Three years on, the war that befell us on Black Saturday’s accursed dawn has yet to be clearly named. The government’s choice, Iron Swords, hasn’t caught (what sword, by the way, is not made of iron?).
Unlike conventional war names – such as the Six Day War, the Seven Years’ War, the Vietnam War, or the Falklands War – this war’s length is unknown, and its location, having stretched from Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria to Yemen, Iran, and Iraq, has been elusive.
The best name is probably the Seven Fronts War. Then again, alongside its seven military fronts, this war had three non-military fronts: the diplomatic, the social, and the moral. And in all these, Israel’s wartime leadership sowed havoc and reaped defeat.
The debacle is palpable even in the US
HAD ANYONE made this prediction in autumn 2023, we would have thought they were mad, but this is the fact: After Israel was invaded and its citizens were mass murdered, raped, decapitated, kidnapped, and showered with thousands of rockets – they were portrayed, and widely seen, as the villains of the war they survived.
Never mind the hostility we face in countries like Ireland or Spain, which have strong anti-Israeli traditions. The diplomatic fiasco is such that even veteran allies like Holland and Britain are now openly hostile to the Jewish state.
Masked attackers in Basque region of Spain vandalize light rail trains destined for Israel in June 2026. (credit: SECTION 27A COPYRIGHT ACT)
The debacle is palpable even in the US, and not only in academic quarters and progressive circles, but also among mainstream Democrats and parts of the Republican party. The question of how this can be fought is not the point. The point is that, three years on, Israel has never even begun the counterattack that the enemy’s offensive on this front demands.
If managed properly, Israeli diplomacy would have made the whole world know the basic facts of our situation:
That Gaza’s assault was not about national liberation, but about religious fanaticism. That the Islamist enemy intentionally hides among its civilians, and from there intentionally targets our civilians.
That no Western country has ever faced such an attack. That all those telling Israel how not to fight this scourge never say how it should be fought. And that Israel is but the warm-up act after which, if it’s up Islam’s preachers, it will march on London, Paris, and Rome.
But Israeli diplomacy is nowhere to be seen. Having been abused systematically during the Netanyahu era, our embassies are often manned by political cronies who cannot effectively address foreign audiences, or by professional diplomats who are deliberately underfunded, sidelined, and humiliated, because this government assumes they vote for its opponents.
The enthusiasm, thought, and resources that victory in the diplomatic arena demands have never been marshaled. Hence this government’s defeat on the diplomatic front, potently visualized last week as 80 countries’ representatives, nearly half the world, left the floor when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rose to address the UN General Assembly.
Having said this, the government’s defeat on the diplomatic front pales compared with its defeat on the social front.
Now, the leaders divided the people
WHAT STARTED three years ago next Wednesday was a classical war of defense. We were invaded, massacred, and threatened with a nuclear bomb, and we fought for our lives. In such situations, Israeli society unites. Like Britain did during the Blitz, like the US after Pearl Harbor. That is what Israel did during the 1967 Six Day War, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and the Second Intifada’s suicide-bombing war.
That’s not what happened in this war. Now, the leaders divided the people.
When Middle Israelis went to fight, the government infuriated millions by failing to conscript its ultra-Orthodox allies’ boys. Worse, our wartime leaders actually labored to etch this draft evasion in constitutional stone, even while thousands of other Israelis were impoverished, wounded, or killed fighting for the survival of the Jewish state.
A leadership with a sense of social fairness, or just political instincts, would have summoned ultra-Orthodoxy’s rabbis and told them squarely: The nation’s needs come before our political needs. Now go tell your followers to fight with their brethren, or we will disown you.
That never crossed our wartime leaders’ minds, even though the quantity of ultra-Orthodox draft deferments, the length of the war, and the consequent burden on hundreds of thousands of reservists and their families made millions fume.
That is how the Seven Fronts War divided Israel between those who sacrifice and those who desert, and that is how Israel defeated itself on the second of the war’s three civilian fronts.
From there, the road was short to the wartime government’s worst defeat – the one it registered on the war’s tenth front, the moral front.
Moral leaders admit the truth and face it bravely
POLITICAL MORALITY is about the treatment of truth.
Moral leaders admit the truth and face it bravely, no matter what it might mean. Immoral leaders deny the truth, flee its verdict, and consciously cultivate the lie.
Our wartime leaders committed all these sins. First, they torpedoed the establishment of a commission of inquiry; then they besmirched the judges who would have led the inquiry; and then they spread libels on par with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion while denying multiple reports of advance warnings and shifting blame from the prime minister to anyone else.
“Benjamin Netanyahu once told me there is no such thing as justice,” psychologist Dr. Ruth Bar – Netanyahu’s adviser when he entered politics – said last month. That explains a lot.
It explains what happened to you, Mr. Prime Minister, on the war’s social and moral fronts:
Why you didn’t care that some people fought and paid while others stayed home and got paid, and it explains why you libeled the innocent, fought the truth, and cultivated the lie.
What it doesn’t explain is your frustration at your defeat on the international stage. If you never cared for justice at home, why did you expect it abroad?
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestseller, The Jewish March of Folly (Yedioth Books 2026), now available in English on Amazon.