(Photo credit: Ayal Margolin/Flash90 via JNS)
The Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, traumatized Israelis and global Jewry. The world’s Jews will recover their equilibrium; however, Israelis will live with the trauma for years, as they did after the shock of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, exactly 50 years earlier.
The toll is everywhere: hostage bodies still in captivity, rising suicides, soldiers in psychological crisis, families buckling under endless reserve duty and creeping fear that the state can no longer guarantee basic security.
As Daniel Gordis observed: “There is loss and heartbreak everywhere, PTSD (in the clinical sense, not two people momentarily rattled at a party) so widespread that an entire society is going to be forever changed.”
Most Israelis have not wavered in their support for the IDF’s response to Oct. 7 and its aftermath; still, many are confronting its consequences. The devastation in Gaza and the international backlash have forced reflection, even as baseless claims of war crimes and genocide have been firmly rejected.
While the country has confronted these external pressures, an internal reckoning has also become unavoidable due to the government’s inability to meet the public’s immediate needs in the aftermath of the attack. The state comptroller issued a scathing report of Israel’s wartime governance, concluding that no coherent civilian-defense system existed when the country needed it most.
For nearly 20 years, especially under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, successive governments failed to establish clear authority over the home front, while coordination mechanisms inside the Prime Minister’s Office barely functioned. The Finance Ministry compounded the problems by shutting down its wartime civilian control center shortly after creating it, while ignoring core economic and social needs. Meanwhile, the Defense Ministry’s emergency bodies were unprepared and poorly regulated, resulting in disorganized, inadequate support for evacuees, essential workers and civilians who were left without reliable government assistance during the crisis.
Still, the resilience of the Israeli people has been on display since Oct. 7.
The attacks led to an immediate surge in unity — transcending the deep political, religious and cultural divisions that existed even before Netanyahu’s push for judicial reform fractured the country. The very citizens he vilified for protesting his proposals saved the country’s civilian front. Groups like Brothers and Sisters in Arms (reserve soldiers) and the women’s group Building an Alternative mobilized some 15,000 Israelis to substitute for the missing infrastructure that was needed in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7. Within two weeks, they had fed tens of thousands, housed nearly 8,000 displaced families, transported civilians and soldiers, run programs for evacuated children and even rescued pets.
This was the Israelis at their best.
Former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren called this “the victory of a society that did not collapse when our state failed us — a society which, on the contrary, united and grew stronger.”
The best examples of Israeli resilience are residents of the Gaza border communities who, despite the horrors they endured, have returned to rebuild their homes and properties. This includes 95% of the kibbutz residents. Similarly, most of those forced to evacuate from the north due to rocket fire from Hezbollah in Lebanon, which started on Oct. 8 — one day after the massacre and kidnappings in the south, have returned.
To that end, German-Indian writer Paushali Lass aptly described Zionism as “the most profound form of resilience” because it represents “the return of an ancient people to their land, weathering attacks and wars, and, despite varying levels of faith or spirituality, maintaining an unbreakable connection to the soil of their ancestors.” The message, she added, is that no matter the threats, “we are not going anywhere.”
Nevertheless, resilience cannot mask the fractures beneath. Not everyone rose to the occasion. Tens of thousands of Israelis fled the country, many permanently. Among them were some of Israel’s best and brightest. Polls show a profound loss of confidence in Israel’s long-term future.
Gregg Roman, executive director of the Middle East Forum, noted that Israel is suffering from a “crisis of social cohesion and burden-sharing.” Though he doesn’t single them out, it is clear he is referring to the refusal of all but a handful of Haredim to serve in the IDF, which has shredded what he called “the covenant of mutual obligation.”
Healing from Oct. 7 requires accountability. Most senior defense and intelligence leaders accepted responsibility and resigned. Netanyahu has done the opposite. He refuses to establish a national commission of inquiry — the essential first step toward national recovery after every major Israeli trauma. Without it, Israelis will go to the next election with only fragments of the truth, as the IDF blames Shin Bet, Shin Bet blames the IDF, and the prime minister insists, against all evidence, that the buck stops everywhere but his desk.
Israel is indeed resilient, and Israelis are heroic. But the nation cannot truly move past Oct. 7 until it confronts the systemic failures that allowed the disaster to unfold. The trauma of that day was not only the result of Hamas’ brutality; it was compounded by years of neglected civilian preparedness, disorganized wartime governance and a home-front system that buckled precisely when Israelis needed it most.
Rebuilding national confidence demands a sober accounting of what went wrong — the gaps in coordination, the breakdowns in emergency response, the complacency that left communities exposed. Israel’s strength lies in confronting uncomfortable truths and repairing what is broken. Only by doing so now can the country begin to heal and ensure that the horrors of that Black Shabbat are never repeated.
Mitchell Bard is a foreign-policy analyst and an authority on U.S.-Israel relations who has written and edited 22 books.
