Is this what ‘67 felt like?

Exploding beeper batteries take 3,000 Hezbollah terrorists out of the fighting. 140 aircraft attack deep into Iranian territory – with not a single loss. Salvos of hundreds of Iranian cruise & ballistic missiles – with nary a scratch. The destruction of the entire Syrian air force and armored corp – without an opposing shot fired. 

Is this what post-1967 Israel felt like?

I awake with a sense of wonder every day as I digest the morning’s news. At certain points I’ve felt this half euphoric, half disbelieving sensation, as if the chips are falling in exactly the places we hoped – but never expected – they would. 

I think back to the Six Day War in 1967 – a war that took place 20 years before I was born, but whose legacy is etched into the psyche of Israelis, Jews and the world writ large. When young, little, besieged-on-all-sides Israel managed within just six days to absolutely humble the expansionist (and eliminationist) ambitions of Syria, Egypt and Jordan. 

People stood in awe of the reconfigured Middle East then – Israel grew in size by 4x as a result of the territories it conquered from its belligerent neighbors (with wildly different resulting impacts). Regimes were felled (Syria), ambitions dashed (Egypt) and seeds were planted (Jordan). 

But the defeat of this axis did not end the threat to Israel – it simply changed it. Rather than countries with wildly different histories uniting behind a secular pan-Arabist vision that saw Israel as a stain in the middle of their contiguous territory & historic ascendence, what replaced it was a religiously inspired fanaticism fanned by the flames of the Iranian revolution, whose fervor (and terror) was systematically exported to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and beyond. This new alliance had a completely different ethos, but it too saw Israel as an obstacle to its ascent – albeit a religious, not nationalistic, one.  

The parallels to today are undeniable: Israel has a set of shocking, fast and decisive victories in the face of what seemed only moments before to be near insurmountable odds. We witnessed the complete evaporation of deterrence from Israel’s sworn enemies as their actions could not match their rhetoric. And the disintegration of the current order again leading to the unknown – if Iranian-inspired jihadism replaced pan-Arabism, what will emerge now in the deafening vacuum that now exists just over Israel’s borders?

In just 75 days, we’ve seen the rapid collapse of Assad’s genocidal regime in Syria. The effortless destruction of Iranian air defenses. The neutralization of every member of Hezbollah’s leadership. The new security buffer zones in Lebanon and Syria. The capture of the hugely strategic peak of Mount Hermon. The absolute dismantling of Hamas. The ascendance of a US president who – within days of being elected – issued a more threatening ultimatum regarding the 101 hostages than the current administration did in 14 months.

And yet there’s another story to tell about post-1967 Israel: we were cocky. 

The devastation of the 1973 Yom Kippur war – even though we ultimately pulled through – changed Israeli society forever. Thousands of soldiers lost, the country within a hair’s-breadth of being conquered. Utter shock and surprise given how differently the war just six years earlier had gone. 

We had learned the wrong lessons from 1967, and as a result experienced an almost-existential national disaster. And there are loud echoes of this with October 7 today: a cocksure Israel was convinced that our technologically superior military & defensive systems would protect us, and that our policy of trying to influence Hamas through economic levers would incentivize quiet. 

How wrong we were. 

In the course of the last 14 months we’ve traversed the inverse path of 50 years ago: from a 1973-style shock in the form of October 7 – with a surprise attack that shouldn’t have been a surprise, a complete military & intelligence failure, an inevitable commission of inquiry – to an astounding 1967-style rout. 

Whatever the results of these last few months, though, we would do well to learn the lesson of 1973: we are not invincible, our enemies are not defeated and we live in an extremely dangerous part of the world. Let us “take the win” now (when – finally – it’s an appropriate phrase to use), but be ever ready to defend ourselves in whatever form the conflict takes next.

And crucially, despite all of the success of the last 75 days, let us not forget that the current stage of hostilities with Hamas cannot end until the 100 hostages so brutally kidnapped – our friends and family – are returned by these jihadi terrorists from the underground death tunnels of Gaza. The pain of their continuing captivity – and of the deaths of more than 1,200 other of our brethren – remains a stain on our daily lives. We have utterly embarrassed Hamas’ Iranian backers and humbled their Hezbollah compatriots – it’s time for the chickens to come home to roost for these Hamas terrorists who began this continuing cascade of death and destruction. Let’s get our fellow citizens home.