There’s obvious tension between Israeli hearts (bring hostages home to restore the state-citizens covenant) and minds (destroy Hamas for long-term security of Israel as the Jewish state). Hamas’s strategy was to return the fewest hostages for the longest lull in fighting, Israel’s to extract the biggest number of hostages in the shortest time possible. So when not fighting Hamas, Israel was still fighting the clock. A truce halts Israel’s momentum and transfers the initiative to Hamas. With its leadership essentially intact and a solid corps of committed fighters, Hamas must be regarded as armed and dangerous. The original four-day truce enabling the exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners was extended briefly. The push to convert it into a ceasefire to end the war presented Israel with two acute policy dilemmas: if, when and how to resume the war to permanently neutralise Hamas as a security threat; and what is the best post-war order in Gaza to which Israel can aspire?

Israel is determined and united that the operation to destroy Hamas must be completed, including the targeted assassination of leaders hiding abroad. The caution with which it conducted its sweep of Hamas from northern Gaza minimised Israeli casualties but prolonged the war and intensified pressures for a pause. Hamas was reeling from six weeks of intense attacks by air and on the ground, with 10 of its 24 Gaza battalions degraded. The pause was an opportunity for Hamas to relocate trapped fighters from the tightening vise in northern Gaza amidst the heavy civilian presence in the south. Coexistence with the monstrous enemy over the border is neither possible nor imaginable. As Yaakov Katz, a former editor, wrote in the Jerusalem Post, ‘We owe it to the hostages to do almost everything to get them home, but we also owe the nine million citizens of this country to ensure that what happened will never happen again’. Israel is trapped in an impossible dilemma; a ceasefire would be an Israeli defeat, a return to the previous policy of containment that failed so brutally on 10/7. When Israel resumed its offensive, Hamas’s culpability for starting the war on 7 October was overshadowed by fresh accusations of war crimes directed at Israel. This is a ‘heads I win tails you lose’ equation for Hamas.

10/7 broke the compact of the state of Israel with the Jewish people to keep them safe. The return of every hostage was a painful reminder of the failure to have kept them safe in the first place. Hence the peculiar mixture of joy and agony compounded by uncertainty over what next. Hamas couldn’t be allowed to prolong the truce, drip by drip, to slow and then destroy the momentum to dismantle it as the only sure means of neutralising its threat to Israel, the world’s only homeland for Jews. A ceasefire before Hamas’s destruction would fail to repair the credibility of Israel’s policy of deterrence that was shattered on 10/7. Leaving intact the existence of a genocidal regime across the border would ensure repeated cycles of aggression and retaliation. Faith in the future of Jews in Israel would be fatally undermined.

The clock was also ticking for Israel with rising antisemitism and declining support among youth and regressives in the West. Hamas’s ideology of Israel’s destruction is fused with the toxic identity politics consuming the West which treats Israel as the region’s colonial, racist, oppressor power. Biden had to appease Palestinian sympathisers in Congress, the party’s black and youth base; and also Arab and Islamic allies and Ukraine hawks. The distinction between Hamas and the people of Gaza is a figment of the liberal Western imagination, not an accurate depiction of on-the-ground realities. On 14 November, the well-regarded, Ramallah-based Arab World for Research and Development published a poll that showed deep hostility and distrust of Israel, the West and global media in Gaza and the West Bank; interpretation of the conflict as an Israeli-Palestinian war; and support for the creation of a Palestinian state ‘from the river to the sea’.

After the war ends and Gaza has been cleansed of Hamas, Israel must look both back and ahead. It must answer three questions regarding the failures on 7 October of intelligence, physical barriers, and the tardy response of the army. According to a detailed BBC reconstruction, several armed Palestinian groups trained together in military exercises and conducted four realistic drills between December 2020 and September 2023. How did Israel miss all this? It’s also hard to see Benjamin Netanyahu, captain of the ship of state on the day of the worst attacks on Jews since the Holocaust, staying in office.

A second urgent task will be to restore confidence in the government. In a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute on 24 November, Israelis expressed doubt that the government has a plan of action for the day after the war by a margin of 63 to 28 per cent. Encouragingly however after one month of war, support for amending the nation-state law to protect the principle of full equality of non-Jewish citizens went up from 40 to 56 per cent. This mirrored Arab Israeli feelings of kinship with the state which rose from 48 to 94 per cent from June to November.

Third, 10/7 showed the folly of ignoring Gaza’s governance. Growing authoritarian dysfunction in Gaza was mirrored by increasingly harsh right-wing parties in Israel justifying expanding settlements in the West Bank. As the centre collapsed among both Palestinians and Israelis, the cocktail of mutual hatred proved deadly. The effect of 10/7 will be to strengthen Israeli determination to maintain an Israeli security regime in the West Bank divided into three zones respectively under Israeli army control, Palestinian control, and joint control. Israel may also conclude this offers a good model for Gaza.

Jews cannot be colonisers of their ancestral land that is intimately woven into their core religious texts. However, many Palestinians have been displaced, know no home other than refugee camps, and bitterly resent Israelis.

On one hand, blame for this state of affairs even as millions of other refugees have resettled in new lands and moved on with their lives, is contested between Israelis, Palestinians and neighbouring Arab countries.

On the other, extremists exploit the conditions to inculcate Jew hatred. Reimposition of Israeli overlordship of a puppet authoritarian regime in Gaza will deepen Palestinian hatred and resistance. Military action is necessary to build a path to peace but will not be sufficient; some sort of political solution will still eventually be required.

Ending Gaza’s occupation and investing in democracy are no more optional add-ons than destroying Hamas and protecting civilians.