Even 72 hours after it started, the bloodbath perpetrated against Israel by Hamas — the death toll is 900 and rising — retains its power to shock. If anything, the sheer criminality of the largest act of terrorism ever against the Jewish state becomes more appalling as new details emerge. The slaughter of young people, reportedly numbering 260, at a dance party. Gunmen firing randomly at civilian vehicles, going house to house, looking for anyone to kill or capture. The agony of hostages, apparently ranging in age from preschool to the elderly, who have been spirited away to Hamas’s Gaza strongholds. If they live, they will be used as bargaining chips or human shields.
Also evident, as the initial shock abates, is the degree to which this audacious attack, enthusiastically praised and possibly orchestrated by the Islamic Republic of Iran, has upended a global political situation already destabilized by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As skirmishing between Israel and Iran’s proxy militia in Lebanon, Hezbollah, shows, the chaos Hamas unleashed will not be easily contained — and was probably meant to be uncontainable. These are perilous moments for the world. The task for every government with a direct interest and power to influence the situation is to counter Hamas’s terrorism, and those who sponsor it, with firmness — tempered by discrimination.
That is much easier said than done, of course. Israel has a right to defend itself, which, in this context, also means a right to take the fight to Hamas in Gaza, as the United States had a right to go after al-Qaeda in Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Support, solidarity and sympathy for Israel and its people, and condemnation of Hamas, expressed by everyone from President Biden to the European Union to the United Arab Emirates to Bono, U2’s frontman and international humanitarian activist, could be the Jewish state’s greatest assets. The Israel Defense Forces, embarrassed at being taken by surprise, has an opportunity not only to regain the military advantage but also — in limiting collateral damage — to demonstrate the moral difference between a terrorist group such as Hamas and a professional army.
The United States also enjoyed a wave of international support immediately after 9/11, only to see it gradually wane as this country’s military response, in Iraq and elsewhere, went beyond what could be justified. Understandably enraged as they are in this moment, Israelis would do well to learn from that U.S. experience.
And this country can learn from what has just happened in Israel. One lesson has to do with the risks of disunity. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed overhaul of Israel’s judicial system, supported by extreme right-wing parties but not a broad consensus of Israelis, now looks even worse in hindsight — given the distracting backlash it set off, especially among members of the country’s security and intelligence establishment. It’s not a precise analogy, but the seriousness of events overseas makes U.S. partisan conflict, or intraparty conflict, such as a fringe of the Republican majority’s recent ouster of now-former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), seem a doubly wasteful use of political bandwidth.
“Dangerous” has accurately described the geopolitical situation since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. After Saturday, it seems too mild a word. Mr. Biden and his foreign policy team had nurtured the belief that they could reset U.S. strategy based on great-power competition with Russia and, above all, China. The Middle East, meanwhile, could be safely de-emphasized, as undemocratic but U.S.-aligned regimes in Cairo and Riyadh helped “integrate” the region, possibly in cooperation with Israel; the Palestinian issue would be left on the back burner and Iran isolated. To all of this, Iran and the most extreme, most heavily armed of the Palestinian factions have just given their answer, the full significance of which remains to be seen but a fair summary of which would be: “Not so fast.”
Mr. Biden’s challenge now is to support Israel, and help it vanquish Hamas, while somehow preserving talks on peace and normalization among Israel, the Arab states and — inescapably — those Palestinian parties that are willing to engage. This is not quite the challenge he was planning for, and certainly not an easy one. And yet it is the challenge Mr. Biden must meet, if the United States’ broader power to influence global events is to emerge undiminished from yet another unanticipated crisis in the Middle East.
