The brutal attack on Israel by Hamas is a violent and deadly reminder about the forces of evil in the world. The original Hamas Covenant issued in 1988 specifically called for Islam to “obliterate” Israel. When Hamas updated its charter in 2017 it softened the language somewhat, but the goal remained the same—destroy Israel.
The attack that began last Saturday, which included the massacre of civilians and the taking of more than 100 hostages, demonstrated that Hamas is a committed terrorist organization. Hamas’s brutal nihilism is causing even more pain for its own people. The Palestinian civilians who live in Gaza under the iron fist of Hamas will suffer greatly from Israeli reprisals.
One question of great concern to Israelis is how their country was caught by surprise. Israel has one of the most advanced security and intelligence systems in the world, yet it appears to have been caught unprepared.
Shimrit Meir, a former senior advisor to Naftali Bennett when Bennett was prime minister of Israel, questions whether her country has been too preoccupied with internal issues and possibly lost site of external threats.
“In the past five years, as Israel dissolved government after government and held divided election after divided election, and even more so in the past year since Benjamin Netanyahu was re-elected prime minister, the nation has been busy tearing itself apart from within,” Meir wrote in the New York Times.
“The Jewish state seems to have forgotten its second role in the world, as a place that embodies the idea of Jewish solidarity. Israelis instead found themselves engaged in an all-out war—not against terrorists but against themselves,” Meir said.
That sounds dangerously familiar. Change a few references in those sentences and one could easily imagine Meir describing the United States.
A Gallup Poll taken in January found that 90 percent of Americans believed 2023 would be a year of political conflict, and they weren’t wrong. A Pew Research Poll last month showed that trust in government is at an all-time low. Fewer than two in ten Americans believe the government in Washington will do the right thing.
Increasingly, we are not satisfied to label members of the opposition as wrong; now they are evil. A Pew Poll in 2014 found that 36 percent of Republicans see Democrats as a “threat to the nation’s well-being,” while 29 percent of Democrats viewed Republicans that way.
And those feelings have only intensified over the last decade as our politics have become more tribal. Now 62 percent of Republicans have a “very unfavorable” view of the Democratic Party, while 54 percent of Democrats view the opinions of Republicans as “very unfavorable.”
Those highly negative attitudes toward the other side create a pessimism about America. A New York Times/Siena College Poll in August determined that 37 percent of all registered voters, regardless of party, believe the United States is “in danger of failing as a nation.”
I do not believe our country is failing, but our politics sure are. We have entered the realm of mutually assured destruction where the evisceration of opponents, which translates into fundraising and votes, takes precedence over sound public policy.
America is the oldest continuous democracy. The rule of law and the principles of a republic established in this country have served as an inspiration for the rest of the world. But our preoccupation with internal power struggles distracts us from our obligation to sustain what has stood for nearly 250 years.
As we saw on 9/11, and as we see now in Israel, real evil is never far away. Meir wrote that “Israelis acted as if we could afford the luxury of a vicious internal fight, the kind in which your political rival becomes your enemy.”
Israel is paying an awful price, and therein lies a lesson for America.