When Hamas terrorists broke through the IDF’s security barrier on October 7, they not only devastated the communities of the Gaza Envelope but also shattered many Israelis’ beliefs about how the world works—a major blow to the collective psyche of a nation already riven by bitter internal strife.
As the full reality of the attack set in, Israels began to wonder just how such a massive operation could have been planned and carried out under their noses.
“We all thought 1973 was the year in which our greatest conceptions as Israelis were shattered. But nothing prepared us for the way our most closely held present-day beliefs about our safety and strength would come down crashing 50 years later, with Hamas’ border assault on October 7,” Lilach Volach wrote in Haaretz, Israel’s most prominent liberal newspaper, in the wake of the attack.
“We thought we had hit rock bottom and then it became worse. We didn’t think it could get any worse,” agreed Efrat Shapira Rosenberg, who, alongside philosopher Micah Goodman, hosts Beit Avi Chai’s Mifleget Hamachshavot podcast, which aims to elucidate the concepts and ideas behind today’s political and social developments in Israel.
“These are the issues we are trying to deal with… military conceptions, political conceptions, ideological conceptions and even philosophical conseptions that collapsed.”
Within days of the attack, Shapira Rosenberg and Goodman had put aside their plans for the upcoming season of their podcast to focus on grappling with the implications of the war.
“The mother of all conceptions,” Shapira Rosenberg says, “is that human nature is universal so if we can’t identify total evil in ourselves, if it’s not something we can identify in ourselves then it doesn’t exist.”
That blind spot, the inability to understand that others could countenance bringing utter destruction upon themselves in order to kill their enemies, prevented Israelis from believing that Hamas would launch such a brutal campaign against southern Israel.
“But because they knew Israel’s response would be to rain hell on Gaza, they were willing to undermine the wellbeing of their own people just to harm Israel,” she adds.
Beyond believing that Hamas would be unwilling to spark such a conflict, Israelis were also led astray by their “conception that the Israeli army is almighty, we see everything, we know everything, we are the startup nation, cyber superpower,” Shapira Rosenberg continues. “That’s also another belief that collapsed, the fact that you can replace physical presence in the territories with technology – it doesn’t work.”
But beyond the collapse our of own strategic assumptions, there is also a deep anger among Israelis at the massive surge in global antisemitism which has erupted following October 7, especially among the global left.
This is especially apparent when reading Haaretz, she said, which has run articles with headlines calling on the international left to “go to hell” and complaining about the growing anti-Zionist movement on American campuses.
In response to these trends, Shapira Rosenberg and Goodman produced several episodes examining the history of antisemitism, how it has persisted as a part of numerous, and often contradictory, ideologies, and how the long-cherished Zionist belief that establishing a Jewish state would eliminate Judeophobia has proved baseless.
Unfortunately, this approach, no matter how necessary, isn’t reflected in the mainstream Israeli discourse, Shapira Rosenberg believes, arguing that “we see the same people saying the same things on the radio and TV.”
“Basically we are trying to give all of us in this very stormy ocean a branch to hold on to,” she explains. “And that branch might turn into a more stable raft or a boat, or it might turn into nothing and we’re going to sink with it.”
But, she says, it’s a necessary risk and one worth taking.
Mifleget Hamachshavot (in Hebrew) is available to stream on the Beit Avi Chai website, on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.
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