A Year On, Israelis Still Haven’t Found a Name for the Current War

Even as it becomes clear who will emerge victorious.

Israeli tanks in Rafah, May 2024. IDF Spokesperson’s Unit via Wikimedia.

Israeli tanks in Rafah, May 2024. IDF Spokesperson’s Unit via Wikimedia.

Observation
Oct. 22 2024
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“One year after October 7,” wrote the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman earlier this month, “this is still the first Arab-Israeli war without a name and without a clear victor.”

Militarily, Friedman is mistaken. No matter how many Israeli soldiers they can kill in isolated incidents, or rockets or drones they can still manage to launch, Hamas and Hizballah have been beaten in the fighting. About the name, though, he is right. There is still no agreed-on way of referring to the current, war, which Israel tentatively code-named at its onset “Operation Iron Swords” in an allusion to the Iron Dome anti-missile system that had protected the country until then. This is not necessarily surprising. As I observed in this column last November: “Since the names of wars are sometimes determined long afterwards, this one, too, may have to wait for the perspective that time alone can bring.”

Time has already eliminated the three names that were most likely, so I judged then, to end up being given to the war. It won’t be called “the Gaza War,” because it long ago spread beyond the confines of Gaza. Neither will it be called “the War against Hamas,” having become a war against Hizballah and Iran, too. And it most definitely won’t be called (as I predicted it might be) “the War of the Accursed Sabbath.” The phrase shabbat ha-arurah, though much bandied about in the weeks after October 7, is rarely heard any more and many Israelis no longer remember that the day Hamas attacked was a Saturday. They do recall that it was Simchat Torah, the day of the “Rejoicing of the Law” that follows immediately the holiday of Sukkot, but to call a war that began with the worse catastrophe in Israeli history “the War of the Rejoicing of the Law” would be grotesque.

It was into this vacuum that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to step when he proposed at a recent cabinet meeting that the war be called Milḥemet ha-T’kumah, “the War of Resurgence.” (The Hebrew noun t’kumah, formed from the verbal stem kum, to rise or stand up, might be translated as “comeback,” although Israelis do not use it colloquially in this sense.) Initial public reaction was not favorable. The phrase struck most Israelis as pompous and self-serving. The prime minister, who would like to cultivate an image of himself as a leader piloting his country with a steady hand to a triumphant recovery from an initial disaster, might as well have suggested erecting a heroic equestrian statue in one of the kibbutzim attacked by Hamas on October 7.

“The War of Resurgence” will not fly far. A country that still has hostages in Gaza, soldiers who are killed and wounded in action every day, and tens of thousands of citizens displaced by the fighting from their homes is in no mood for celebratory rhetoric.

This does not, however, leave Israel without a leading candidate for the name of the war of October 7, and this is . . . the War of October 7. As a name, it’s to the point, without frills, and already in use as a default term, and it won’t be overruled by future events. Moreover, despite its simple factuality, it has great emotional resonance. The words “October 7,” like “9/11” in America but even more so, are for Israelis far more than a date. They have become a cry of pain, a shudder of horror, a shout of fury, a cringe of shame, and perhaps above all, a headshake of incredulity—of the feeling that even now, a year later, it’s impossible to understand, despite all the explanations that have been given and all the facts that have come to light, how what happened could have happened. Ha-shvi’i b’Oktober says all that.

It’s not just the 7th, either. It’s the day before and after it as well. All three days have now entered the Hebrew language as descriptive terms for a national state of mind. When Israelis speak of Yisra’el shel ha-shishi b’Oktober, “the Israel of October 6,” they are referring not to that day alone but to all the days and years that preceded it and to the country that was blind enough, divided enough, distracted enough, and overconfident enough to let October 7 occur. And by the same token, Yisra’el shel ha-shmini b’Oktober, “the Israel of October 8,” denotes the shaken, grieving, chastened, teeth-gritting, determined yet deeply apprehensive Israel that will never again be the country it was two days earlier.

There is a significance in these dates belonging to the Gregorian rather than the Hebrew calendar. Religiously non-observant Israelis never had a problem with “the Six-Day War” and its echo of the six days of the biblical Creation, or with “the Yom Kippur War,” or with sometimes calling Israel’s 1948 War of Independence Milḥemet Tashaḥ, “the War of 5708,” because they instinctively felt that Jewish tradition had a relationship to these wars, which could be meaningfully placed within the cycles of the Jewish calendar. They do not feel this way about the current war, which is one reason why, when the suggestion was made to call it Milḥemet Breshit, “the Genesis War,” after the first book of the Bible that recommences the annual cycle of Torah readings on Simchat Torah, it fell flat.

This is also why one can safely predict that the Israeli government’s recent decision to set the official memorial day for the fallen of October 7 on the 25th of the Hebrew month of Tishrei, on which October 7 came out last year, will gain no traction. October 7 was October 7. Although some Israelis may feel like the Shas party head Aryeh Deri, who declared on the war’s first anniversary last week that “we are only beginning to appreciate the extent of the wonders and miracles that God has performed for us,” this is not language that most Israelis, including many religiously observant ones, can connect with. There is an understandable resistance to seeing religious solace or significance in an inexcusable manmade debacle, no matter how successfully it may ultimately be overcome.

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hebrew