Israel’s Second War of Independence

During the summer of 2024—because I could no longer bear the thought of not taking an active part in our ongoing war, and thanks also to my stubborn refusal to acknowledge my advancing years—I volunteered for the IDF reserves. For the first time in decades, I put on a uniform, donned a helmet, and picked up a gun; the uniform still fit me, more or less, while the latter two items were far heavier than I’d remembered.

My assignment was to help guard a kibbutz in the Upper Galilee near the source of the Jordan River: an area that was then under constant rocket fire from Hizballah terrorists based in neighboring Lebanon. Among my fellow reservists were women and men who’d been on duty, without a break, since the attacks of October 7, 2023. On that day they had faced the very real possibility of a Hizballah assault many times larger and deadlier than Hamas’s in Gaza—and yet their kibbutz’s emergency squad was armed with but a single automatic rifle. By the time I joined them in the following August, they still lacked the heavy weapons needed to repel any serious Hizballah infiltration.

In off-duty hours during my ensuing weeks of service, I interacted with the members of the kibbutz: extraordinary people who, despite the daily shelling, refused to leave their homes. Many were veterans, or the descendants of veterans, who’d defended the kibbutz through successive wars in the past.

On one such occasion, I attended a meeting of the community’s emergency committee, gathered to determine procedures in case Hizballah were to attack us directly. One participant reported that there were not enough sandbags on hand to barricade all the kibbutz’s windows. Another registered the lack of sufficient gravel to fill the industrial-sized sacks behind which the soldiers would defend the crossroads. Still others asked how the children could be evacuated in the event of an emergency. And what about the elderly? The bedridden?

Sitting there, witnessing this conversation, I couldn’t believe I was in modern-day Israel. If I closed my eyes and just listened, I could swear instead that we were not in 2024 but in 1948, three-quarters of a century earlier, at the height of Israel’s War of Independence.

That same sensation of déjà vu also hovered over a question that, ever since October 7, I was being frequently asked: which if any of Israel’s previous wars did today’s war most closely resemble?

To such a question, the obvious answer would have been the Yom Kippur War, which had erupted on October 6, 1973, exactly 50-years-and-a-day before this latest outbreak. Indeed, Hamas deliberately chose this date to start the war in a sadistic effort to reignite Israel’s Yom Kippur trauma.

As did the new war, the earlier one had begun in a massive surprise attack—led then by the Egyptian and Syrian armies—that had caught Israel and its armed forces completely off guard. And, as in 1973, Israel in 2023 and 2024 has turned that initial rout into a military victory not only in Gaza but now also in Lebanon. Cadets at West Point and other military academies around the world study Israel’s astonishing success in 1973. They will study our success in this war no less.

What is more, in addition to the similarities between our current conflict and the Yom Kippur War, we might also consider other parallels that range still farther back in time.

Take, for instance, the Six-Day War of 1967. That earlier conflict had broken out when the nationalist Arab forces of Egypt and its partners—Jordan, Syria, and Iraq—surrounded Israel and pledged to throw it into the sea. Similarly, 56 years later, on October 6, 2023, Israel would again find itself surrounded, this time not by nationalist Egypt and its proxies but by jihadist Iran and its proxies—Hamas, Hizballah, and the Houthis—all correspondingly bent on Israel’s destruction. And once again Israel would succeed in turning imminent existential disaster into a battlefield success every bit as impressive as that of the Six-Day War.

Nor is that all. Other clashes bearing parallels to this most recent one have included the First (1982) and Second (2006) Lebanon Wars, as well as the brief Gaza operations of 2008, 2012, and 2014. Each of these, to one degree or another, can realistically be seen as foreshadowing the current conflict—so that now, with Israel continuing to fight, we can discern sharp echoes not only of 1973 and 1967 but also of our more recent series of border clashes.

But for me the larger truth remains that in the roster of Israel’s conflicts over the decades since achieving statehood, none today continues to echo so resonantly—or so instructively—as does the one I named at the start: the 1948–49 War of Independence.

Let me explain.

First, as in our War of Independence,the current war has been fought not deep in enemy territory but nearby and indeed within the state itself: in our farms, towns, settlements, and municipalities.

Next, like its predecessor at Israel’s birth, this latest war has been waged not only or even principally against our armed forces but rather against our civilian population—with similarly horrifying results in the toll of Israelis killed and grievously injured or seized, tortured, and hauled into captivity. This war, again like the War of Independence, has seen civilian Israeli volunteers picking up guns to protect and secure their homes and their families huddling in bomb shelters.

Finally, this war—for which we do not yet have a nationally accepted name—not only resembles the War of Independence but also rivals it in terms of its duration. As of the January 19th cease-fire, the current conflict has outlasted our independence struggle by four days.

Like Israel’s other wars, this latest one, too, has been fought for our security, if not for our very survival. But the current war is also being fought for something even more fateful. That something is Israel’s soul.

That is what was at stake from the very moment this war began, at 6:29 on the morning of October 7, 2023, when our soul was already torn by political schisms. The catalyst was the launch by the newly elected government, under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, of a far-reaching reform of the judicial system. With the subsequent hardening of positions on either side came the dangerous refusal of IDF reservists to report to duty and the government’s refusal to heed warnings of the threats of such internal divisions to Israeli security.

The scene, only days before October 7, of Israelis clashing in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Plaza over the nature of public Yom Kippur prayers revealed how deep and dangerous those schisms had grown. Whether for or against the judicial reforms, Israelis appeared united in believing that they could continue to indulge in this open drama of severe civil strife and not, as a society, be required to pay a price for it. Bound by the belief that the “Startup Nation”—that world-renowned destination for culinary tours, that champion winner of Eurovision musical contests, that recipient of the highest awards in the fields of literature and film—was somehow located geographically in Paris, or San Francisco, we forgot that we were, in fact, in the Middle East.

Hamas did not forget. We now know from documents found in Gaza that Israel’s internal struggle helped Hamas determine both the timing and the ferocity of its October 7 attack.

That onslaught ripped Israel’s soul apart even more widely. It threatened to tear asunder our twin duties to guard the land and people of Israel and to redeem those captured in its defense. We remain torn by two interwoven fears: first, that if we were to fail to secure the freedom of the hostages, Israeli parents would no longer be able with a clear conscience to send their children to serve in the army; and second, that if we fail to defeat and crush Hamas, Israelis will no longer have an army to send their children to.

Meanwhile, in the world at large, Israel was finding itself increasingly isolated, accused of committing genocide even as Hamas and its supporters were celebrating the genocide that its terrorists had attempted to commit. Despite the supreme efforts of the IDF to reduce civilian casualties in Gaza, despite registering the lowest ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths in modern military history, we were widely condemned, even by our American ally, of responding “disproportionately” and “over the top” to the slaughter of October 7, of killing “entirely too many Palestinians,” and of dehumanizing and deliberately starving non-combatants. Across the United States and Western Europe, the university campuses where many Israelis had studied or taught turned into arenas for anti-Semitic spectacles. Classic anti-Semitic tropes, stipulating the Jewish people’s penchant for vengeance or its thirst for children’s blood, proliferated in Western media.

As if all these nightmares proved insufficient, Hizballah soon physically joined Hamas’s assault, and so did the Houthis of Yemen and the Iran-backed militias in Syria and Iraq. Iran would fire some 700 ballistic missiles and drones at Israel. As millions of Israelis sheltered from the incessant barrages, 200,000 became internal refugees, fleeing their residences in both the north and the south. What certainty did we have—did any of us have—that the Jewish state could nevertheless prevail?

This, in short,was a true 1948 moment, evoking nothing so threatening as the evening of May 14, 1948, only hours after David Ben-Gurion had proclaimed Israel’s independence, when five Arab armies joined by barbarous terrorist bands invaded the nascent Jewish state in order todestroy it. That, too, was a genocidal campaign, smashing through our borders in the Negev and the Galilee, triggering desperate fighting in Jerusalem, Safed, and Jaffa, and claiming the lives of thousands.

And then too, Israel had been alone. We had no major allies. Although President Truman had seen to it that the U.S. would be the first nation to recognize the re-created Jewish state, he just as swiftly slapped on that state a total arms embargo.

The late Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, with whom I had the honor to work, once told me that, on May 14, 1948, Israeli forces possessed barely enough bullets to fight for a single week. Just so, visiting an artillery base last summer in the north, I was told that, as a result of the cutoff of American supplies, our cannons were down to firing a mere five shells per day.

In the current war, Israel has had to make such excruciating decisions as whether to continue destroying Hamas no matter what or, in return for the hostages’ release, to risk the state’s long-term security. In 1948–49, Ben-Gurion had to decide which part of the embattled Jewish state to preserve first: Jerusalem? Tel Aviv? Beersheva? The entire country could not be defended at once. Like today, Israeli forces in 1948 were stretched thin, traumatized by battle, exhausted.

Israel also entered its first war with its soul already divided between competing Zionist visions and ideologies: politically, between liberal-socialist Zionism and revisionist Zionism; militarily, between the Irgun and Leḥi on one side and the Haganah and Palmaḥ on the other. It was an internal schism every bit as bitter, if not more so, than that of prewar 2023.

Was it in light of those similarities between 1948 and today that Prime Minister Netanyahu has called this latest struggle a war of revival (milḥemet t’kumah)—a Hebrew phrase that has also become a longstanding popular term for the 1948 War of Independence? Be that as it may, and setting aside strategic and logistical parallels, this war, as I see it, also recalls the War of Independence in a more fateful, morally direct, and in the end transformative way. As I see it, this must be the war to correct, and to get right, the things we got wrong in 1948.

For example: this must be the war in which the Israeli public will no longer be required to abide the refusal of Haredim to serve in the IDF. That exemption, first conferred by Ben-Gurion in 1949 to no more than 400 yeshiva students, has expanded to include 70,000 eligible conscripts. Such gross imbalance cannot continue.

This, then, is the war in which the citizens’ army of Israel must and will become an army of all its citizens—an army in which Haredim serve just as they served without protest, proudly, in 1948. And serving too will be not only Haredim but also the Israeli Arabs whom Hamas and Hizballah refused to distinguish from Israeli Jews, slaughtering us all indifferently.

There is more. In 1948, the state of Israel secured its territorial sovereignty at an excruciating cost: a sovereignty that over the decades it has largely forfeited in such crucial geographical areas as the Negev—62 percent of the country’s territory—where the state’s laws against polygamy, drug trafficking, and gun trafficking are rarely if ever enforced, and where, especially among the Bedouin community, illegal construction continues apace.

In this war, we Israelis will remind ourselves of other lessons from 1948 that we’ve steadily forgotten. We will recall that we live not in Sweden or California but in the homicidal, fratricidal, and genocidal Middle East. We will recall that, while we can form crucial alliances, at the end of the day we alone are responsible for our defense. We will also recall that, rather than remaining dependent on foreign sources of arms, to the greatest degree possible we must be munitions-independent. As in 1948, we must manufacture not only our own bullets, grenades, and “Davidkas” (homemade mortars) but ordinance for tanks, artillery, and combat aircraft.

As in 1948, a war fought a mere three years after the Holocaust, we today and tomorrow must grapple with the reality of anti-Semitism. We must come to grips with the reality of a world that cares little for Jewish life while, and despite the superhuman efforts of the IDF to minimize Palestinian and Lebanese casualties, condemning us for non-existent war crimes and issuing warrants for our leaders’ arrest.

Most crucially, this is the war in which we must once again learn the meaning of Zionism. That meaning can itself be defined, and encompassed, in a single word: responsibility. While the disaster of October 7 was the product of many Israeli failures, the most egregious of all was the failure to have assumed responsibility for the defense of our border and the population living alongside it.

We must fulfill that responsibility, along with the responsibility to pursue an effective public diplomacy and protect our image in the world. We must also adequately and responsibly arm and equip our soldiers, while contributing as well to the defense of Jewish communities abroad. Above all, we must be responsible in demonstrating to our people, beyond all conceivable doubt, that the state has done the utmost to secure the release of any who have been taken hostage.

In this, our second war of independence, we have the opportunity—and beyond that, the duty—to ensure Israeli and Jewish unity. Our leaders have the opportunity to exhibit and personify the kind of behavior urged by Ben-Gurion in his most exalted (if untranslatable) coinage: mamlakhtiyut: i.e., acting in a respectable, responsible, and statesmanlike manner. Perhaps that would even be a more fitting name than the war of revival, or Iron Swords (the IDF’s formal name for its current military operations): milhemet ha- mamlakhtiyut, the war for attaining true sovereignty.

Thus, along with winning the war on the battlefield, we must triumph also in the war for Israel’s soul. Even though the extraordinary solidarity we experienced at the beginning of the war is today once again in danger of unraveling, there is reason to believe we will avoid the bloody internecine hatred of the kind once openly unleashed when, at the height of the Arab invasion of 1948, one Israeli armed force deliberately sank a ship (the Altalena) bearing the fighters of another.

Above all, we have every reason to be optimistic about the generation that has fought and continues to fight this war: the 360,000 reservists who, proportionally speaking, made up the equivalent of 20 million Americans—four million more than served in all of World War II.

They, the members of this generation, are tempered, steeled, anything but fragile, and intensely patriotic. They are the greatest such generation we have known since 1948. They are the Levi Eshkols and Golda Meirs, the Yitzhak Rabins and the Moshe Dayans of the future. They have been, and they remain, united, transcending all of the usual Israeli divisions—politics, religion, ethnicity—to live and to fight as a single force and with singular purpose. They are unparalleled in their resilience, their camaraderie, their quiet moral confidence, and their courage.

This generation will lead our country in rebuilding, reviving, and breathing new life into the Zionist project. This is the war for restoring our dignity, our identity, our independence, and for reaffirming and embracing our responsibility. This is the war after which, each time we rise to sing our national anthem anywhere and everywhere in the strong, sovereign, responsible Jewish state of Israel, we can stress, without modification, elision, or irony, the final phrases that say exactly who we are: “a free people, in our own land, in the land of Zion, in Jerusalem.”