Israel has suffered an unprecedented attack since 50 years ago. Syria and Egypt breached their defenses, triggering a war that traumatized the country. This new Yom Kippur, this new war, is a devastating blow that Israel receives at one of its worst moments, with society fractured by the ultra-religious and ultra-nationalist drift of the Netanyahu Government.
The consequences will be enormous for Israel and the entire Middle East. The normalization of diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia now seems impossible.
Iran, an ally of the Palestinian rebels, is stronger today. Therefore, Washington's diplomatic maneuvers to find a new understanding with Tehran will be much more complicated. The fate of the Palestinian people, who seemed doomed to live at the mercy of Israeli will, is now once again a paramount issue.
On October 6, 1973, the Arab armies took advantage of the Yom Kippur holiday, the holiest in the Jewish calendar, to attack Israel. Now it has been done by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian militias from the Gaza Strip. An unprecedented offensive by land, sea and air has breached Israeli defenses and brought fighting and destruction to the streets of cities like Sderot, half an hour south of Tel-Aviv.
At least 100 Israelis and 200 Palestinians have been killed. The injured number in the thousands. Several Israeli civilians and military personnel have been kidnapped and taken to Gaza. This is devastating news for everyone. The Palestinians are already paying the price for Israeli military superiority. The Gaza Strip, where two million people live and which Israel, with the help of Egypt, has blocked for 16 years, is the target of Israeli fighters and will continue to be so.
But Israel has also suffered considerable damage, under a barrage of more than 2,000 rockets that have reached the outskirts of Jerusalem and shaken a nation with anxiety over the clouds due to the rise of religious extremism and the expansion of the colonies in the West Bank.
The consequences will be traumatic. The Israelis had no answers yesterday for what they were living and what is falling on them. The invulnerability of the army and the secret services went to waste. His antennas and confidants in Gaza did not warn of what would happen. No one warned the population on their weekly rest day. This time there were no warning sirens. The attack caught the military completely off guard. How has it been possible that so many civilians have been killed and kidnapped, victims of an atrocious fury, of war crimes recorded on video and uploaded to social networks?
The last soldier captured by Hamas was Corporal Gilad Shalit in 2006. The kidnapping lasted five years and Shalit was released in exchange for a thousand Palestinian prisoners, many convicted of terrorism offenses with blood on their hands . What will Hamas now demand in exchange for the lives of the hostages it has captured?
This second Yom Kippur puts Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in front of a terrible decision: release thousands of terrorists, strengthen Hamas and other enemies of Israel, in exchange for recovering alive the citizens he has failed to protect.
Al-Qassam has stated that the attack is "in defense of Al-Aqsa", the holiest mosque, the one that rises above the Wailing Wall, and that these weeks thousands of Jews have visited, encouraged by more radical members of the Israeli Government.
The coalition government, the most conservative in Israel's history, with ultra-nationalist and ultra-religious ministers who aspire to the annexation of the entire West Bank, has opened a rift with unpredictable consequences in society.
Secular Israelis see their freedom threatened, they fear that Israel will become an ultra-Orthodox theocracy. Plans to cut the power of the Supreme Court, subjecting it to a parliamentary majority, are said to be a step in that direction. The dispute is existential, about the identity of Israel and the role of Judaism in the public life of the State, and about the future of Israel itself as a State of law.
A few days ago, in the midst of Yom Kippur, on the occasion of the tensions that the ultra-religious had created in Tel-Aviv on the occasion of a prayer segregated by gender in Dizengoff Square, the center of Israeli secularism, President Herzog said that "d 'in 50 years historians and leaders will see these days, the terrible price of this dispute, and they will wonder how we did not understand the magnitude of the danger, the depth of the abyss. After all, they will say, 'they had it in front of them'".
Hamas has made this chasm even deeper. Israeli military superiority will once again subdue the rebels in Gaza and security will be restored, but Israel needs much more to live at peace with itself, the Palestinians and the entire Arab world.
