A thought About on the First Anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack by Dan Ben-David, a Tel Aviv University economist who heads the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research.

“My mom was a 13-year-old smuggled alone out of Baghdad to Palestine during World War II. My father landed here as an orphan; his father was butchered by his Lithuanian neighbors as the Nazis moved in. Following the war of independence, my parent’s army units joined to create Kibbutz Malkiya on the Lebanese border. (That kibbutz, where they first met and married, became a charred ghost town over the past year.) That’s my family’s history — but change the names, and you basically have the history of Israel 1.0.”

That generation, Ben-David continued, “made sure their children and grandchildren would understand the importance of preserving Israel as our people’s safe haven, built on democracy and the rule of law.” That priority, that story, “was the thread of steel that has bound each generation to our founding one. It creates a situation that makes Israel unique, and not just in comparison with those who want to annihilate us.” 

Look at how “both Ukraine and Russia have had to pass laws to prevent able-bodied men from leaving during war,” he added. “But when Israel is threatened with war, the planes that are full are not with Israelis trying to escape possible hell but with those dropping everything abroad — school, work, vacations — to come home and defend the country, many of whom eventually lose their lives in doing so. You cannot buy that kind of motivation.”

The fact that Israel drafts most 18-year-old men and women, “literally provides the army access to the top of the top of Israel’s human spectrum,” noted Ben-David, and it was that cohort that “just devastated Hezbollah’s leadership and intercepted the most massive ballistic missile attack in history.”

“That steel thread is what has saved us over the decades — and that is exactly what is so dangerous about Netanyahu’s domestic divide-and-conquer strategy that puts his personal interests above all else. Here we are, after the most horrific period in Israel’s history, and Netanyahu keeps snipping away at the thread,” Ben-David wrote. “Aside from encouraging his cultist followers to make state enemies out of hostage families, pilots, physicians and anyone else who dares to criticize the great leader, he has no exit plan for the deepening military crisis, no budget for the deepening economic crisis, no intention of drafting the ultra-Orthodox into an army desperate for manpower to replace all those who we lost. Because all of those might lead his far-right allies to turn against him.”

So on this first anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack, I find myself most preoccupied with the fact that Israel is fighting a multifront war and Israelis still don’t know whether they are fighting to make Israel, A thought About on the First Anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack, safe for a Jewish democracy or safe for the prime minister’s political survival, safe for the ultra-Orthodox to never have to serve in the military and safe for the prime minister to declare to the world he is defending the frontier of freedom in Gaza and Lebanon while sustaining a morally rotten and economically draining settlement engine in the West Bank.

The biggest threat to Israel today is not Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah or the Houthis. A united Israel can beat them all. It is those who are unraveling Israel’s steel thread — with a bad story.