Upon returning from a visit to Israel, Joshua Karlip reflects on the country’s successes in light of the October 7 massacres:

The founders of Zionist ideology, from Leon Pinsker and Theodor Herzl onward, understood the creation of a Jewish state as the antidote to anti-Semitism. Even as a Jewish state would provide a safe haven for the Jewish people, statehood would allow the Jews finally to take their place amongst the family of nations. Tragically, these aspects of the Zionist dream have not yet come to fruition. Rather than taking its place amongst the nations, Israel has become the Jew amongst nations. Likewise, Israeli military strength failed to protect the victims of October 7th from the genocidal violence directed against them.

Still, in an even more fundamental way, the state of Israel has proven a great Jewish success. A century ago, the majority of the world’s Jews lived in deeply Jewish spaces. The shtetls and cities of Eastern Europe, as the cities and villages of North Africa and the Middle East, functioned as the spatial context within which Jews lived a thick Jewish identity, manifesting itself through practices, languages (Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic), folkways, and values that deeply reflected the millennia-old Jewish textual tradition.

If the Torah, the text, stood at the heart of the Jewish experience, it only could survive within the context of Jewish space. The Communist destruction of Judaism, the Holocaust’s destruction of Europe’s Jews, and the Arab lands’ expulsion of its Jews forever ended these centuries-old Jewish spaces. It was Israel that provided a home not just to Jews from all of these lands; even more fundamentally, it restored to them a Jewish space in which they could live, speak, and study in the language of the texts and traditions that always had sustained them.

Examining the effects of Iran’s decision to launch nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, Benny Morris takes stock of the Jewish state’s strategic situation:

The massive Iranian attack has turned what began as a local war in and around the Gaza Strip and then expanded into a Hamas–Hizballah–Houthi–Israeli war [into] a regional war with wide and possibly calamitous international repercussions.

Before the Iranians launched their attack, Washington warned Tehran to desist (“don’t,” in President Biden’s phrase), and Israel itself had reportedly cautioned the Iranians secretly that such an attack would trigger a devastating Israeli counterstrike. But a much-humiliated Iran went ahead, nonetheless.

For Israel, the way forward seems to lie in an expansion of the war—in the north or south or both—until the country attains some sort of victory, or a diplomatic settlement is reached. A “victory” would mean forcing Hizballah to cease fire in exchange, say, for a cessation of the IDF bombing campaign and withdrawal to the international border, or forcing Iran, after suffering real pain from IDF attacks, to cease its attacks and rein in its proxies: Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

At the same time, writes Morris, a victory along such lines would still have its limits:

An IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon and a cessation of Israeli air-force bombing would result in Hizballah’s resurgence and its re-investment of southern Lebanon down to the border. Neither the Americans nor the French nor the UN nor the Lebanese army—many of whose troops are Shiites who support Hizballah—would fight them.