stands almost empty, symbol of a lonelier Jewish state that is excoriated in many places amid calls to “globalize the intifada.” Protesters in New York chant “the state of Israel has to go.” The health authorities in Gaza announce that Israel has killed 41,788 Palestinians in the past year. Numbers tend to numb, but they promise another cycle of retribution in due course.

As after the Sept. 11 attacks two decades ago, the world has changed, people have changed, language itself has changed, becoming more treacherous. The tribal has triumphed over reason in a sea of mutual incomprehension and recrimination. Once the David of Middle Eastern conflict, Israel is now the increasingly vilified Goliath, even as it sees itself in a struggle for survival that it did not initiate.

“We are a different society, a different country. Just look at the traumatized faces of people,” said Nirit Lavie Alon, an Israeli teacher at the Technion university in Haifa. “I gave up on peace, completely. Really, we are very desperate.”