A brutal year and a tale of two Israels: the one that is feared and the one that is fearful | Jonathan Freedland

2 weeks ago

You’ll be ahead of me on this one. By the time you read this, it’s possible that Israel will have hit back in response to the nearly 200 ballistic missiles that Iran fired on Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and other cities on Tuesday evening. As I write this, the world is bracing itself for that expected Israeli retaliation and what threatens to be an all-out regional war, pitting the Middle East’s dominant powers against each other.

The reason for that gap between us is that I am writing these words before the start of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, which began at sunset on Wednesday. By tradition, Jews are supposed to refrain from all work for the 48 hours that follow, work defined to include not only updating newspaper columns but watching the news on TV or checking your phone. I suspect I will not be the only Jew who will have struggled to comply with that stricture this year.

But you don’t need a crystal ball to know that whenever that Israeli response comes, opinion will divide instantly and sharply, with two radically opposed views of what has just happened – mapping on to two wholly opposed views of Israel itself. That divide is part of what made this perhaps the hardest Rosh Hashanah that all but the oldest Jews can remember, one that came at the end of a dark and terrible year.

Here’s what I mean about those two different views of Israel. There’s the Israel you see on the news: the mighty bully, wildly lashing out at its neighbours, that, not content with turning much of Gaza into rubble, has now rolled its tanks into Lebanon – apparently for no better reason than because it can. This Israel is the one indicted by the world’s courts, where it is accused of the most heinous crimes. This Israel has, for a year, brought out millions in mass demonstrations in the major cities of Europe, the US and beyond, a scale of protest unseen for two decades, politicising a generation that has decided that opposition to Israel is the great issue of our age.

And then there’s the Israel you glimpse in the testimony of the men, women and very young children who survived a massacre whose anniversary comes on Monday – telling how they huddled, alone and undefended, in bathrooms and kids’ bedrooms, for long, terrified hours as Hamas men surrounded their homes, firing bullets through doors and hurling grenades through windows, before eventually setting house after house ablaze, yelping in delight at what they themselves called a “slaughter”. This Israel is the one still yearning for the hostages seized that day, scores of whom remain in captivity in Gaza. This Israel is the one whose north has been pounded by Hezbollah rockets for 12 months straight, forcing about 65,000 Israeli civilians from their homes.

These are the two Israels, and they have next to nothing in common: the Israel that is seen by much of the world, and the Israel that sees itself.

Take the upcoming anniversary. For many outside Israel, 7 October will mark one year since the start of a brutal war whose prime victims have been the innocents of Gaza, their deaths counted in the tens of thousands. Inside Israel, 7 October is the anniversary of the bleakest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust, when nearly 1200 people, most of them civilians, were massacred, many of them raped, tortured and burned alive.

Damaged buildings in the Haifa district of northern Israel, following a reported rocket strike by Hezbollah on 22 September 2024.

Or take the last two weeks. For many outside Israel, the bloodshed of the last fortnight is confirmation that Israel is the country that most threatens the Middle East, an aggressive power that, whatever comes next with Iran, had already widened its war to take in Lebanon, with strikes on Yemen too. Inside Israel, the last two weeks are understood as the country at last hitting back against the proxies of the regime that constitutes the true danger to the Middle East – namely, Iran and its theocratic rulers. For years, Iran has encircled Israel with a “ring of fire” that includes the three Hs: Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen and, most well-armed of the three, Hezbollah, wielding an enormous arsenal and the power of a state within a state. These actors and Iran are not, incidentally, simply in the business of ending the injustice of Israel’s post-1967 occupation: their stated goal is to end Israel itself.

For many outside Israel, last week’s killing of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was a reckless act of Israeli escalation, bound to push the Middle East into all-out war and equally bound to cause great loss of life. To Israelis, it was an act of self-defence, finally taking out the commander of an army that had been firing on northern Israel for an entire year – a fusillade that began on 8 October in an act of self-proclaimed solidarity with Hamas and which never stopped – rendering the towns and villages of that area uninhabitable. Israelis ask which country in the world would tolerate such a bombardment and leave untouched the man giving the orders, especially when that man once hailed the convenience of Jews being gathered in one place, Israel, because it meant not “having to go to the ends of the world” to find them. While they’re at it, Israelis like to remind their critics of Nasrallah’s role at the right hand of Bashar al-Assad, when Hezbollah assisted the Syrian dictator as he set about the murder of more than 600,000 of his own people.

Or take the war that has caused so much pain for all of the last year. What the world sees in Gaza is a benighted strip of land that Israel has crushed, heedless of the consequences for civilian life. What Israelis see is a cruel Hamas enemy that revealed its true face on 7 October and which has embedded itself inside and beneath the streets and homes of Gaza, using the entire population as a human shield, so that when innocents die there, it is Hamas who should bear the blame.

You can keep on like this, each example exposing the gulf that separates Israel from a swath of world opinion. But all this only points to the deeper difference. To most outsiders, Israel is a regional superpower, backed by a global superpower. It is strong and secure. But that is not how it looks from the inside. Israelis see their society as small – the size of New Jersey – besieged and vulnerable.

For several decades, the rest of the world could say such talk was absurd; that whatever Israel’s origins, with the state established just three years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the country that existed now was muscled and armed, with nothing to fear. But then came 7 October.

Watch One Day in October, a meticulous Channel 4 documentary centred on Be’eri, a kibbutz that lost a tenth of its population that day – more than 100 people – and you begin to understand why Israelis do not feel like the invincible colossus of their critics’ imagination. A man describes being cornered in a room as he witnesses first his wife and then his teenage son bleed to death, shot through the metal door that stood between them and the Hamas men. A child, now aged nine, recalls the sleepover at a friend’s house that ended in being taken to Gaza as a hostage. A woman remembers how she called for help again and again – and how the army never came. She tried to comfort her best friends in whispered phone calls; instead she heard their dying breaths.

At the time, some objected to my use of the word pogrom to describe 7 October. Israel is a state with a daunting military; it was ridiculous to use language from the era when Jews were a defenceless minority. But that was to miss the echo felt by those who lived through it: that, for those hours when the army had not yet reached them, they were as powerless as their ancestors in the shtetl. It’s why so many saw 7 October not as an Israeli event so much as a Jewish one.

There are two things to say about this yawning gap between how the world sees Israel and how Israelis see themselves. The first is that there is one group that is exposed daily to both perspectives and often finds itself caught in the middle. I am thinking of diaspora Jews, who see what Israel does, and how it looks, from the outside – and yet know, from friends and family, how it feels on the inside.

The second is that if there is to be any hope at all of ending the terrible bitterness that fills that part of the world and radiates far beyond it, then those who stand on opposite ends of the yawning gap have to try, if only for a moment, to see how things look from the other side. Israelis need to think hard about the impact their actions, so eminently justified in their own eyes, have on all those around them. And the rest of the world could do with putting themselves in Israelis’ shoes every now and again, to imagine what it would be like to be surrounded by enemies who dream of your death and who, just one year ago, tried their damnedest to make those dreams come true.