Israel’s Is Fighting a Different War Now
6 min read
Over the past year, after suffering a devastating surprise and brutal losses, Israel has achieved remarkable military successes. Yahya Sinwar, mastermind of the greatest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, is dead. So, too, are most of his senior subordinates and military commanders. Hamas guerrillas harass Israeli soldiers in Gaza, but what had been an army of tens of thousands—organized into five light infantry brigades and more than two dozen battalions—has been shattered, with half of the fighters dead, by Israeli estimates, and many others wounded or in captivity.
Up north, the successes are no less dramatic. The charismatic and shrewd head of Lebanese Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, is dead. So is his successor. So is Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s most important military figure. And so is most of the rest of the high command. Thousands of exploding pagers, walkie-talkies, and laptops have killed or disabled their users in Hezbollah’s army, which was perhaps double the size of Hamas’s.
Most of Hezbollah’s inventory of 150,000 missiles and rockets has been destroyed—more than 80 percent, according to the Israelis—and the group’s ability to coordinate has been so fractured that instead of the feared volleys of 1,000 projectiles a day, it struggles to launch 50 or 100. The area along Israel’s border, in which Israeli soldiers have found stockpiles of anti-tank missiles and other weaponry in many of the houses, has been painstakingly cleared. Here, too, guerrillas are attacking Israel Defense Forces soldiers, but Hezbollah can no longer muster the large, complex military formations that were formerly more numerous, better trained, better equipped, and better led than their Hamas counterparts.
And on top of it all, Iran has thrown two punches at Israel that were deflected and defeated by American and Israeli defenses. In return, Israel has demolished Iran’s main air-defense system—its Russian-made S-300 batteries—leaving it open to future strikes.
On a recent trip to Israel, I found that Israel’s military and intelligence leaders—who in December were still stunned, guilt-ridden, and infuriated—were in a different place. They are still racked by their collective failure on October 7, 2023, but have recovered their balance. There was no lightheartedness at their exceptional military achievements, however. This was not only because their losses are felt with particular keenness in a society that values its soldiers’ lives in ways even most liberal democracies do not. It is because the Israelis now understand their war differently than they did in December.
Then, commanders and analysts focused on Gaza and Sinwar. They intended to destroy him and Hamas, and to rescue as many of the hostages as possible. The hostilities launched by Hezbollah along Israel’s northern border—a shower of rockets and sniping every day, which had forced the evacuation of some 80,000 Israelis a few miles from the Lebanon line—were ongoing, but represented an account to be settled later. The Houthis had fired a few missiles at Israel; the major exchanges between Iran and Israel were in the future.
The Israeli high command now sees all of these conflicts as elements of a single, multifront war with Iran. It believes that the preparation for the Hamas attack was intimately tied to Hezbollah, which is in turn an Iranian proxy. It believes, moreover, that the purpose of these attacks, over the next few years, was not to inflict damage upon Israel, but to destroy it. “They thought they could conquer Israel,” one sobered general told me. “I had not fully understood that.” A Hezbollah attack would have followed the same pattern as Hamas’s assault—launched along the entire border, from an extensive tunnel system and mustering points concealed within civilian buildings. Had both attacks occurred simultaneously, Israel’s situation might well have been an order of magnitude more dire than it was on October 7.
Why Sinwar launched his attack before Hezbollah felt ready is unclear: He may simply have grown impatient. But the links, some of which were known to Israel before the war, were far deeper than the Israelis had realized. Saleh al-Arouri, one of Hamas’s most senior military leaders, had been living in the vicinity of the Hezbollah high command in Lebanon when an Israeli bomb killed him in January. He and Israel’s other enemies are and have always been absolutely clear about their intention to destroy the country no matter the price paid by civilians. Most Palestinians “would settle in a moment for peace, some deal that will let them get on with their lives,” he told a British interviewer in 2007. “We need to keep them angry.”
Israel is now fighting a different kind of war, which has elicited a different Israeli mindset. “We’re no longer afraid of casualties,” a hard-bitten colonel told me. “I lost 10 guys, and nothing stopped. We don’t go to the funerals; we’ll visit after the war.” This is a fundamental change from the Israel of October 6, 2023. Israel is girding itself for the daunting prospect of a long war against Iran, even as its immediate conflicts with Hamas and Hezbollah cannot be swiftly and decisively wrapped up, no matter what American and European leaders might wish.
The IDF has always been a military focused on short-term fixes, on tactical and technical innovation, on agility and adaptability. As an Israeli strategic planner ruefully put it, “We only talk about strategy in English.” That will be a problem in the next phase of this war. Israel does not wish to put Gaza under military government during its reconstruction—but it has also failed to devise any plausible alternative, despite floating ideas such as an international police force or a return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza. Lots of humanitarian aid goes into Gaza—I saw the long lines of trucks—but much of it is immediately hijacked by Hamas gunmen, who control the distribution of relief, and with it the population. Hezbollah is still reeling from its hammering over the past two months, but it survives in the shape of small cells. Israeli and American hopes that the Lebanese armed forces can contain it have always proved to be pipe dreams. The long-range strikes by Iran against Israel will surely continue.
The Israelis will persevere, and things may break their way—if, for example, Iran’s internal politics are shaken up by the passing of the supreme leader, by ferocious American sanctions, or by overt and covert punishment for the attempted assassination of President-elect Donald Trump. In any event, the Israelis grimly believe, and with reason, that they have no choice but to continue fighting.
Yet the changes in Israeli society are noticeable. The reserve army that has fought these wars is tired. Many soldiers and airmen have spent most of the past year in battle, and their families have felt the strain. The national-religious component of Israeli society—what would translate in American terms into modern Orthodox Jews—has particularly borne the load. Because of Israel’s reserve system, many of the fallen are middle-aged men, and many leave behind fatherless children. “Ten dead. Fifty-six orphans,” one friend bitterly remarked. The national-religious disproportionately volunteer for frontline combat units. Their antipathy toward the ultra-Orthodox, who are draft-exempt and have been draining government budgets at the expense of subsidies for soldiers whose families and careers have been upended by war, is fierce. “Cowards,” spat out one mild-mannered friend, who now despises a population whose behavior she might once have excused.
As ever, Israel is a complicated and changing place. Yossi Klein Halevi, one of Israel’s shrewdest observers, once said, “Everything you can say about Israel is true. So is the opposite.” And thus it remains. Israel includes alienated secularists and patriotic Arab citizens (increasing numbers of whom quietly join the military); it has liberals and reactionaries, men and women of all skin colors, gay-pride marches and obscurantist religious seminaries. But one thing is certain: It is engaged in an existential war of a kind that most of us in the West cannot appreciate unless we go there, observe, and listen.
