The day after Tisha B’Av

Nine days in Av. Our enemies do not only wish for our destruction. They pursue it. They want these days to echo for us through Jewish history as days of mourning and hurban, destruction. They see themselves as the modern incarnations of those who have hated the Jews through time and sought their ultimate demise. They revel in it. They define themselves by it. And their societies rot because of it.

In seeking to repeat history, they have forgotten it. We are not, as Menachem Begin said, the Jews with trembling knees. We are a nation of lions. And they forget that each force that has sought our destruction has, in turn, ended up in the dustbin of history.

What will determine these days is not what our enemies plan, but our response to it. And three components of that response will be key.

First, our unity. This will not break us. This will bring us together. We may disagree about policy, but we must love each other. Ahavat Hinam, baseless – or unqualified – love. We will be there for those in need. We will insist that our people and its future is bigger and more important than any one tribe’s ideology.

Second, our strategic response. Hope is not a strategy, but neither is “exacting a cost.” This is not about deterrence, nor is it about making them pay a price. This is about a long term, methodical, relentless strategy with as many allies as we can muster, for as much time as it takes, to exploit our enemies’ weaknesses, sustainably dismantle their capabilities, and, most of all, deny the appeal of their death cult, which condemns their own societies to ruin.

And third, it is about peace. Yes, peace. That, in the end, is what this war is about. We may be in a zero-sum contest with Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian regime, but we are not in a zero-sum contest with Islam or with the Palestinian people. Victory is not about the defeat of our enemies — though that is a necessary component of any long-term strategy. It is about what we build, not what we destroy. And we must emerge from this testing moment recommitted to a future, however difficult to achieve, in which the peoples of the Middle East, all peoples — Muslims, Jews and Christians, Palestinians and Israelis, prosper and live in dignity and do not see their own welfare and thriving as requiring the demise of the other.

After the 9th of Av. There is the 10th.