Jordan Chandler Hirsch
This distinction isn’t the result of confusion about what month it is on the calendar. It points to two fundamentally different Israels—call them “June Israel” and “October Israel”—that have alternated throughout the nation’s young history. The Israel that laid waste to Iran’s nuclear program this past June—that stunned Hezbollah, that decimated Hamas, that rewrote Middle Eastern order—operates according to entirely different principles than the Israel that Hamas devastated on that Black Saturday two years ago.
To understand where Israel is heading requires tracing how these two Israels have manifested over time and how the latest advent of a “June Israel” moment is poised to change Jerusalem’s relationship with friend and foe alike for years to come.
On June 7, 1981, a squadron of F-15s and F-16s took off from Israel’s Negev desert. Flying low over Jordanian and Saudi airspace to avoid radar detection—so low, in fact, that Jordan’s King Hussein reportedly spotted their markings from his yacht in the Red Sea—they snaked into Iraq and swooped down on their target: the nuclear reactor at Osirak. In less than two minutes, they obliterated the facility, racing home without a single loss. Israel faced global condemnation but gained regional respect: It meant what it said about preventing nuclear-armed threats.
Nineteen years later, on Oct. 12, 2000, two Israeli reserve soldiers, Vadim Nurzhitz and Yossi Avrahami, took a wrong turn and ended up in Ramallah, home of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Detained by PA security, they were held in a police station that was soon overrun by a mob, which beat, stabbed, and ultimately lynched them. A Palestinian, Aziz Salha—eliminated by the IDF in Gaza 24 years later—appeared at the window, waving his blood-soaked hands in ecstasy before an undulating crowd, which proceeded to mutilate the soldiers’ bodies and parade them around the town square. Israelis reeled in the wake of the murder, their faith in the peace process with the Palestinians fatally undermined.
June Israel is proactive, daring, devastatingly competent; October Israel is complacent, risk-averse, subject to surprise.
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