Personal tragedies transform individuals and families. National tragedies transform nations and international systems. Britain was never the same country, nor the same empire, after the Battle of the Somme came to a grim close in November 1916. Across the Atlantic, eighty-five years later, America’s post-Cold War luxury vacation from history ended abruptly on the morning of September 11, 2001. On that day, al-Qaeda’s terror attack not only murdered over 3,000 people, it also permanently altered America’s domestic politics and view of its place and role in the world. Whatever its eventual fate as a country, Ukraine was forever transformed on February 24, 2022, when Vladimir Putin unleashed his “special military operation” upon Kiev. Looking back on that assault two or three decades from now, future historians may well come to see Ukraine’s national tragedy as the harbinger of a continental one: the calamitous moment at which Pax Americana was finally broken in Europe, and the old continent plunged into a new epoch of insecurity and decline.

Like America, Britain, and Europe, Israel is no stranger to transformative tragedy. It is no different, except that the tiny size of its territory and population, the nature and number of its carnivorous neighbors, and its lack of protective buffers—no glorious isolation for the Israelis, no sea to shining sea—mean that Israel’s structural vulnerability to transformative tragedy is exceptionally high.

Six months after the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack, it is important to consider Israel’s transformative tragedies. Israel was born of tragedy and into tragedy. Once established, moreover, it has followed—with an eerie, almost mathematical regularity—a pattern of recurring susceptibility to surprise attacks at the hands of its known enemies. Having barely survived a bloody birth into modern sovereign statehood in the 1947–48 War of Independence—a war which, for the Arabs, became known as The Nakba, literally “The Catastrophe”—Israel has experienced a transformative tragedy event, in or around October every single generation. 

On October 6, 1973, twenty-five years after four Arab armies first attempted to strangle the nascent Jewish State in its crib, a surprise attack by Egypt and Syria on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur, amounted to what political scientist, Susan Rolef, aptly describes as “an earthquake that changed the course of the state’s history.” Although Israel eventually won the war, what Israelis call “the Mechdal,” meaning “the debacle,” shattered public trust in the country’s founding elites and ignited an unprecedented wave of popular protests. May 1977 brought about the Mahapach— an end to the Labor Party’s hegemonic rule and the first real transition of power in the country’s history. Israel’s founding elites, and the Labor Zionism ideology upon which the country was founded, would never again dominate the Jewish State’s culture, economy, or politics. The war, in which 2,800 Israeli and 40,000 Arab soldiers died, defenestrated the old guard in Israel—including Golda Meir, Pinchas Sapir, and Abba Eban—and brought to power what in many respects was a more diverse and economically liberal, but also more nationalistic and religious leadership, headed by Menachem Begin’s Likud Party.

A generation later, the eruption of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in Jerusalem on September 28, 2000, again shook Israel to the core and set its politics on a new trajectory. Rejecting Ehud Barak’s offer of an independent Palestinian state spanning Gaza, 97 percent of the West Bank, and a capital in East Jerusalem, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat unleashed an unprecedented campaign of suicide-terrorism. Between 2001 and 2003 alone, 114 Palestinian suicide attacks hit Israeli buses, restaurants, hotels, markets, and crowded streets. An additional 300 suicide bombing plots were foiled by Israeli intelligence services over the same period. Sporadic shootings, stabbings, and car-ramming attacks undermined any sense of personal security anywhere in Israel.

By the time the Al-Aqsa Intifada fizzled out in late 2004, it had not only led to the murder of 1,053 Israelis—over 70 percent of whom were civilians—but effectively destroyed the Israeli left, which had, since the launch of the Madrid (1991) and then Oslo (1993) peace processes, gambled on peacemaking with the Palestinians. Reflecting back on the trauma with hindsight of two decades, the seasoned diplomatic correspondent of the Jerusalem Post, Herb Keinon, concluded that, the “Intifada, which for the average citizen felt very much like a war in everything but name, was a defining event in Israel’s history, akin to the War of Independence and the Six Day and Yom Kippur wars. Israel after September 2000 is not the same as Israel before September 2000. This harrowing period fundamentally altered Israeli society because it impacted everyone.”

Voting patterns confirm the seismic shift experienced by Israeli society since the outbreak of the Intifada. Whereas in the 1990s, Israelis twice voted in governments committed to taking great risks, and making far-reaching territorial concessions, to the Palestinians—the 1992 Yitzhak Rabin government and the 1999 Ehud Barak government, respectively—by the mid-2000s, only one Israeli government, Ehud Olmert’s Kadima Party-led coalition, dared to make another desperate attempt at peacemaking with the Palestinians. This attempt was once again rebuffed in 2008, this time by Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas. And after Hamas’s takeover of Gaza in 2006, as repeated rounds of Iranian-supplied rocket fire penetrated deeper and deeper into Israel, the Israeli electorate moved further and further to the right. The threat of becoming a victim of terrorism, it seems, does not move people to support parties that favor extending concessions to terrorists. In December 2005, 67 percent of Israeli Jews surveyed by the Israel Peace Index supported the idea of an independent Palestinian state, but by July 2021, the number of proponents of a two-state solution had been cut by half to 34 percent.

Then came the day that Israelis now refer to as Ha’Shabbat Ha’Shchora—The Black Sabbath. In the Hamas terrorist attack on Saturday, October 7, 2023, which took place exactly fifty years and a day after the surprise attack of the Yom Kippur War, Israel experienced yet another transformative tragedy that shattered its sense of self and etched a decisive point of demarcation in its national life. There is Israel before Saturday, October 7th—the single worst day of slaughter, rape, and torture of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust—and there is Israel after.

Commentators scrambling to convey the scale, brutality, and psychological impact of the October 7th attack have compared it to Israel’s Pearl Harbor or 9/11. The magnitude of the attack was certainly staggering, with some 1,200 killed on October 7th alone and 250 kidnapped, the equivalent of 42,000 Americans murdered and 9,000 kidnapped by terrorists on a single day. Yet neither label adequately captures the event’s true significance, and some may argue that words themselves are inadequate to the task.

Elsewhere, Amichai Magen has described October 7th as “Israel’s civic Yom Kippur,” arguing that the social contract between the state and its population was broken on October 7th. The very existence of the State of Israel was supposed to ensure that a day like October 7, 2023, could never happen, and yet it did. What appeared before that fateful day to be a self-evident solidity—that the existence and agency of the State of Israel were broadly guaranteed—evaporated, leaving an abyss of insecurity and anxiety in the heart of every Israeli. It is in that fundamental breach of trust in the capacity of the State of Israel to guarantee the continued existence of the people of Israel that the deep significance of October 7th lies. And the long-term consequences of that terrible day will emerge from that breach of trust.

As with the deep sociopolitical changes that followed 1973 and 2000, the tragedy of 2023 will irrevocably alter Israel’s DNA. But how? What does “the day after” look like, not for Gaza, but for Israel itself? One obvious answer is that it is simply too early to say. Six months after October 7th, the colossal failure of October 2023 remains an open-ended, evolving tragedy. The war in Gaza is far from over, 134 hostages continue to languish in Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) captivity, and the broader campaign of annihilation waged on the Jewish State by the Iranian-led “axis of resistance” continues to metastasize. The risk of rapid escalation into an all-out conflict remains a clear and present danger and will continue to be so into the uncertain future.

Still, sociopolitical outcomes, such as new political movements and national agendas, emerge from earlier narratives, and we can already identify three main narratives that will shape post-October 7th Israel.

The first narrative—spoken mainly quietly, around anxious dinner tables and in closed Whatsapp groups—is one of despair. If the Jewish State failed to prevent a mass pogrom at home; if more than 120,000 Israelis remain internally displaced; if Hamas and Hezbollah promise—as they explicitly do—that the October 7th massacre was merely a prelude to a relentless tsunami of future attacks culminating in the annihilation of the Jews; if a nuclear-armed Iran is now a fait accompli; if trust in the country’s national leadership is so utterly broken; if what Israelis can look forward to is a spiraling descent into parochial hyper-nationalist religiosity, violence, bad governance, poverty, corruption, and the eventual death of Israeli democracy, then there is no hope. The radicals have won. Zionism, as a liberal-national project, is doomed. All that is left—particularly for the 500,000 or so most secular, liberal, high-tech savvy, and internationally mobile Israelis—is to head for the exit.

The second narrative, which in some respects represents the polar opposite of the first, but also shares with it a certain apocalyptic hysteria, is one of Jewish absolutism to match Palestinian rejectionism. Captured in the personae of Meir Kahana, Bezalel Smotrich, Orit Strook, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, Jewish absolutism calls for the total defeat of the Palestinians and the attainment of full Jewish sovereignty between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. The dream of the absolutists is also to somehow attain a demographic reality in which Jews constitute the overwhelming majority of the population in every part of that territory. For them, the only logical answer to a century of Palestinian Arab refusal to share the Holy Land with the Jews, is for the offer of territorial compromise to be permanently taken off the table and for the Muslim population to be pushed out of that land. Those who insist on seizing everything, they argue, deserve nothing and will end up with nothing. For the Jewish absolutists, if the Palestinians and their supporters demand the total dismantling of Jewish national self-determination in the Land of Israel—“From the River to the Sea Palestine Will Be Free”—Zionism, as a rival national-movement, necessitates a parallel, maximalist vision of total Jewish victory—“From the River to the Sea Only Israel Will Be.” If negotiating peace with the Palestinians does not work; if every bit of land Israel vacates is bound to become a terrorist safe haven from which jihadists conduct the next phase of attack; if economic benefits and diplomatic concessions are answered only with violence; and if neither deterrence nor technology have proven capable of ensuring Israel’s security, then there is simply no choice. Ultimately, the divine plan of Jewish national revival means that the land belongs entirely to the Jews.

The third narrative—the one that will have to prevail if Israel is to remain a modern, Jewish, and democratic state integrated into the West—is one of centrist rejuvenation. Drawing upon the deeper wells of the Israeli spirit, this narrative will be one of self-examination and self-correction. If Israel could reinvent itself after each of the transformative tragedies of 1948, 1973, and 2000, the rejuvenationists say, then it can, indeed it must, do so again now. Rejecting both despair and absolutism as recipes for national suicide, centrist rejuvenation would construct a big-tent national coalition—extending from the center-right to the Zionist-left and moderate Arab-Israeli forces—for the purpose of restoring physical and ontological security to all Israelis. Domestically, this would involve a determined campaign to rebuild Israel’s battered public service, root out corruption, improve governance, and restore trust in the country’s leaders and institutions. It would make the strengthening of Israeli liberal democracy the sine qua non of national politics. It would also entail the renegotiation of the Israeli social contract so that the burdens of military service and taxation are more equally distributed across different segments of the population. In particular, ultra-orthodox Jewish men and Muslim Israeli women would have to enter national service and the labor market at much higher rates than in the past.

In terms of foreign policy, centrist rejuvenation would focus on three principal and mutually reinforcing strategic goals. First, to degrade and destroy the ring of fire constructed by Iran and its proxies around Israel’s neck, so that the 120,000 internally displaced can safely return to their homes and Hamas and Hezbollah no longer possess the capacity to inflict large-scale violence on Israeli civilians. Degrading Iranian proxies would also strengthen deterrence against Iran itself and clear the path to preventing the Ayatollahs from achieving their goal of becoming a military nuclear power. Second, to resuscitate and expand the Sunni Arab-Israeli alliance, culminating in full normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia and the development of a cooperative regional security and economic framework in the Middle East. As part and parcel of this regional framework, a clear vision for a well-governed, demilitarized, and deradicalized Palestinian state must be articulated. Last but not least, a rejuvenation strategy for Israel needs to ensure the country maintains and expands its economic and technological advantages. This means protecting existing diplomatic, trade, and investment relationships, but also strengthening ties with new partners, notably the Sunni Arab world and India.

Ultimately, a centrist rejuvenation strategy would follow the maxim that, in order to survive and thrive, Israel cannot afford to be a mediocre country, it must excel. To contain, and eventually defeat, the rival narratives of despair and absolutism, the centrist rejuvenation strategy must do that most Jewish of things—to transform tragedy into transcendence.

It is tempting to try to locate the root causes of Israel’s repeated historical pattern of fall into catastrophe, and there are certainly commonalities one can point to that contributed to the tragedies of 1973, 2000, and 2023. In all three cases, the years preceding disaster were materially very good years for Israel, with rapid economic growth, a burst in infrastructure development, and rising prosperity. In all three cases, recent demonstrations of military prowess or diplomatic breakthroughs reduced Jerusalem’s sense of international isolation, bolstered popular hopes that peace was just around the corner, and lulled Israelis into a false sense of security. In all three cases, also, the run-up to disaster was marked by rising elite corruption, reduced citizen trust in the country’s elected leadership, and the festering of deep and visible societal divisions. In short, the old harbingers of doom—hubris, complacency, and bad political culture—were on full display in each one of Israel’s episodes of transformative tragedy. This is not to soften, let alone excuse in any way, the genocidal ambition or brutality of Arab assaults on Israel in 1973, 2000, and 2023. But it is to flag the conditions under which Israel—and other threatened open societies—become more vulnerable to tragedy.