The coldest place in an Israel scorched by the Summer of August 2023 was probably the pedestrian way in Jerusalem’s City of David. Back then, the country was full of protests, roadblocks, refusals to serve in the IDF, and an overall feeling of chaos and imminent ruin.
At the site of the previous destruction of Jewish sovereignty, however, there was quiet. Where the last of the rebels had hidden — in the drainage beneath the street — Jamie, the guide, handed me a printed page from Flavius Josephus’ book. On October 11, when I asked him to send me a copy on WhatsApp, he told me he had given one to each of the “VIPs” who had visited the City of David. They were moved, returned to street level, and went back to deal with modern Jewish wars.
Josephus’ passage deals with the question the Romans asked themselves: whether to enter Jerusalem by exploiting internal strife, or to wait:
“And all the Roman commanders rejoiced at the quarrels of the brothers among their enemies as if they were finding great spoil, and wished to hurry and seize the city; they even urged Vespasian, believing that this time everything he set out to do would succeed. They said to him that now the gods were fighting for them, setting enemies at variance with one another, brother against brother. But the wheel turns quickly, and perhaps the Jews will tire of civil war or be moved to repentance for their deeds and be reconciled.
To these words Vespasian replied: ‘Know that you are very much mistaken in this counsel of yours at this time. Indeed you long to display the strength of your hand and the splendor of your arms, as those who stand before a spectacle, but this matter is fraught with danger and you do not attend to your own advantage and safety. For if you hurry at once to storm the city, you will, by your actions, establish a peace between our enemies and by that very right hand of theirs will they fall upon us.
If you give them time, afterwards the number of our enemies will diminish, for the fire of dissension will consume them. For the gods arrange war better than I, and they will deliver the Jews into the hands of the Romans for nothing and give victory to our armies without toil and peril. And while the enemies go about and people’s tools fall into their neighbors’ hands — because a terrible curse has arisen upon them, a civil war — it is better for us to look upon them from afar and sit quietly than to meddle in the quarrel of men who are going to die, fighting among themselves in a frenzy.'”
The “Axis of Evil” favored Vespasian’s patient approach. Yahya Sinwar, the minister of the southern army of Iran, thought differently. He did not wait for orders from above — he went in.
Destroying the villa
Since October 7 there has been fierce argument about what brought about the massacre: “Brothers in Arms” IDF refusers and the Kaplan protesters, or the government’s judicial upheavals? It is a continuation of Jewish wars by other means. The bitter truth is that behind Hamas’ burning, pathological hatred of Jews, they did not distinguish between Kaplanists and right-wingers, ultra-Orthodox and secular.
“Here is a settlement,” they celebrated in their GoPro footage as they entered the communities around the Gaza envelope — not exactly die-hard fans of the settlement enterprise. On their channels, when they portray a Zionist soldier as evil, they paste on him a beard, sidelocks and a large black kippah — in short, an ultra-Orthodox Jew. Apparently, they didn’t hear that Israel’s number-one problem is that the Haredim are not all that keen to serve in the military.
The attack was supposed to have been carried out during the previous Jewish New Year celebrations, when Simcha Rothman and Yariv Levin were opposition MKs and Kaplan was simply the name of a street. The general weakness the State of Israel displayed, reflected in its internal conflicts, served as moral support for Sinwar, though not as the main motive.
In a rare 2006 interview on Channel 2 from prison, Sinwar explained that Israel could not be destroyed, pointing to its formidable air force as proof. Gradually, however, he became convinced that it could be destroyed. He surely saw the exaggerated, hysterical reports about the “collapse of the air force” as a sign from above that Allah was with him. But the preparations began long before that.
In 2021, then-Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar warned that if Israel were faltering in its leadership, all its indicators would show decline. I later learned that he was not referring to internal divides. Rather, his focus was on the insane morale boost that radical Islam received from the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the implications for the perception that terrorism ultimately triumphs over the West, as well as for how Operation Guardian of the Walls in 2021 ended.
In the warning Bar gave Benjamin Netanyahu about the need to shelve the judicial reform, he did not mean that the enemy sees weakness in the societal rift; rather, he meant that a significant pre-emptive strike against the axis was needed, and such an intentional pre-emptive blow could only be achieved by national consensus — not while the streets were burning. Netanyahu, however, thought Bar was just another official using his professional opinion to thwart a political move he opposed; the Shin Bet chief did not foresee that evil would open from the south, and the tragic end is known.
And so, although objective evidence shows there is no direct causal link between Israel’s internal rift and the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, I understand what Jamie the tour guide understood, and what historians will understand: there is a spiritual connection. When Jews forget which neighborhood they live in and set about demolishing their own villa as if there is no jungle around it, the sword comes for them. When the headline a day before October 7 about the expected protests around Simchat Torah celebrations in Tel Aviv’s famed Dizengoff Square reads “The War of Simchat Torah,” a war like that will indeed come — only different.
Don’t believe the word “spiritual”? Call it “karma is a bitch.”
Unity, but a different kind
The wild lack of proportion led to defiant statements that political opponents are worse than Hamas and Hezbollah, or to declarations like “Hezbollah is Bibi’s problem; I won’t show up for the next war,” as said one of the leaders of “Brothers in Arms” who has since been suspended from reserve duty. The vast majority who made such statements, however, did not mean it at all; proof of that is the turn-out at IDF bases when Hamas and Hezbollah actually attacked.
But for many long years, the system acted as if there were no enemy on the street. Quiet, wealthy, large, and old countries would have thought twice before launching the crazy circus of five consecutive election cycles. Here, in the Middle East, the perception was that defeating the other side mattered more than passing a budget, crafting long-term plans, or a war against Iran’s nuclear program.
And so, even if it doesn’t seem that way right now, it seems to me that the conclusion of the mainstream in Israeli society — unlike the mainstream currents in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, or France — is that the path to victory runs through unity, and that a narrow government is narrow in more than one sense. Not a naïve unity for mere appeasement, but a unity born of the necessity of a call to mobilization.
