The true victory photos at the end of the war won’t come from Gaza.
Israel will win on the battlefield, but the images will not necessarily be happy ones.
There will be touching pictures of hostages released and painful images of lost loved ones.
There will be tears of joy and tears of sadness.
There will be satisfaction as the Hamas beasts are punished.
There will also be sorrow, as we part from the current generation of leaders, of the IDF and of the nation – a leadership that meant well but sinned by arrogance.
The true images of victory will come from the wedding halls, from whence the singing of brides and grooms will rise. From the maternity wards across the country. From the return of the displaced in the South and the North to their homes in the moshavim and kibbutzim along the borders. From Ben-Gurion airport with the arrivals of thousands and thousands of new immigrants. From Intel in Kiryat Gat. From the creativity that will break out of the hi-tech incubators. From agriculture, art, and music. From the strengthening of the shekel. And, may there be a million demonstrators calling for unity on the streets of Tel Aviv.
Images of renewal that will increase the frustration of our enemies.
The images to convince Palestinians to replace their leaders
These are the only images that might bring the Palestinians to understand that they must replace their leaders, change their course, and educate their children differently – because if their leadership remains the same and they continue on the same path of destruction, they will never reach a safe shore. Yet if they do change, the sky is the limit.
The First Intifada broke out during the second week of December 1987, following a car accident in the Gaza Strip. An Israeli truck driver collided with two vans carrying Palestinian workers. Four of them were killed. During their funeral in Jabalia, a rumor spread that it has been a deliberate attack.
Riots broke out immediately in Gaza and spread to Jerusalem and the West Bank. A week later, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin established Hamas.
In early January 1988, less than a month after the outbreak of the Intifada, I went to meet Ahmed Yassin in his home in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza.
I was then the head of the Palestinian desk at the Ma’ariv daily. Yassin sat shrunk in his wheelchair, barely able to speak, but it was clear that everyone present accepted his leadership. He voiced the most extreme views I had ever heard. The destruction of the Jewish state was only a partial objective on the way to eliminating Western “pagan civilization.”
At that time, Shati was already under full Hamas control. The IDF did not enter. In order to safely pass through the Hamas checkpoints on the way to the Yassin home,
I needed the protection of two intermediaries: a nephew of Yassin’s, who was also his student, and a senior activist from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian (PFLP) in the Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem. They protected me so that I could convey their spiritual leader’s message against Israelis. This was the only time I met Yassin.
During those years, Faisal Husseini was the strongman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in the territories. He was born into an aristocratic Palestinian family, the grandson of Musa Kazim al-Husayni, leader of the Palestinian nationalist movement. His father, Abd al-Qadir, was killed in the Battle of Castel during the 1948 war. In 1967, before Egyptian-born Yasser Arafat fled from Jerusalem, he gave his personal weapons to Husseini, thus appointing him as the leader in his absence.
Husseini was a pleasant figure who received his military training in Cairo and Damascus.
In 1988, he fully committed himself to the Intifada. Seeking to be viewed as a political leader, rather than a military one, he conveyed his orders to the ranks by means of winks. One of his closest associates was the senior Fatah militant, Jibril Rajoub (Abu Rami).
The First Intifada began to fade in the early 1990s, and Husseini increasingly embarked on a track of negotiations with Israelis. Many attributed the change to the decline of the PLO in the wake of its absolute identification with Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War.
In one of the deeper conversations I had with Husseini in Madrid, on the sidelines of the peace conference in 1991, he rejected the interpretation.
“What did you expect from us, to identify with the Americans?” he asked rhetorically.
“So what caused the change in your position”? I queried. “The tens of thousands of Jews who land every month in Israel since the collapse of the Soviet Union,” Husseini replied sadly.
The arrival of planes carrying hundreds of thousands of new immigrants deepened the Palestinian frustration. They had hoped that the Intifada and the resistance against Israel would lead to an Israeli demoralization, a brain drain, and emigration of the younger generation. They got the opposite.
YASSIN, HOWEVER, was not affected by the new olim landing at Ben-Gurion airport. And not even Palestine “from the river to the sea” would satisfy him. He fought for the elimination of all “pagans” from the West and from the East. Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh, and Muhammad Deif grew up on his shoulders.
In North America, Jews are shocked by the rise of extreme antisemites. They are scared by the testimonies they heard from Jewish students in Congress, by the answers they heard from university heads. Jews feel targeted in Europe. They wake up every morning to demonstrations of violence directed against them and against Israel. Jews in the Diaspora fear that their lives would not be the same without Israel.
Jewish Agency data shows that since the October 7 massacre by Hamas, 1,951 new applications for immigration to Israel have been filed in North America. During the same period in the previous year 1,006 were filed, which translates into an increase of 94%. In France alone, more than 1,300 applications were initiated since the attack, compared to 260 over the same period in 2022, in an increase of 412%. In addition, thousands attended the aliya fairs held last month in Paris, Marseilles, and Lyon.
I wanted to bring this data to the attention of Sinwar, Deif, and Haniyeh before the Israeli soldiers reach them. I can also imagine that two victory images no longer give them rest: the unity and determination of the IDF and Intel’s huge investment of $25 billion in Kiryat Gat.
The victory picture will only be complete when soldiers return from the front and fill the wedding halls with joy.
The true image of our victory will come by the end of the year, when the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics publishes the baby boom data that will bring blessings to us all.
The writer is president emeritus of the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) and a former Maariv diplomatic correspondent and Washington bureau chief.