A potential pivot point on Gaza — and also on Israel

The massacre was largely carried out by terrorists with guns. But on the political side in Israel, long knives will surely be unsheathed soon enough.

It is human to assume things remain more or less the same. Then history intervenes with a game-changing event. So it was on Saturday, Oct. 7, when battalions of Hamas militants invaded Israel as it celebrated a Jewish holiday.

They managed to kill hundreds of civilians and drag many back others into Gaza as hostages, even as their colleagues rained rockets on Tel Aviv and other cities. It was an event so shocking as to change everything.

That’s because Israel, for all its history of bravado and occasional recklessness, is a prosperous country with largely Western expectations about the lifestyle and security of its citizens. Despite a history of terrorism and violence, its people are mostly ill-suited to be stoic about the scenes that unfolded here this weekend.

These included not only buildings lying in ruins and going up in flames but submachine-wielding terrorists running wild in Israeli villages and towns. They included a video of crying women marched by militants into Gaza through Israeli territory unimpeded. Abductees, including an elderly woman, were paraded inside Gaza. In a bone-chilling recording, a mother begged for help as she hid with her baby while attackers broke into her home.

There are at least 600 dead and 2000 wounded, the vast majority of them civilians. Relative to population, this is equivalent to four 9/11s in the United States. 

Just as those attacks by Al Qaeda launched a new chapter for the United States, so this attack ends Israel’s patience with the strategy it has pursued since Hamas expelled the Palestinian Authority from Gaza in 2007. That strategy was to accept Islamic militant rule in the neighboring strip, strictly control who and what goes in and comes out, and accept the occasional round of rocket fire. It was understood that the missiles can mostly be stopped by the Iron Dome system and are not likely to kill a lot of people — as indeed they have not.

Israel has never had the stomach for the losses it would likely absorb by launching a ground invasion aimed at physically dislodging Hamas. And even though it has cumulatively killed hundreds of civilians in its efforts to bomb Hamas into ending rocket fire during mini-wars in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021 and 2022, it never flattened Gaza the way U.S. forces did in Iraq’s Mosul and Syria’s Raqqa to uproot the Islamic State.

But given the dimensions of Saturday’s disaster, it’s safe to say that the tanks would already be rolling into Gaza, if not for the hostages.