Finally. The war we had been waiting for

It finally happened. An air raid siren at 3 a.m. Friday heralded the start of the war we had been waiting for.

We were waiting for almost 25 years – since Prime Minister Ariel Sharon directed the Mossad to focus mainly on it; since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared (over and over again) that it was Israel’s top strategic challenge; since President Barack Obama signed the nuclear agreement with a sunset clause; since President Trump pulled out of it.

For many, the attack on Iran and its nuclear facilities came almost as a relief: finally, Israel was doing what needed to be done. Viscerally, many Israelis felt that only force might derail the jihadi regime’s stated goal of destroying Israel.

Though it is far from over, though there are mounting Israeli civilian casualties and parts of Israeli cities look like war zones, and though Iran may for years or decades continue to be ruled by ayatollahs and try again to make a nuclear bomb, Israel has won this war against Iran.

Israel won this war because we finally launched it. We broke the yoke of more than 20 years of paralysis, of containment, of rhetoric not backed by sufficiently forceful action. We snapped out of our paralysis.

We finally came back to our original selves, to the Israel of our founding generation, to the Ben Gurion defense doctrine which stated that Israel must take the initiative, that war must be fought on enemy’s turf.

In retrospect, it is important to understand the factors which contributed to the paralysis – among them inevitable societal changes; risk-aversion at the highest levels of government and the defense establishment; a democratic country’s preference for peace (or the illusion of it) to war; the incapacity of the West (of which Israel is part) to fully grasp the Islamic jihadi way of seeing the world and internalize the implications.

Whatever its causes, this 20-year Israeli paralysis allowed Hezbollah to amass some 200,000 missiles and Hamas to build hundreds of kilometers of tunnels with weapons flowing uninterrupted across and beneath the border with Egypt. Israeli leaders infected by this paralysis did not respond strongly enough when the first rockets were lobbed at Sderot following Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005; when Hezbollah systematically broke the UN resolution ending the second Lebanon War in 2006; when it agreed to allow suitcases of Qatari cash to be handed to Hamas, hoping the money and military restraint would buy quiet. The paralysis compromised the defense establishment’s ability to assess Hamas’ intentions and preparation in the years, months and hours before October 7^th.

October 7^th was the formative moment in breaking the paralysis – a blessing in the form of a disaster. We learned the hard way that containment is not – never was – a viable strategy and that initiating war on our terms is better than coming under attack. October 7^th finally gave the political and military leadership the courage to incapacitate Hezbollah – after nearly a year of it ravaging Israel’s north with missiles. October 7^th may have spared us a nuclear Iran.

This Israel-Iran war hopefully marks the start of a new era for Israel and, possibly, for the region. Like with Hezbollah, Israel’s attack exposes Iran’s weakness. A psychological hurdle, created by years of paralysis, is broken.

To be sure, this is not to say the war will be easy or that the Iranian regime won’t survive the war and return to dominating its people, rebuilding a nuclear weapon and reestablishing its axis of terror. That is a likely scenario. Hoping that the Iranian regime will implode the way the Assad regime in Syria did, is to naively ignore the difference between a secular dictatorship and a theocracy. It is also a dangerous distraction from the war’s stated goals.

But regardless of its final outcome, this war marks an end to paralysis that characterized the last 20 years. It will restore Israel’s deterrence. It will beget a renewed admiration and respect for Israel among its Sunni neighbors, undermined by the October 7^th attack, which could usher in a new era for the Middle East.

This war is a victory – by virtue of initiating it.