Today marks the one year anniversary of the remarkably successful Hamas raid on Israel, in which some 1,500 lightly-armed Islamic militants from Gaza so greatly humiliated the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his country’s entire national security establishment. The consequences of these last twelve months have been enormous, not merely for the Jewish State and the rest of the Middle East, but also for America and the entire world.

For many fatal diseases the cause of death is less the result of the infection itself than that of the defensive immune system, whose massive over-reaction destroys vital tissue, killing the entire organism. And I think that the Hamas raid of October 7, 2023 and the Israeli response may eventually be seen in this light.

Some 1,200 Israelis died that day, probably many or most of them killed by their own country’s panic-stricken and trigger-happy IDF forces, whose Apache helicopters were ordered to blast anything that moved. Although such losses were hardly insignificant in a Jewish population of some 7.2 million and the national humiliation was enormous, if the Israeli government had merely been content to launch a few weeks of punitive bombing attacks against Gaza and then grudgingly accept an exchange of prisoners with its Hamas adversaries, I doubt the results would have been too serious.

Israel had held many thousands of Palestinians without charges or trial and often under brutal conditions, so releasing these in exchange for the 200-odd Israelis Hamas had carried back to Gaza would have meant a huge loss of face for the Jewish State, but hardly a threat to the country’s survival. The Israelis could have merely fired a few of their complacent and incompetent local military commanders and strengthened their Gaza defenses, and matters would have probably gone on much like before.

Israel had been riding high at that point, on the very verge of accomplishing its decades-long project of fully normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia, the most powerful Arab state. Israel’s close friends totally dominated the Biden Administration and Donald Trump promised to do even more for that country if he somehow managed to regain the White House. The country had just celebrated the 75th anniversary of its founding, and its international strategic position seemed better than it had been in many years, so it could have easily taken its Hamas debacle in stride.

But after the events of the last twelve months, I tend to doubt that the country will survive much longer in anything like its existing form, and its collapse may also take down with it the entire political structure of organized Jewry worldwide, which today so heavily dominates both America and much of the rest of the world. While Israel may face very serious risks from the major regional war its government seeks to ignite, I think the greatest threat to its existence comes from the massive distribution of devastating information that has taken place during this last year.

If the Israeli government had cut its losses and exchanged prisoners with Hamas, the country might have been humiliated but Netanyahu would have been utterly destroyed. So partly because of his own desperate political situation, he reacted in very different fashion, unleashing massive, relentless attacks against Gaza’s helpless couple of million civilians, clearly hoping to save his own political skin by using the Hamas raid as an excuse to kill or expel all the Palestinians in that enclave and afterwards in the West Bank. This would have allowed him to establish his name in history as Israel’s second founding father, finally creating the Greater Israel that all of his predecessors had failed to achieve. This bold project was certainly spurred on by the small extremist political parties upon whom the political survival of his government depended, whose ideological leadership regarded those territories as their God-given heritage under the fierce version of the religious Judaism that they followed.

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