OPINION:
A few months back, passengers arriving at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport walked down a sloping path to passport control flanked by dozens of posters depicting the remaining hostages Hamas had dragged into the Gaza Strip after its Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of Israel and the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
When I arrived in Israel earlier this month, only one poster remained: that of Ran Gvili, a 24-year-old police officer killed while attempting to defend a kibbutz from the terrorists.
This turned out to be emblematic of the current reality in Israel: The hostage release and ceasefire President Trump brokered in October has brought Israelis palpable relief and renewed optimism. However, they also recognize that peace is not yet at hand.
“We’re living with traumas and scars,” an Israeli brigadier general told me a few days later. “But we’re resilient. We need to be because our enemies have only been weakened, not defeated.”
Iran’s rulers and their main proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis) have no interest in a “two-state solution,” except perhaps as a step toward a “final solution” in the sense the Nazis used that monstrous phrase. Their goal remains what it has always been: the extermination of the people of Israel.
There’s a word for that: genocide. Of course, it is one of the many crimes Israel is relentlessly accused of despite the conclusive and repeated debunking of that charge.
This is a long-standing pattern. In the late 1950s, Vasily Grossman, the Russian-Jewish novelist who was the first journalist to see the Nazi death camp at Treblinka, wrote: “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.”
Hamas leaders could have halted the current conflict at any time over the past two years simply by releasing the hostages and laying down their arms. Merely freeing the hostages might have sufficed, so adamant were the Israelis — for historical, religious and psychological reasons — to redeem the captives.
Hamas leaders chose instead to use Gaza civilians as their shields, both on the streets above their multimillion-dollar subterranean fortress and in buildings booby-trapped with improvised explosive devices.
That’s not all. “During the worst of the days of the hunger crisis in Gaza in the past six months, Hamas deliberately hid literal tons of infant formula and nutritional shakes for children by storing them in clandestine warehouses belonging to the Gaza Ministry of Health,” Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Palestinian American activist and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, has reported.
Hamas’ strategy was to maximize Gaza residents’ suffering, confident that the United Nations and influential nongovernmental organizations would blame the Israelis.
The day after the Hamas invasion, Hezbollah began rocketing northern Israeli communities from Lebanon. Houthi rebels in Yemen started firing missiles at Israel a few days later. In April and October 2024, Iran’s rulers launched hundreds of missiles and drones at targets in the Jewish state.
Sophisticated Israeli and American air defense systems prevented thousands of deaths and catastrophic destruction. In the months that followed, Hamas was decimated, Hezbollah was crippled and, thanks to Mr. Trump’s deployment of B-2 stealth bombers, Tehran’s nuclear weapons facilities were seriously damaged.
Although Israelis prevailed on multiple fronts, their enemies have been winning a cognitive war — a campaign of disinformation, libels and slanders on a historically unprecedented scale.
“The [Oct. 7 Al-Aqsa] Flood, with its might, has prepared the international arena,” said Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal. “This is our opportunity to build on this in order to expel this [Israeli] entity from our homeland and from the international stage.”
The most effective combatant in the cognitive war: the Qatari-owned Al Jazeera media platforms, which went so far as to assign Hamas operatives as reporters.
Major media outlets parroted Al Jazeera and repeated fake statistics provided by Hamas-controlled “local authorities” and the “Gaza Health Ministry.”
TikTok, a propaganda arm of the Chinese Communist Party, contributed to the anti-Israel effort. Iranian and Russian bots also spread hate and lies and incited violence.
A group of editors at Wikipedia has been consistently slanting Israel-related entries, as has been conclusively established by researcher Ashley Rindsberg. Wikipedia’s poisonous calumnies flow downstream to artificial intelligence platforms such as Google, ChatGPT and Claude.
Joining the Islamist-left coalition are extreme-right influencers — Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens among them — who are only too eager to demonize Israel, Israelis, Zionists and Jews.
As I write this, the body of murdered hostage Ran Gvili still has not been returned. Hamas fighters are not disarming. An “international stabilization force” has yet to be organized. Hamas has vowed that no such force will enter the western half of Gaza, still under its control.
Since the latest ceasefire, Hamas gunmen are estimated to have summarily executed no fewer than 80 opponents, rivals and dissidents, labeling them and all those willing to consider peaceful coexistence with Israelis “collaborators.”
Meanwhile, Israelis have only begun the painful process of examining the failures that led to the perfect storm of Oct. 7. Among their mistakes was believing that if Gaza residents’ lives improved — more and better-paying jobs, schools for their children and improved health care, including in world-class Israeli hospitals for thousands of Gaza residents — Hamas leaders would refrain from initiating another devastating war.
What Israelis grossly underestimated was Hamas’ commitment to jihad, a war that began 1,400 years ago.
A new Israeli defense posture is evolving. It will not depend on mirror imaging, wishful thinking or even deterrence. It will focus on early detection of threats, followed by kinetic operations to prevent those threats from metastasizing.
This will not make Israelis more popular in Western Europe, at U.N. headquarters or at Gracie Mansion once Zohran Mamdani moves in, but it’s necessary if the people of Israel are to live.
• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a columnist for The Washington Times and host of the “Foreign Podicy” podcast.
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