The toughest question you can ask an Israeli nowadays is also the simplest: “How are you?”
The just-released Israeli military inquiry about its own scandalous, incredible inability to protect the residents of Kibbutz Be’eri on the Gaza border hasn’t changed that.
It’s been nine months since Hamas terrorists overran Israeli villages near Gaza, shredding Israel’s pitiful defenses, massacring 1,200 people, and kidnapping 250 others. It’s a trauma equal to—even surpassing—Egypt and Syria’s surprise attack 50 years ago, setting off the 1973 war.
So, asking any Israeli, “How are you?” sets off a conflict. Whether they just had a birthday, celebrated a wedding, or welcomed a new child or grandchild, Oct. 7 hangs over everything. Many Israelis have lost friends or family members in the Hamas massacres and the ensuing war. Hundreds of thousands have served in the military. No one is untouched.
“Mixed feelings” doesn’t begin to describe what’s going on in their heads. The trauma doesn’t come only from the deaths and injuries. It comes from the realization that the Israeli military, the one body in this country that had received automatic trust and support, let everyone down in the worst possible way.
None of this is meant to downplay the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza over the past nine-plus months or the blame for the deaths, injuries, and destruction on both sides that falls totally on Hamas and its Iranian sponsors.
The Be’eri inquiry shows how badly Israel’s army failed on Oct. 7. Thousands of terrorists began flooding across the Gaza border at 6:30 am—on a Saturday, Shabbat, also a Jewish holiday—but Israeli forces didn’t manage to enter Be’eri until 1:30 pm. For seven hours, the overmatched, heroic, but tiny local militia battled the bloodthirsty killers and rapists practically alone. By the time it was over, 132 Israelis were dead, and 31 others were taken hostage from Be’eri.
A similarly grim and shocking picture was developing in villages all along the border, as well as a nearby music festival, where terrorists rampaged through the dancers, killing and abducting dozens.
As residents cowered in their safe rooms, they pleaded, one after another, dozens, hundreds of times—“Where is the army?” The terrorists broke into most of the safe rooms, butchered and raped the civilians inside, and burned many of the houses, all this while the army was trying to get its act together.
The inquiry report details how badly the army command malfunctioned, how chaotic its response was, how long it took for elite military units to retake control of relatively small civilian areas, and how many fatal mistakes were made along the way.
But here’s the catch: There’s nothing new here. All this has been well documented, reconstructed, and replayed over and over again. The question the inquiry doesn’t address is: “Why?”
So, if you ask, “How are you?” Israelis have to juggle whatever personal joys they’ve had since Oct. 7 with an overwhelming collection of negative feelings: Disillusion, anger, mistrust, and sadness.
- Disillusion over the failure of Israeli military intelligence to grasp the significance of months of Hamas preparations, many of them out in the open, preceding and for the Oct. 7 attack.
- Anger over the inability of the military to stop the attack once it started.
- Mistrust of the Israeli government over its clumsy handling of the war and the international crisis set off by the attack and Israel’s counterattack.
- Sadness. Most of all, sadness over the death toll that climbs every day as soldiers are killed in combat and over the fate of more than 100 hostages still held by Hamas and its allies in Gaza.
This is not just theory. Mental health experts point to troubling trends. Among the findings: One-third of women and one-fifth of men report high levels of traumatic stress, about double the level before the war. One in four Israelis suffer from substance abuse, again about double the level before Oct. 7.
The main problem is expectations. A proper Israeli military deployment on Oct. 7 would have resulted in the quick wiping out of the Hamas terrorists, most of them on the other side of the border, with minimum casualties among Israelis, both military and civilian. It’s that simple.
Having lived with the lesson of the mistaken interpretation of intelligence warnings before the 1973 war, Israelis had the right to expect that such a colossal failure would never happen again. Yet it did.
The army’s report on its failures at Kibbutz Be’eri does not touch on that, because it starts its examination on Oct. 7. Everyone knows that the real failure was in the months and years before the attack.
Israel knew that Hamas was smuggling into Gaza weapons across the border with Egypt. Hamas even “smuggled” in a full-sized tunneling machine of the type used to dig subways; there is no way Israel didn’t know about that.
Israel funneled hundreds of millions worth of Qatari cash to Hamas, assuming it would buy quiet—all the while knowing full well that much of the cash was literally going underground.
Meanwhile, above ground, Gaza was being transformed from the dusty, downtrodden enclave I knew when I covered the territory in the 1990s to a mixture of new apartment complexes, fancy villas, and shopping malls alongside the squalid refugee camps with their poor, exploited Palestinians preserved for propaganda purposes and TV news backdrops.
And now much of it has been destroyed—not nearly as much as you’ve been led to believe by those news reports, but much. Also destroyed by the Hamas massacres is the idea of a two-state solution; few Israelis would agree to a Hamas-led Palestinian state next door these days—and Israelis’ faith in their own future.
Rebuilding that faith is the most critical challenge facing Israel today. It won’t begin until the war is over and the discredited military and political leadership is replaced.
The Be’eri inquiry has done nothing to speed that crucial process, which has yet to begin—nine months and counting after the worst Israeli failure ever.