7 OCTOBER: ONE YEAR ONOne Year After the October 7 Attacks: The Impact on Four Fronts
The turbulent year since Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel draws to a close, marked by a sharp escalation in conflict between Israel and Iran and its proxies. Four CFR experts assess the changes since the attacks.
One year after Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel, Elliott Abrams examines the extraordinary response of Israel’s government and society; Linda Robinson catalogues the wrenching toll on Palestinians in Gaza; Ray Takeyh surveys Iran’s newly challenged network of regional allies; and Steven Cook explores how much expanding conflict has tested U.S.-Israeli ties.
Israel’s Year of Trial and Reckoning on Defense
Elliott Abrams is Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at CFR.
Most of 2023, which overlapped with the Jewish years 5783-4, was marked by deep internal divisions in Israel over “judicial reform”. Large demonstrations, vicious political rhetoric, and a sharp split between those who favored the reform as a way to limit excessive judicial power and those who saw it as the end of democracy in Israel heated Israeli politics to the boiling point.
But then came October 7, 2023, and the judicial reform was forgotten. The country came together in shock and horror at the magnitude of the loss of life and the brutality of the Hamas-led Palestinian armed groups who crossed the border from the Gaza Strip to kill, maim, rape, and take hostages. In the ensuing months of 2023, there was broad agreement on the need to defeat Hamas, and moreover, unified support for the soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces. Some senior officers resigned quickly and others more slowly in the aftermath, taking responsibility for the security disaster, but the bravery and commitment of the young soldiers, most of them reservists, taught Israelis a lesson about their younger generation. There had been loose rhetoric by old-timers wondering whether the great generations who founded the state in 1948 and guided it through the wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 were being followed by a new generation not up to the task of defending Israel. That argument is over.
But many other arguments are not. Whatever senior officers did in accepting blame, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepted none himself. As the months passed, and the fighting wore on, he drew sharp criticism once again. On top of all his old issues, blame piled on for October 7 and for him not finding a way to get the hostages back. Here new divisions appeared: what should the price be to retrieve them before more died or were executed?
