2024 (Hard Questions, Tough Answers- January 6, 2025)
Q. What is your take on Israel’s fortunes during the outgoing year?
A. Seen from a distance of barely a week, 2024 represents yet more descent down the slippery slope toward a conflicted, non-democratic, immoral, isolated, messianic and binational entity between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. That is one end of the scale. Yet at the other end there had emerged by the end of the year one very significant and positive exception to this dynamic.
Q. Start with the exception. It makes for more encouraging reading . . .
A. In recent months, Israel’s security community registered dramatic victories over Iran, Hezbollah and almost the entire Axis of Resistance or Shiite Crescent. In a fascinating domino dynamic, the pro-Iran Assad regime in Syria fell and Iraq’s Shiite militias ceased attacking Israel.
Only Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen, neither a strategic threat, continue to attack Israel. In September, a dramatic IDF commando operation targeting an Iranian missile factory deep in Syrian territory sent yet another message to Iran about the vulnerability of its nuclear project.
Note that Israel’s Sunni Arab neighbors, from Egypt to Bahrain via Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, actively assisted it in combating Iran. This means that for the first time in its modern history, Israel was allied with major actors among its neighbors, while those few neighbors that remain openly hostile have been beaten into retreat. Even countries critical of Israel in the West have allied with it in combating Iran and the Houthis.
This is very good news for Israel’s overall security, and it happened in 2024.
Q. Now back to the bad news from 2024: Slippery slope? Immoral? Isolated?
A. In 2024 Israel lost a great deal of international support at the moral level due to the IDF’s behavior in the Gaza Strip. What began as a legitimate war of retaliation for the brutal Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023, deteriorated over the past year into death and destruction in Gaza on a horrific scale.
While much of the Gaza destruction can theoretically be justified in terms of the cost of eliminating Hamas, by the dawn of 2025 the IDF had not eliminated Hamas, could not declare victory in Gaza, and must contemplate what looks like the loss of its moral compass.
Worse, while the world recognizes this, the majority of Israelis apparently do not. The IDF continues to force hundreds of thousands of Gazans out of the northern Strip while the messianists in the government lay plans to settle that territory. Israel had every right and obligation to defeat Hamas by conquering the Strip. But everything it did beyond that in 2024 is a moral stain on the army and the country.
Q. Yet you began by noting that the events of 2024 allied Israel with its neighbors. That is hardly isolation or moral reprobation.
A. Israel’s neighbors are either failed states (Lebanon, Sudan, Libya) or autocratic police states (all the rest, again stretching from Egypt to Bahrain). That the events of 2024 rendered Israel more acceptable to the neighborhood says a lot more about Israel and its changing values than about the neighborhood.
Take, for example, the Israeli hostages in Gaza. Traditional Israeli and Jewish values embodied in Maimonides’ famous dictum that “there is no greater mitzvah [religious obligation] than redeeming captives” have been set aside by a government full of ostensibly pious Jews who regularly quote Maimonides. Keeping Netanyahu in office despite his moral and legal bankruptcy, allocating copious funds to building settlements and promoting religious ‘values’, and postponing creation of a commission of inquiry likely to blame it for the war--all are more important to this government than stopping what has become a pointless war and saving those hostages who are still alive.
Israel’s elected leaders do not want to inquire what happened on October 7: why the Palestinian issue exploded and why the country was so unprepared. That is deplorable, and it lays the foundation for the next destructive strategic surprise. Yet Israel’s neighbors could not care less. They never appoint commissions of inquiry. Their leaders have no real empathy for the Palestinians, much less for Israelis slaughtered on October 7. They simply know how to identify shared strategic interests with Israel.
Q. On December 31, 2024, Israel’s population passed the ten million mark. Significant?
A. Yes. This is critical mass. It is significant at the strategic level. But little noticed in statistical analysis of the past year was the fact that over 80,000 Israelis left the country, many not planning to return. These are by and large young professionals representing the economic backbone of the country. The absence of hi-tech workers may not be so noticeable insofar as in the short term they can continue to participate in the Israeli economy from abroad. But the absence of medical professionals is already increasingly glaring. Try to get an appointment with a medical specialist in less than two months.
These Israelis no longer believe in a future for themselves and their families in Israel. They are setting up expat colonies in Cyprus, Greece and beyond.
This too happened in 2024. And in 2025, many additional Israelis are contemplating a similar move. Not because they are afraid of Iran or Hamas. They are afraid of Netanyahu and his messianic, fascistic allies in government--all democratically elected.
Q. The crisis over military conscription belies the claim of demographic ‘critical mass’.
A. Indeed, despite crossing that ten million landmark and despite Israel’s cyber and hi-tech advantages, a war lasting more than a year and being waged on multiple fronts revealed in 2024 that the IDF does not have enough combat soldiers. Compulsory service has been extended. Reserve duty has been stretched for some to hundreds of days. The toll on families, on mental well-being and on the economy is enormous. The term ‘critical mass’ proves deceptive because the entire Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community, well over a million strong, has been exempted from service while its young men study Torah, grow huge families and otherwise live off government funding.
In 2024 it emerged that traditional Jewish veneration of devout Jewish youth studying holy books no longer holds, particularly when many of these youth are actually enjoying their exemption while idle or working. Notably, the protest against the Haredi exemption was led by equally religious Jews from the National Religious sector who have served, and died in combat, above and beyond the call of duty.
Q. This points to the equally prominent role played by the National Religious in 2024 in prosecuting the war in Gaza for messianic religious reasons . . .
A. While Haredi Jews have cultivated Torah study as a principled and sacred alternative to military duty, the National Religious have over recent decades (the turning point was alarm over the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza) cultivated participation in the security community as a messianic duty. In the IDF, they are increasingly prominent at the senior officer level.
And so are the messianic values they bring with them and which they disseminate among the ranks. Professor Yagil Levy of The Open University, probably Israel’s most prominent sociologist of the military, does not hide his alarm: “Talk of Armageddon, a war of Gog and Magog that will drown the region in blood and fire, was there before October 7,” he states. “[But] the war has normalized it. . . . [In Gaza] a moral disaster is taking place.”
Q. Bottom line?
A. After 2024, Israel’s future seems assured from a security standpoint. But what kind of Israel? The more the country resembles its neighbors and the less liberal and less democratic it becomes, the more it signals both moderate Israelis and the Diaspora that a day of reckoning is approaching. That is the message of 2024.