Two Years of War

Two years ago, on Simchat Torah, I awoke in my home in central Israel to the sound of booms in the distance. Rain hadn’t been forecast, and an unusually hot, dry season had scorched its way across the summer months and into the first week of October. Yet hovering at the bleary borderline between dreaming and dawn, I awoke with the irrational thought that Tefilat Geshem—the annual prayer for rain to be recited later that day—had brought thundershowers. The source of those booms, which persisted under sunny skies, would soon occur to me. Their echoes still reverberate and elude comprehension.

Walking to shul, I came across the first signs of a country thrust into what would become the longest war in its history. My street, normally quiet on a holiday morning, bustled with young people in uniform lugging large backpacks and piling into small cars. Simchat Torah services, which often stretch well into the afternoon, were cut short. And although we must have recited Tefilat Geshem, I have no recollection of it. The only memory I retain is of the Torah reader receiving a phone call from his commander, just as he finished chanting the final words of Deuteronomy: “In all the great terror which Moses showed in the sight of all Israel.” Soon, awful rumors of paragliding terrorists and fear-stricken concertgoers and kibbutznikim began to spread from the shul’s back benches.

Sukkot is described in the Torah as occurring at “the turn of the year,” right after the harvest is gathered and just before the new crop is planted. It’s a redolent phrase that also echoes the rhythms of the liturgical calendar, which begins with the penitential month of Elul, continues with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Days of Awe, proceeds with the rejoicing of Sukkot, culminates with the revelry of Simchat Torah, and then washes away into the humdrum of a new year. Tefilat Geshem is the cathartic turn of the holiday into the everyday reality of the new year. Yet, for two years after that terrible Simchat Torah, no new year arrived.

For two long years, the war evolved and shifted shape, sometimes expanding and sometimes contracting as Israel encountered a widening gyre of enemies that began with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon and came to encompass the Houthis in Yemen and the Islamic Republic of Iran. At first, the streets were quiet and the cafes empty. But gradually, we came to realize Yehuda Amichai was right when he contradicted Kohelet:

A man . . . doesn’t have seasons enough to have

a season for every purpose. . . .

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,

to laugh and cry with the same eyes,

with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,

to make love in war and war in love.

And so, while friends and family were off at the front, birthdays were marked, weddings were celebrated, soldiers were buried, and babies were born.

These two years unfolded like a ragged collection of separate moments, each possessing its own distinct texture and mood. There were the early, mournful days when I realized which of the 1,200 Israelis killed on October 7 I knew and the later, nerve-wracked months when the IDF began its ground campaign and I scanned the photographs of fallen soldiers, looking for familiar faces. There were many sleepless nights and early wake-up calls, when air-raid sirens wailed as my family stumbled into the safe room, where we calculated the seconds to the thud of Iron Dome interceptions as if they were lightning strikes whose proximity could be measured by counting “Mississippis.” There were more optimistic periods too, especially during ceasefires when we gathered breathlessly around the TV to watch the release of hostages and when sudden jolts of sensational news buzzed our phones and quickened our pulses. Yet despite all the dramatic developments, the war’s abiding trait was its intractability, a pervading sense of endlessness.

Often, I felt stranded, and sometimes I really was—I live in Israel but teach at a college in the US, and the war made air travel impossibly unpredictable (once I was forced to fly to Germany via Montenegro, spend the weekend in Berlin, and then travel on to New York via Warsaw). Many times, a ceasefire seemed imminent, only for negotiations to break down and the war to grind on. The number of days that the hostages were held in captivity ticked up, announced on website widgets and pieces of masking tape stuck to people’s shirts. Israelis continued to mourn their dead; Gazans did the same in unthinkable numbers as they fled one dystopian cityscape for another—all while the families of the hostages endured a living nightmare that confined them to what Rachel Goldberg-Polin, the mother of murdered hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, described simply as “a different universe than all of you.” As for the captives themselves, one can only imagine how the darkness of their subterranean captivity stretched on into eternity.

And then, two years after it began, the war came to an abrupt halt. On October 8, 2025, which fell on the second day of Sukkot, Israel and Hamas agreed to the first stage of a truce engineered by the United States and mediated by Egypt, Turkey, and Qatar. On the following day, when the Israeli cabinet ratified the agreement, I looked out the windows of my living room as the skies opened with the yoreh, the first significant rainfall after the long, Levantine summer. As soon as I could, I returned to the alternate universe that was Hostage Square, the special place next to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art where protesters had tirelessly rallied for the release of the captives. For two years it was the most somber of sites, but now people were laughing, crying, dancing, and singing, while others waved American flags and eccentrics dressed up like President Donald Trump. A few days later, while we were cooking for Simchat Torah, Hamas released the twenty remaining hostages into the tearful embrace of their families, as millions of Israelis watched the incredibly emotional scenes unfold with an uncanny combination of disbelief and relief.

That night was the most joyous and exuberant Simchat Torah I have ever experienced. People thronged the streets, packed the synagogues, banged rhythmically on the bimah, and danced with abandon, fueled by copious quantities of alcohol and buoyed by the long-awaited arrival of good news. The following morning, worshippers gathered to celebrate the completion of the Torah, to recite Yizkor in memory of the dead, and to pray for rain. At the small Jerusalem shtiebel that I attended, people wept as the hazzan cried out the final stanza of Tefillat Geshem:

Remember the twelve tribes whom You moved through split waters

For whom You sweetened the bitter waters

The blood of their descendants spills for You like water

Turn to us, for our soul is engulfed with water!

Suddenly, everyone was quiet. In the hush, you could sense the turn toward a new season under heaven, if not from war to peace, then at least from a time to hate to a time to heal.

The passage of exactly two years, from the time the hostages were taken to when the last living captives were released, suggests a name for this conflict that I haven’t heard yet: the Two-Year War. Arguably, the catastrophe began earlier, when Israel saw five national elections in the space of three and a half years and the streets swelled with massive protests. At a particularly low point, fights broke out between religious and secular Jews at a public Yom Kippur service in Tel Aviv, as contemporary Israelis seemed to mimic the ancient sectarianism that had led to the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. That autumn in these pages, Hillel Halkin lamented that Israel was “over the cliff and falling, and no one knows how far down the ground is.” On October 7, it turned out to be farther than we could ever have imagined.

The scope, depravity, and violence of Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians, our fellow citizens, defied comprehension. The magnitude of the security lapse and the initial inability of the IDF to beat back the invasion from Gaza were utterly baffling and broke the trust Israelis placed in their armed forces. The numbers of hostages taken by Hamas, which included men and women, Jew and non-Jew, soldier and civilian, the elderly and babies, eclipsed our worst fears. Yet what I found most bewildering was that the Israeli government was missing from public view for hours, days, and in some sense, the entire duration of the war.

I haven’t been a member of the Likud party in almost twenty years, yet in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, I still expected that the prime minister would speak to the nation seriously in sorrow and anger, with resolve. I still remember listening to President George W. Bush’s famous September 11 speech, which he broadcast from a bunker straight into my staticky car radio in suburban Baltimore. Although Prime Minister Netanyahu declared war, he gave no such address, neither comforting nor fortifying the country, nor expressing regret about the catastrophic failure he oversaw. Members of his coalition were also absent from the ensuing parade of funerals and shivas. And although they managed to muster a wartime mantra—“be-yahad nenatzeah” (together we will be victorious)—the government hardly seemed to realize that regular citizens had already reunited, and it was Israeli civil society, including infrastructure previously built by antigovernment protesters, that compensated for the failure of its public servants. Israelis lined up to give blood to the injured, food and clothing to the displaced, and agricultural help to farmers in the South, while old soldiers dusted off their uniforms to rejoin their army units and save the country from cataclysm.

The constant thud of intercepted rockets, which woke me on the morning of October 7, was soon overpowered by the rumble of fighter jets, the whistle of munitions, and the sickening sound of exploding concrete. The song of the year on Israel’s equivalent of Billboard was Ness and Stilla’s “Harbu Darbu,” a brassy revenge rap of unadulterated fury (“We brought the whole army upon you and swear there’s no forgiveness”), and there were many other war songs playing on the radio, including more searching hits like Odeya and E-Z’s “Horef 23” (“I remember how I was too scared to leave the apartment / that Someone upstairs had fallen asleep on the job / Try explaining to someone what happened here”). Yet the war’s true soundtrack was provided by the air-raid sirens and cell phone alert systems, whose fluctuating pitches and different tones alerted Israelis to incoming rockets, attack drones, and ballistic missiles.

What I remember most from those first days was not the clang of battle but the choked silence of the home front. A few days after the attack, while easing my car into the garage, I overheard a woman whispering to someone that the body of my teenage neighbor—a surveillance officer—had been retrieved from the Gaza border. That Friday, the entire neighborhood lined up on the sidewalk with Israeli flags, some quietly crying as family members drove by on their way to the funeral. I’ll never forget how my shul rabbi, who was called up by the military reserves as part of a massive effort to identify the many mutilated bodies, was so dumbstruck by what he saw that for weeks he could not bring himself to open his mouth and deliver a sermon.

Somehow, though, there were still plenty of people who were confident about what to say, and they didn’t hold themselves back from saying it. News studios were full of passionate intensity, as current and former politicians and former members of the military and intelligence sectors competed for the last word and anchors struggled to maintain order. Regular Israelis ultimately regained their voice, and more often than not it was burning with rage. But when I returned to work in the United States, I was even more disconcerted by the brash sounds, loud images, and blaring statements that I encountered there.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, while Southern Israel was still burning and the bodies of its victims were still being recovered, noisy protests were held that accused Israel of doing things in Gaza that it hadn’t done, with a few protesters supporting Hamas and calling on Jews to evacuate Israel for their Polish “homeland.” At my beautiful bucolic college, the local chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine shared on their Instagram account a “Statement in Support and Solidarity of the Unity Intifada,” which was decorated with four drawings of men—presumably fighters for Hamas—flying paragliders and emblazoned with the Fanonian formulation, “Liberation is a material process that requires confrontation by any means necessary.” Campus demonstrators thrilled to the staccato chant “Free, Free Palestine!” and academic panels on the Gaza War sometimes felt like old-time religious revivals, with professors preaching anti-Zionism to the snapping fingers, whooping cheers, and stamping feet of an enthusiastic student congregation.

I am not naive about the challenges facing higher education, yet until that October, I firmly believed in the potential of academic dialogue to illuminate even the most complex and contested facets of our world, including conflicts in the Middle East. Now I was forced to admit that much of what passes for critical discourse on Israel and Zionism was at best devoid of critical insight; at worse, it was unmoored from historical realities and sometimes even indistinguishable from antisemitism. I was disgusted by the mealymouthed Ivy League university presidents who, when questioned in Congress about antisemitism on their campuses, were unable to speak clearly, forcefully, and morally. Yet what bothered me most was the abdication of intellectual responsibility in so much of the academic world and the vacuity of its most vaunted institution—the college seminar.

It has become common for Israelis to speak of “sobering up” in the wake of October 7, by which they usually mean replacing liberal views with hard-line positions. And yet, my own rude awakening did not lead to a clarifying conversion on the road to (and from) Jerusalem. For one, my binational life, ping-ponging between Israel and America, afforded me a split-screen perspective that simulcast scenes of terrible suffering in Israel alongside the searing images of Palestinian agony that Israeli television refused to show. I held no expectation that a terrorist organization like Hamas would act morally or speak truthfully about what was transpiring in Gaza, yet I was increasingly disturbed to find my own government misleading the international community along with the Israeli public.

When I gave in to temptation and scrolled social media, my eyes burned. I got into a Twitter spat with a left-wing Jewish activist who could hardly bring herself to acknowledge that Israelis were hurting and frightened by the apparent goals of so-called Palestinian liberation. I knew that there were troubling incidents on college campuses, but it was clear to me that many of the clips I saw, which alleged the harassment of Jewish American students, were manipulative and dishonest.

Tired of everything, I mainly stayed home. Eventually, I found myself marching in Jerusalem with a motley crew shouting a plain and plaintive phrase that I could finally embrace: “haye adam! haye adam!”—“Human life! Human life!” Curious about the presence of yarmulke wearers at such a protest, a young American yeshiva student came up to me and, in the American English sociolect of “yeshivish,” asked me: “What’s pshat?” or “What’s the deal?” I laughed at the incongruence of this encounter between a former yeshiva bochur and a current one, but I also realized that it was a good question. What was one to make of the growing attendance of religious Jews at such rallies, which in years past would be almost the exclusive domain of secular Israelis? And what, indeed, was the meaning of this war—which began as a morally just and strategically necessary Israeli response but now seemed to veer toward at least some of the outrages that Israel had been falsely accused of in the immediate aftermath of October 7.

The meaning and consequences of the Two-Year War certainly won’t be clarified by the country’s current leadership. And our public intellectuals, who have either been stricken silent or doubled down on the old forms of thought that first made them prominent, are unlikely to be of much help. I sincerely hope that some of the remarkable characters we’ve met along the way—humane, clear-visioned people like former hostage Eli Sharabi, and Rachel Goldberg-Polin, and Rabbi Elchanan Danino (the father of murdered hostage Ori Danino)—will help guide us. But I also realize that they need to rebuild their own shattered lives.

These days, my neighborhood is peaceful again. The air force no longer flies overhead; bombs and rockets are not falling nearby. But sometimes, late at night, I’ll be awakened by a noise and won’t be sure whether it’s a motorcycle dopplering by or the rise of a siren.