In the early days of the war that broke out on 7 October, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the conflict to come was a “second war of independence”. Netanyahu was referring to the first Arab-Israeli war, which saw Israel being attacked by its neighbours hours after declaring its independence. In what he certainly thought to be a Churchillian speech, Netanyahu said Israel would fight on “land, at sea and in the air” and would secure “total victory”.
The speech and sentiment can be brushed aside as just another piece of “Bibi theatrics”, but it did capture a feeling of existential anguish that few outside of Israel may have understood. To external observers, while the 7 October attacks were unprecedented, they did not threaten the very existence of Israel. Hamas had shattered Israel’s sense of security, but the risk of a serious Israeli defeat was never a possibility.
But to Israelis, this felt exactly right: Hamas fighters had broken into towns and border communities, gone one by one in every house to kill and maim. There is no deeper existential fear than the fear of seeing your own home being invaded. This primal fear was exactly what Hamas sought to ignite when it broke out of the wall confines of Gaza and attacked multiple Israeli towns—some of which are the last strongholds of the Israeli peace camp—filming it for the world to see.
To a lesser extent, the same can be said of the current crisis Israel faces with Iran. The Islamic Republic has built a “ring of fire” around Israel: Tehran has surrounded the country with proxies such as Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iraqi Shiite militias. Using the fight against Israel as a rallying cry, Iran aspires to be a regional hegemon—one that has little to do with Palestine or the interests of the Palestinian people which are better represented by other countries in the region.
Iran can be seen as slowly tightening the noose around Israel. This is despite Iran’s own weaknesses, including the fact that the regime itself is despised by many Iranians. To make matters worse, during the night of 13 April, Iran launched more than 300 missiles and drones at Israel, in response to an strike on its consulate in Damascus believed to be carried about by the Jewish state, marking another escalation in a long list of escalating security headaches for Israel.
Read more: After months of Israeli provocations, Iran finally strikes back
Iran’s willingness to cross the line and directly attack Israel may be viewed, in that sense, as a dramatic and dire warning that Tehran feels confident enough in the success of their regional project that they think has tied down Israel in so many areas that it will not respond.
If a full-scale confrontation with Iran were to break out, Israel is capable of carrying out attacks in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran. To the average Israeli, this may evoke the first decades of Israel’s existence, when the country faced conflicts on all fronts, bringing again this “existential fear” that re-emerged on 7 October.
The threat that Iran may turn nuclear—a threat a high-ranking IRGC official recently referred to when he warned Iran could “review its nuclear doctrine” if Israel attacked its nuclear programme—coupled with Tehran’s longtime pledge to “erase Israel from the map” may also fuel the sense that Israel is fighting for survival.
Two faces of same coin
Existential fear and exceptional strength have been two faces of the same coin for much of Israel’s history. Israel’s former PM Golda Meir once said, “Our best weapon is that we have nowhere to go”. Israel’s psyche has been built on this notion that its mere existence was always threatened and never a given. One of the ideological founders of the Israeli right-wing camp, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, summed up this idea when he spoke of the “wall of fire”, or “Iron wall” Israel would have to put up to survive in a hostile region.
But Israel has also evolved past this stage. It is no longer a country isolated from the region—at least it wasn’t on 6 October. Acting as if Israel’s existence is always on the line deprives Israel of an array of responses that may be smarter in the long term or even in the short term.
