Here in Israel, there’s no ‘crisis of confidence’. It’s stronger than ever

Sitting with friends in Tel Aviv this week, there was a common theme: a deep depression at the events of October 7 and a constant, grinding and anxious awareness of the hostages still in Gaza, a fraction of whom are being drip-fed back to safety in exchange for days of ceasefire.

Six weeks after the worst attack in Israel since the Yom Kippur War of 1973, things are quieter than usual in the Middle East’s most hedonistic city, though people have begun going out again, enjoying food and drink with friends in the warm weather. The beach, normally thronged on hot afternoons, is subdued, with a few contemplative people sitting on towels looking at the horizon. Crowds are much denser in Dizengoff Circle, where people can sit in deck chairs round a fountain that is now a shrine to the hostages, complete with hourglasses filled with red sand next to every poster of the kidnapped.

Crowds are constantly milling around what is known as ‘Kidnap Square’ outside the Tel Aviv museum. There, a huge open-air Shabbat dinner table is laid with places for all 240 hostages, and their families gather under a few trees, sometimes giving interviews. There are tents and marquees and aid workers everywhere and at first, the queues to donate blood stretched miles. 

In the West we chuck around the term “solidarity”, usually as a virtue-signalling buzzword showing support for the right groups. In Israel I have not heard that word. But I have been regularly visiting Israel for 20 years and I have never before seen such national unity, as if a warring family has suddenly realised they’ve only got each other. And in a close-knit country 11 times smaller than the UK, everyone knows people caught up in the horror, whether as victims, victims’ families, or soldiers. The emotion, and commitment to what happens next, is genuine and complete. “We are all in Gaza,” they say, and they mean it.

And so it has been almost amusing to read and hear analysis from Serious Persons, such as the august Columbia historian Mark Mazower, that there has been a “crisis of confidence in Israel and Zionism”. Mazower’s evidence seems to be that Israelis were shocked by their vulnerability to such a vicious attack. It was telling, he writes, that Israeli UN ambassador Gilad Erdan wore a yellow star at the Security Council, as if Hamas, “a militant organisation running a tiny, overcrowded territory where two-thirds of the population lives in poverty and most are dependent on international aid to survive” were on a par with “the mighty Third Reich”.

This is a strange take on the situation. Israel, revealing a catastrophic moment of weakness, is not weak; neither militarily, nor, it has become abundantly clear, ideologically. It has been badly divided politically, as those who followed the mass protests over judicial reforms will know. But a polarising government that many rightly see as sub-par and obnoxious is not the same as “a crisis of confidence in Israel and Zionism”. It’s the opposite: a battle for the soul of the country, and a passionate desire to see it survive and thrive.

Indeed, it was clear that Erdan’s much-criticised yellow star was as much a statement about the perverse (if predictable) anti-Israel response in the rest of the world – and the UN – to October 7 as it was a tribute to Israel’s traumatic feeling of imperilment in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. As for the present, it has now become blindingly obvious to anyone who visits that the initial shock has morphed into unified anguish and purpose. People across the political spectrum feel that getting the hostages back isn’t just important, it’s imperative. This means Israel doing whatever is necessary to achieve that end, and crucially, to make sure the same thing never, ever happens again.

Even left-wingers, quick to blame what they see as Israel’s military heavy-handedness, now see no option but to win the war in Gaza, in order to annihilate Hamas and prevent a recurrence; at the very least out of respect to those who have been taken or killed. As a usually apolitical friend of mine, a mother of three, put it: “If we don’t get them all back, then what is the point of Israel? We have to get them back. We have to.” This is not the same as doubting Israel’s purpose. Rather, it is a renewed and monomaniacal determination to make Israel keep fulfilling that purpose.

Meanwhile, the outside world bent on prophesying Israel’s doom seems to overlook the response of Israeli Arabs, whom Israel also has a duty to protect. And among the Arab population of Israel, there has been a groundswell of support for the state. A poll by the Israel Democracy Institute shows that 70 per cent of Arab Israelis feel kinship with the state, as compared to 94 per cent of Jewish Israelis; in June, the figure among Arab Israelis was just 48 per cent. Many thousands are involved in grassroots groups like Standing Together, which, though governed by leftist visions of “peace for all” and “climate justice” nonetheless facilitate Jewish-Arab cooperation. All this suggests a strengthening rather than a weakening of the Zionist project.

Israelis have always been patriotic, for obvious reasons, but now everywhere you turn there are displays and posters calling for the return of all the hostages. There are vast flashing billboards on banks and malls demanding to know how world leaders, and the UN, would feel if their family were taken hostage. Whole sides of skyscrapers are illuminated with the Israeli flag, while the most humble abodes and businesses are flying it too.

Faltering faith in Israel? A crisis in confidence in Zionism? Bad news for the clever pundits of the West: they have never been stronger.