Israel is both traumatized and sober-minded

There’s a “new wisdom” making the rounds in foreign-policy circles in Washington. It goes something like this: Israelis were so traumatized by Hamas’s brutal invasion on Oct. 7 that they can’t think straight about their interests. This is the reason why 85% of Israelis oppose Palestinian statehood and 99 out of 120 Knesset members voted for a resolution opposing unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state by foreign governments on Feb. 21.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew took the new line public. In his address on Feb. 18 before the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations meeting in Jerusalem, he asserted therapeutically that “discussing” Palestinian statehood “is a huge challenge for a nation still in a state of trauma.”

On Thursday, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates made a similar argument in a conversation with The Washington Post’s David Ignatius. Gates acknowledged that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s opposition to the establishment of a Palestinian state is shared by the people of Israel. Like Lew, he attributed Israel’s wall-to-wall opposition to a Palestinian state to “the traumatic effect on Israel of Oct. 7,” which, he asserted, “had a huge impact psychologically inside of Israel.”

The “new wisdom” that Israelis are acting out of trauma is deliberately manipulative. Obviously, Israelis were traumatized by Oct. 7. The atrocities meted out that day by thousands of Palestinians—in and out of Hamas—against thousands of Israeli civilians and soldiers left a gaping hole in the hearts of every Israeli. How could it be otherwise? Any population in any country whose fellow citizens suffered far lesser atrocities simply because of their national identity would be traumatized.

But while it’s true that Israelis were traumatized by the slaughter that Black Shabbat, it doesn’t follow that their post-Oct. 7 positions are an emotional response to trauma, which Israelis can be expected to abandon once they get past their emotional angst.

As a people, Israelis have responded rationally and bravely to the events of that day. In the face of the Holocaust Hamas and its civilian followers enacted on southern Israel, Israelis immediately mobilized for war. The goal of the war—embraced by more than 90% of Israelis—is total victory over the enemy that did this.

Although it is seldom said outright by politicians afraid of American wrath, victory for Israelis means no Palestinian state—ever. This isn’t a vengeful or emotional determination. It is a rational understanding that Oct. 7 was the outcome of Palestinian statehood.

Gaza has been an independent Palestinian state since Israel withdrew all of its civilians and military forces in August 2005. The fact that the Palestinians chose not to present themselves as such doesn’t change the basic fact that they have been fully sovereign for more than 18 years.

Rather than build the institutions of a state, the Palestinians in Gaza, Judea and Samaria freely chose to be ruled by Hamas, which they overwhelmingly support. And as is the wont of jihadist terror groups, Hamas used its control over the Palestinian state in Gaza to build a sadistic death machine.

On Feb. 21, the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel submitted a 39-page report to the United Nations. Titled “Silent Cry: Sexual Crimes in the October 7 War,” the report details the systematic, methodical employment of gang rape, sexual mutilation and other sexual violence that Hamas employed against Israeli women, men, girls and boys at multiple locations on Oct. 7. The report demonstrates that sex crimes were a premeditated tactic deliberately deployed against the Israeli victims to cause maximum humiliation and trauma for the victims, the victims’ families and Israeli society as a whole.