I have had occasion to correct a number of friends who talked about this war as if we are acting out of retaliation for Oct 7th. I disagree.
Something about the elimination of Yahya Sinwar provides support for my contention. Photographic evidence is followed by a discussion of the differences between acting out of vengeance and anger versus how Israel is conducting this war.
Here are two famous photos of killing from anger and hate: the first from a lynch in Ramallah when two soldiers who accidentally took a wrong turn and found themselves in Ramallah were not only killed but their bodies torn apart; the second of a young Israeli woman murdered on Oct 7th and carried off dead, thrown onto the back of a truck and paraded through the streets of Gaza:
In contrast, the IDF unit that eliminated an arch enemy of Israel, Yahya Sinwar, the architect of Oct 7th, carries his corpse from the dusty ruins of the building they collapsed upon him. There is no need to make displays of hate or fury. They remove him with dignity and respect – not toward Sinwar, who deserves none, but toward themselves.
We are not fighting out of revenge.
We are fighting to make sure Oct 7th never happens again, to make sure missiles, drones, incendiary kites, etc. are never launched over our border again.
I doubt we would accept so many soldiers dying in this war if it were for revenge. We would not bring down that pain upon their families for revenge. And their families would not stand for it. Losing a son or daughter in the fight against evil — to make sure evil does not rise up again trying to swallow us all — that, they are sadly and with great trepidation willing to risk. But for revenge? I doubt it.
We saw what happens when the goal of a war is unclear to the people — the Four Mothers movement arose in 1997 after a helicopter accident claimed the lives of 73 military personnel. Three years later, under the influence of the anti-war protest movement they began, Israel unilaterally pulled out of the security zone we held since 1982.
Had we known then that the spawning of Hezbollah would be facilitated by that withdrawal, perhaps we would have been motivated to maintain the security zone even at the cost of soldiers’ lives (256 between 1985 and 2000) and prevent the evil that grew bolder and bolder on our doorstep in the north.
Had we understood what it meant to allow Hamas free reign over Gaza, we would have heeded the voices among us that warned us not to withdraw from Gaza in 2005.
So far, about 700 soldiers have sacrificed their lives fighting Hamas and Hezbollah for the sake of the rest of us (including the 301 who fell during the massacre on October 7th). Their families, no Israelis, would ever tolerate such losses for the sake of revenge.
Revenge Fighting
Our enemies label their attacks against us as revenge — for killing this Hamas official or that Hezbollah official. But we are not killing them in revenge; we are not playing their tit-for-tat. And neither are they, really, if you pay attention to what they say. They are attacking us, not because of what we do, who we kill, what checkpoints we put up: they are fighting us because we dare to live and breath as a Jewish sovereign nation in their midst, and worse — on land that was once conquered and then controlled by occupying Islamic rulers (but not Palestinian Arabs).
And we are fighting them because we are determined to live safely and breath freely as the Jewish sovereign nation that we are — on our indigenous homeland.
Were we to fight in revenge, we would be fighting from a state of emotionality. Out of anger. Emotions do not provide a solid basis upon which to devise strategy and to design attack modes. Besides, to be angry at Hamas for Oct 7th would imply that we were taken totally by surprise by their savagery — that, even after seeing ISIS barbarism, we thought that their ideological counterparts in Gaza would not be like them.
So no; we are fighting this evil with cold and measured calculation.
That makes us more dangerous, more precise, more determined. It makes the population more able to bear the unbearable costs of this war. The losses of family members, the losses of homes, the losses of livelihood, the losses of our normal daily lives. If you want a taste of our new ‘normal,’ see here and here and here.
Where anger lies
If we are angry — and we are — it is at our own military and civilian leadership who missed the signs pointing to the impending disaster. And it requires enormous measures of self-control to prevent that anger from interfering with our need to obey the Home Front Command, to suffer the anxieties and struggles inherent in living under wartime conditions, for raising children and trying to maintain healthy family relationships while unsure how ‘normal’ the day will be. We are waiting for the war to be over before demanding accountability and justice for what our leadership has led us to.
Of course, not everyone succeeds, or even tries, to hold back the anger until the reckoning that will follow the war. They are out there demonstrating, sometimes violently, in the streets — against the government, against continuing the war, almost as if there was no war. But that is a story for another day.
So no. We are not fighting in revenge.
We are, quite simply, fighting for our lives.