Our choice between ‘never again’ and ‘again’

While deeply moving, President Trump’s recent meeting with former Hamas hostages was also depressing. Eight Israelis — unbowed, patriotic, and highly representative of our society as whole — told the president that their state had let them down. The only hope for the remaining hostages rested with America, they implicitly said, and its ability to pressure the Israeli government. If this message were not sufficiently dismaying, Eli Sharabi, freed only a month before, after 491 days of hellish captivity, presented Trump with a two-paneled drawing. On one side were three Holocaust prisoners and, on the other, three Israeli hostages. Except for the barbed wire interning the first and the Hamas terrorists looming over the latter, the subjects were identically gaunt and humiliated. “Never Again,” pledged the heading over the Holocaust victims, while above the hostages wept a single word, “Again.”

Israel, the drawing indicates, not only failed to fulfill its moral duty to redeem all captives but, far more fundamentally, betrayed its raison d’être. The state established in 1948 proved incapable of living up its promise to always defend the Jews, especially those living in our homeland. Of course, in terms of its unfathomable dimensions, the Holocaust cannot be compared to the relatively limited horrors inflicted by Hamas. Still, Israel’s founding vow was broken. In proclaiming, “Never again,” many Israelis are no longer referring to the Final Solution, but to the onslaught of October 7 and the hostages’ enduring ordeal.

Restoring Israel’s credibility as the guarantor of Jewish survival is our most fateful challenge today. We must internalize the lessons of October 7 and ask ourselves honestly, even brutally, how they can be tangibly applied. What are the changes — military, diplomatic, political, socio-economic, and even spiritual — needed to guarantee that, from now on, when we say, “Never again,” this time we mean it.

Firstly, and as swiftly as possible, we must bring all the hostages home. There can be no healing of past wounds nor effective girding ourselves for further conflicts as long as Israelis remain in Hamas’s hands. The terrorists can be dealt with decisively in the future, when our soldiers are rested and more adequately armed, but the hostages who are still alive have little time to wait. And if even our most far-reaching concessions prove unacceptable to Hamas, we must be able to say to ourselves — and our children — we tried our utmost and more.

At the same time, we must alter our strategic thinking. While this week visiting the Nahal Oz base, I heard an observation soldier relate how, prior to October 7, she reported sighting major Hamas exercises and asked her commanding officer whether the IDF would intervene. “No,” she responded, “Hamas is training, not attacking, and we can’t pre-empt. Remember, we are the Israel Defense Forces, not the Israel Offense Forces.”

The IDF must now become the IOF. We must no longer permit terrorist armies to amass anywhere near our borders. On each, we must reestablish and significantly expand security zones. We must re-instill the knowledge, planted in the pagers operation and the elimination of terrorist chiefs, that murderers of Jews are nowhere safe. Above all, we must act to prevent the enemies dedicated to our destruction from acquiring the means to achieve it. Israel cannot co-exist with military-grade nuclear facilities in Iran.

Israel declared its independence in 1948, but 77 years later, has largely forfeited it. From American leaders participating in our war cabinet meetings to our dependence on foreign arms and military aid, Israel has hemorrhaged sovereignty. Though we will remain a small nation navigating between superpowers, we must nevertheless strive to achieve the maximum degree of freedom in our decision-making and our ability to implement it. No longer must Israeli citizens feel compelled to appeal to a president to do what their own government appears incapable. Israeli officials must work to regain the basic trust of our people, even those who oppose their policies, and their respect for the democratic system. We must once again take pride in, and zealously preserve, our sovereignty.

Independence must reign not only in Israel’s foreign relations, but, even more pressingly, in our domestic affairs. South of Beersheva — 62 percent of the country — there is minimal enforcement of Israeli law. Gun and drug trafficking, illegal building, are rampant.  An additional 13% of the country’s population, the ultra-Orthodox, also rejects the state’s authority, if not its very legitimacy, refuses to serve in the IDF, and to provide a basic modern education for its youth. In Judea and Samaria, a minority of Israeli citizens flagrantly, and occasionally violently, defy Israeli law. Just as a state that does not safeguard its external freedom cannot fully defend that of its inhabitants, neither does a state that cannot govern itself retain the resilience necessary for national defense.

Resilience — khosen, in Hebrew — is essentially a prerequisite for keeping any promise of “Never again.” As captured Hamas documents agonizingly attest, the political divisions within Israeli society prior to October 7 rendered it vulnerable to large-scale attack. While democratically elected governments have every right to pursue their chosen policies, they also have the duty to maintain a basic degree of unity. America might be able to afford extreme political polarization; not so, Israel. Thus, though almost all of the security chiefs forum’s two dozen participants are outspoken critics of the government, the government must heed the forum, which warned that further efforts to weaken judicial checks on elected officials would again weaken Israel’s resilience. Unlike the United States, where the president is also the commander-in-chief, Israeli leaders cannot simply order Israelis to fight; rather, they must convince them. Conserving those powers of persuasion is critical for the state’s security and its ability to ensure “Never again.”

Seeking realistic peace options with our neighbors, strengthening our bonds with world Jewry, rebuilding ties with nations alienated by the war — all are essential if we are serious about averting “Again.” We must work to narrow what has become one of the world’s widest income gaps and to make our minority communities part of the Israeli story. Most crucially, we must struggle relentlessly against the sin’at chinam — gratuitous hate — that plagued our society prior to October 7. There is a dark and direct connection between the fighting that broke out around the Yom Kippur services in Dizengoff Square on September 25, 2023, and the catastrophe that befell us less than two weeks later.

The choice is ours. Only we can determine whether “Never again” remains merely a declaration and a vision that the state will stay ill-equipped to uphold. The founders of 1948 made a pledge and went to vast lengths — fighting off invaders, absorbing immigrants, forging a nation — to fulfill it. We now must do the same. We alone can decide if the next picture presented in the Oval Office shows, alongside those of Holocaust survivors, the images not of the defenseless victims of terror, but of Israelis standing indomitable, unified, and secure.