Earlier this summer, a New York Times column by the American-Israeli writer Ruth Margalit ran under the headline “How Benjamin Netanyahu Is Crushing Israel’s Free Press.” Her main complaint: the government’s failure to outlaw the free, popular, and privately funded Israel Hayom, followed by efforts on the part of the prime minister and his press office to engage in spin. Matthew Continetti comments:

For anyone even remotely familiar with the Israeli media landscape, Margalit’s charges are absurd. But they are also deeply revealing—of a bankrupt Israeli left that is powerless, isolated, unpopular, unlamented, and vengeful. Defeated at the polls, the left in Israel mobilizes external pressure—the Diaspora, J Street, President Obama, the UN, nongovernmental organizations, [the] foreign press—to compel the Israeli government to enact the very policies the Israeli public rejects. It is a strategy of delegitimization, of convincing world opinion, such as it is, that Israel is neither liberal nor democratic and therefore undeserving of moral approval, foreign aid, and other forms of diplomatic support. . . .

What the left despises about the new Israeli media is not its form but its content. Israel Hayom leans right, supports Netanyahu, is unapologetically Zionist and patriotic, and is tied to the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. It is also incredibly popular. . . .

The narrative of persecution offered by Margalit serves two functions. It explains the left’s continued failure in elections by ascribing losses to a vast right-wing conspiracy to control Israeli media and politics. And it turns meager journalists whose views are not shared by the public into heroes fighting a righteous battle for morality and justice. . . .

Margalit quotes a journalist who says, “Sometimes competition is the refuge of the antidemocrat.” How incredibly wrong that is. The last refuge of the antidemocrat isn’t competition. It’s the New York Times.

As the war in Gaza appears to be coming to close, writes Michael Milshtein, Israelis are left with “a sense of failure and bitterness” despite the IDF’s “military successes and strategic achievements.” Meanwhile, he writes, Gazans are likely to see the war as a “historic achievement,” and thus once more fall into the cycle of ecstasy and amnesia that Shany Mor identified as the key pattern in Palestinian understanding of the conflict.

Milshtein too acknowledges how much the present results resemble what preceded them, reminding us that Arabs and Israelis felt similarly after

the 1956 Sinai Campaign when, like in the current war, Israel was pressured by the United States to withdraw from conquered territories and bring the conflict to an end. The same applies to the Yom Kippur War, the second intifada, the Second Lebanon War, and the 2014 Operation Protective Edge [against Hamas]. Arab collective memory regards these events as achievements resulting from sacrifice and the ability to absorb severe blows, exhibit steadfastness (sumud), and make it impossible for Israel to declare decisive victory.

This phenomenon shouldn’t lead Israel to conclude it has been defeated but must be understood so as to formulate sober goals and courses of action in dealing with enemies in the region.

For now, there are no signs of soul-searching [among Palestinians] concerning the price of the war. Responsibility for the carnage and destruction, described as a nakba greater than that of 1948, is laid at Israel’s doorstep. This reflects a long-standing fundamental Palestinian flaw: a “bipolarity” with, on the one hand, fighting spirit and praise for the ability to harm Israel and, on the other, victimhood from the results of the war the Palestinians themselves started.