‘The day after” preoccupies international diplomacy and challenges commentators around the world. Countless articles and position papers have laid out action guidelines that address the question of how to move forward after the war ends.

Some questions, however, mask false assumptions that frustrate analysis and render any recommendations derived from it moot. Such is the case with the dangerous conclusion that initiating an Israeli-Palestinian political process should wait until “the day after” the war. We may find that waiting too long precludes the chances of ever reaching an end to the conflict.

The expectations and emotions stirred up by the phrase “the day after” cloud its meaning. Arik Einstein’s hopeful words in his “Song After the War” are on the lips of many Israelis. We want to believe that a comforting light awaits us at the end of the dark tunnel, and that it will wake us from this nightmare and put our lives back on track.

But the war in Gaza can be expected to disappoint those who hang their hopes on “the day after.” Even if that day is ceremoniously announced, it will not necessarily mark the end of the bloodshed.

What will be in store the day after the war ends?

Politicians are known to break promises, but the reality is different this time. An Israeli government that does not act to eradicate Hamas, will eradicate itself. The spin doctors will find it impossible to “engineer” the public consciousness and convince us that “we won.” The test of victory is in the world of facts: if the residents of the South do not return to their homes, we will not have won.

It will take the IDF a long time to restore a sense of security to those traumatized families. Even when the Hamas government collapses and its top leaders are eliminated, it will still be necessary to deal with the brushfires of its vestiges. The fighting will continue to fall on the shoulders of the IDF.

Many governments, in the region and outside of it, support the annihilation of Hamas, but they have no appetite for endangering their own soldiers to that end. Moreover, will those displaced from the South return to their homes if their children’s safety relies on an international force?

The post Now is the time for sketching out a new political horizon first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Dearest Young Israelis,

Since October 7, we have watched you see the unseeable, do the unthinkable, save our country, and keep bouncing back. Hamas particularly enjoyed kidnapping, killing, raping, and torturing members of your generation, in uniform, at home, while dancing. Their war aims included terrorizing you into finding Israel unlivable.

Boy, did they underestimate you. Instead of breaking you, they made you, instantly forging you into one super-powered generation. As good Zionists, you don’t cut-and-run – you fight and rebuild.

Your heroism turned the October 7 pogrom into the Zionist redemption of October 7.2.

Rising from the ashes

House-by-house, you liberated our invaded communities. Now, you enter Gaza’s three-dimensional fortified hellholes, threatened by terrorists in tunnels below, rockets from afar, snipers above.

You make split-second decisions whether people in the HaMosques, the Hamospitals, the killergartens, are innocents sheltering there or killers lurking there.

You take bullet hits, absorb grenades, mourn friends, and keep defending us, even when exhausted, dirty, smelly, hungry, thirsty, and scared. Being terrified makes sense, you just can’t become petrified; great soldiers transform their fear into determination.

We also honor the spiritual power and steely discipline of our young heroes up North – and throughout Israel. For trained, motivated soldiers, who saw what this Amalek, Hamas, did, who know how many killers and missiles Hezbollah has, waiting is harder than fighting.

Deterrence and proactive arrests in the territories require a Zen power.

October 7 showed what happens when armies devalue guard duty, intelligence warnings, and preemptive strikes. Never let strategic inaction demoralize you.

We also appreciate those not fighting who volunteer, donate, support, mourn, normalize life, and launch your new generational mission of remaking Israel.

DAY-BY-DAY we mourn amazing fallen heroes, from loving families. Their too-short lives nevertheless overflowed with relatives, friends, community, wisdom, idealism, goodness, values, Judaism, Zionism, patriotism, and love. Their smiling, vital, glowing photos haunt me nightly.

Staff Sgt. Lavi Lipshitz, 20, an impish Givati soldier, forever captured on his playful Instagram posts, wrote in a computer file called “Tzahal,” if something happened: “Thanks to this country Israel that gave me this opportunity, and thanks to my friends who gave me this opportunity to bond with them in such special ways.”

“Nothing productive can flourish” from wallowing in mourning, he insisted. Instead, he urged, “build… be active constantly.”

Another Givati sergeant, Pedaya Mark, lost his father to terrorists in 2016, and a cousin fighting the first Hamas assault. Mark wrote: “The people of Israel are strong. Tzahal is strong!… We will wipe out our enemies… Am Yisrael Chai.”

And a paratrooper, Shachar Fridman, 21, fought house-to-house on October 7, seeing death, smelling death, losing six brothers-in-arms. A TV crew interviewed him days later. He admitted that the harassment of Jews praying on Yom Kippur by some secular Tel Avivians made him wonder if he even had a place in Israel.

“But now,” he said, “I see we have a future. I am willing to fight for a country like this. There is no country like this in the world.”

Fridman believed this evil war saved us from a civil war. You must save us from reverting to such ugliness.Fridman wrote a will – at 21! This prose poem of menschlechkeit says, “Be good people… smile… strive to make every person you meet smile too… And most importantly, be good people in your own way.”

Finally, he implores: “Love yourselves and the world. When you radiate happiness, a circle of joy will slowly form that will create a better world.”

EVERY DAY in this war-torn yet soulful Israel, I feel that love, that joy, mushrooming. I have been on wedding dance floors giving new meaning to the phrase “heavy metal dancing” – as you dance wildly with an extra, life-affirming ecstasy, while bumping into Tavor X95 assault rifles that can spray 750 to 950 rounds per minute.

I have heard newlywed grooms who are asked: “Where are you living now?” answer casually: “On the Lebanese border.” And I have toasted new engagements, new babies – 3,200 born in Jerusalem in October alone, double our losses that hellish day.

But we must do better. We must champion the IDF’s non-partisan, patriotic approach. Tone counts. The days of “zilzul,” (a dismissive attitude) of Left and Right demeaning one another, calling rivals “traitors,” must end.

If we need new, less divisive, TV stations, let’s launch them. If we need to stop being demagogic on social media, start yesterday. If you must tell your parents, especially if they’re politicians or journalists, to knock it off, it’s time. And if we must fire every politician, let’s start recruiting you, younger leaders.

Your renewed Zionism must be this Tonal Zionism too. How we do politics, manage disagreements, and talk to one another, must become as important as the positions we take. Let’s change the dynamics ruining democracies worldwide, by penalizing demagogues, ostracizing them, cauterizing their hatred – not rewarding them.

Tonal painters use one color, lightening or darkening shades. Today, in Israel, we paint our future in two colors, blue and white, united against Hamas’s blood-soaked-green and the Jew-hater’s green-with-envy. Inevitably, we will quibble about various shadings – but never again can we return to the pre-October 7 tribal, internecine, insanity that consumed us.

We must never forget our true colors, how united we are by Jewish values, history, faith, tradition, and common decency, not just by evil enemies. We owe this new Zionism, this renewed Israel, to Shachar, Lavi, Pedaya, and hundreds of others who fell, were wounded, were kidnapped, and are mourning. Most important, we owe it to ourselves.

Published by Jerusalem Post

The post The Next Generation of Israelis:  We need your Tonal Zionism first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

President Joe Biden has been speaking passionately, empathetically, about Israel, spearheading Western resistance to the barbaric Hamas threat. He articulated a central mission for his administration, America, and the civilized world: saving Israel, and crushing Hamas. Yet Biden’s passion ebbs when facing an enemy behind at least 24 recent drone strikes against American troops, wounding 24 soldiers. Biden must start uttering that four-letter word – Iran, recognizing this deadly adversary – and America’s mortal enemy.

Biden keeps claiming there’s no clear proof that Iran was behind October 7. Yet Iran armed, trained, and funded Hamas. It sounds like America’s spies aren’t providing proof of Iranian support to avoid responsibility for missing the signs of an impending attack.

Hamas’s October 7 massacre should teach Americans not to underestimate their enemies – if they call for your destruction, they’re calling for your destruction. With Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria attacking, Biden should lash back, reinstating a missile embargo, and imposing crushing economic sanctions.

Americans’ circumspection regarding Iran is mysterious. True, every American leader has criticized Iranian offenses. Nevertheless, too many Democrats hesitate, engage, and cajole the mullahs, rather than shunning, decrying, boycotting, and walloping them. Too many acknowledge Tehran as an adversary – but don’t see the regime as an enemy.

Adversaries are rivals with competing interests, whom you have to confront sometimes; enemies are evil threats who make your blood boil.

Sometimes, politicians have enemies they love to hate. The Russian marauder Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s tyrannical Kim Jong Un, lead most Americans’ most-hated-foreign-leader list.

But, sometimes, politicians are cursed with enemies they wish they could love. For decades, most Republicans didn’t hate Saudi Arabia enough, despite the 1970s oil embargo and the 15 Saudi-born suicide-hijackers on 9/11. Saudi Arabia’s brutal rub-out five years ago of one man, journalist Jamal Khashoggi, ended the establishment’s pro-Saudi love-in. As Saudi Arabia became less medieval, and more pro-Israel, murdering this popular Washington Post columnist blackened Saudi Arabia’s reputation.

Similarly, too many left-wingers, who abhor dictatorship, rationalize Palestinian crimes as justified by Israeli oppression – even when committed against Palestinians.

Still, America’s tiptoeing around Iran is puzzling, especially for Democrats. When Iranians held Americans hostage, they made Jimmy Carter look wimpy, causing Ronald Reagan’s 1980 win. Democrats claim to champion women, gays, religious freedom, and human rights, yet Iran’s theocrats are abusive, sexist, homophobic, and repressive. Democrats are “anti-nuke,” yet the Iranian regime keeps rushing toward nuclear weaponry while scheming against Big Satan – America – not just Little Satan, Israel.

Even now, few Americans can name the 22-year-old whose murder by Tehran’s morality police triggered last year’s grassroots protests throughout Iran – or the Iranian prisoner who won the Nobel Peace Prize just weeks ago (Mahsa Amini and Narges Mohammadi). These courageous women’s names – and other Iranian heroes – should be on every democracy-lover’s lips.

Todays democratic softness toward Iran began in 2007, when Barack Obama claimed his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton was imprisoned by “Washington Groupthink.” Clinton supported the Iraq War, which Obama opposed.Envisioning “a new era of American diplomacy,” Obama insisted “We need a president who is willing to talk to all nations, friend and foe” – especially Iran’s mullahs. Obama mocked Clinton and George W. Bush as addicted to war-war. This reflected Obama’s post-Vietnam rejection of American exceptionalism and his hostility to “American imperialism.”

The CIA coup

As president, addressing Muslims on his 2009 Cairo trip, Obama essentially apologized for America’s “role” in overthrowing “a democratically elected Iranian government.” Some scholars dispute this stick-figure “America bad” twistory.  Iranians elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq. But he started consolidating power, dissolving the Majlis, Iran’s parliament.

One American diplomat cabled Washington from Tehran warning that Mosaddeq would establish a “dictatorship.” Moreover, the CIA stirred the Iranian public but didn’t engineer the entire coup. As usual, history is more complex than the propagandists’ spin.

Still, the 1953 CIA coup – 70 years ago – supposedly proves America’s original sin-ism, the progressive critique dismissing America as toxic globally and not a force for good. That misreading shaped Obama’s worldview. It kept him pulling punches with Iran, from failing to champion Iranian dissidents’ Green Revolution in 2009 to producing 2015’s poorly negotiated nuclear agreement.

Exploiting these guilty feelings, the mullahs keep out-foxing America, especially under Democratic administrations. Still, even if President Biden isn’t denouncing Iran directly, the mullahs and Hamas may have overplayed their hand.

The post Iran is no mere adversary, it is America’s mortal enemy first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.