Besides the immediate question of the intelligence failure of October 7—why didn’t the IDF and Shin Bet anticipate the attack and prepare to defend against it—there is also the much broader question of what went wrong with Israel’s strategic thinking. In this 2021 essay, recently made available in English, Omer Dostri criticizes the IDF for losing its appetite for maneuver warfare, i.e., sending substantial ground forces to destroy an enemy and bring about a decisive victory. Dostri argues that, in struggling with the difficulties of confronting enemies like Hamas, Israeli generals erred by focusing on limited warfare and attacks from the air. They developed complex doctrines, influence by French postmodernist philosophers, that lost sight of the basic principles of war.

Perhaps it is too soon to tell, but Dostri’s analysis appears prescient in the wake of October 7. He takes a careful look at other similar cases of conventional armies pitted against guerrillas—such as America in Vietnam and the French in Algeria—to argue that decisive victory is not impossible in such scenarios. He concludes:

War, including one in which the sides are not balanced in terms of power, can be decided only by use of ground forces, deployed as part of the general use of military and non-military capabilities. Clear evidence of this can be seen in past wars between states and guerrilla or terror groups. During such conflicts, enemy insurgents cannot be defeated in “clean” wars from the air alone, and are not impressed by efforts to influence them mentally with the pyrotechnics of smoke and fire.

This is also true of the Israeli case, despite its unique circumstances. The enemy’s military buildup and transformation into a terror army requires the state of Israel, and the IDF especially, to wage a war which will certainly require use of ground maneuver as part of a broad combined-arms effort. Maneuver needs to be aimed at military decisions in stubborn and complex fighting, which will very likely lead to serious losses.

In 1946, Julius Streicher, a high-ranking SS-officer and a chief Nazi propagandist, was sentenced to death at Nuremberg. Just before he was executed, he called out “Heil Hitler!” and the odd phrase “Purimfest, 1946!” It seems the his hanging alongside that of his fellow convicts put him in mind of the hanging of Haman and his ten sons described in the book of Esther. As Emmanuel Bloch and Zvi Ron wrote in 2022:

Julius Streicher, . . . founder and editor-in-chief of the weekly German newspaper Der Stürmer (“The Stormer”), featured a lengthy report on March 1934: “The Night of the Murder: The Secret of the Jewish Holiday of Purim is Unveiled.” On the day after Kristallnacht (November 10, 1938), Streicher gave a speech to more than 100,000 people in Nuremberg in which he justified the violence against the Jews with the claim that the Jews had murdered 75,000 Persians in one night, and that the Germans would have the same fate if the Jews had been able to accomplish their plan to institute a new murderous “Purim” in Germany.

In 1940, the best-known Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda film, Der Ewige Jude (“The Eternal Jew”), took up the same theme. Hitler even identified himself with the villains of the Esther story in a radio broadcast speech on January 30, 1944, where he stated that if the Nazis were defeated, the Jews “could celebrate the destruction of Europe in a second triumphant Purim festival.”

As we’ll see below, Jews really did celebrate the Nazi defeat on a subsequent Purim, although it was far from a joyous one. But the Nazis weren’t the first ones to see in the story of Esther—in which, to prevent their extermination, the Jews get permission from the king to slay those who would have them killed—an archetypal tale of Jewish vengefulness and bloodlust. Martin Luther, an anti-Semite himself, was so disturbed by the book that he wished he could remove it from the Bible altogether, although he decided he had no authority to do so.

More recently, a few Jews have taken up a similar argument, seeing in the Purim story, and the figure of 75,000 enemies slain by Persian Jews, a tale of the evils of vengeance, and tying it directly to what they imagine is the cruelty and vengefulness of Israel’s war against Hamas. The implication is that what’s wrong with Israel is something that’s wrong with Judaism itself. Jonathan Tobin comments on three such articles:

This group is right in one sense. In much the same way as the Jews of ancient Persia, Israelis have answered Hamas’s attempt at Jewish genocide with a counterattack aimed at eradicating the terrorists. The Palestinian invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7 was a trailer for what they wished to do to the rest of Israel. Thanks to the courage of those who fought back, they failed in that attempt, even though 1,200 men, women and children were murdered, and 250 were kidnapped and dragged back into captivity in Gaza.

Those Jews who have fetishized the powerlessness that led to 2,000 years of Jewish suffering and persecution don’t merely smear Israel. They reject the whole concept of Jews choosing not to be victims and instead take control of their destiny.