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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is determinedly seeking to have us all remember the war Israel had to wage against Hamas after the terrorists invaded on October 7, 2023, as the “War of Revival.”

By cabinet fiat last October, Netanyahu replaced the official IDF designation of the conflict, “Swords of Iron,” which had been announced on the very day that Hamas carried out its invasion, with his carefully chosen “War of Revival.” He routinely utilizes the term in his Knesset speeches. Presumably, it is what his planned self-appointed and self-mandated political commission of inquiry into the war would investigate, and pronounce Netanyahu unstained.

As things stand, the wording on the graves of soldiers killed on and since October 7 simply states, in lieu of a formal decision, that they “fell in battle,” without specifying a name for the war in which they were killed. The IDF noted this week that no decision has yet been made by the government as to whether to impose the “War of Revival” wording on the soldiers’ graves — a potential requirement that some families are bitterly vowing to resist.

In similar vein, last week, Netanyahu’s office ordered the excision of the word “massacre” from the title of legislation establishing an annual commemoration of the October 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught.

The prime minister’s goal, needless to say, is to remove or at least marginalize the failures surrounding the Hamas-led invasion from the public consciousness and thus escape his crushing personal responsibility.

Most Israelis think of the two years of fighting, bluntly, simply and accurately, as “the October 7 war.” Netanyahu’s doublespeak seeks to misrepresent what was an essential resort to force — against any enemy that had been unfathomably allowed to breach Israel’s defenses and carry out the worst massacre in modern Israeli history — as some kind of war of choice, an initiated conflict that Israel opted to embark upon in order to achieve a glorious revitalization.

The war that Israel launched after thousands of Hamas-led terrorists brutally murdered some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in southern Israel and abducted 251 to Gaza was not a “war of revival.” Neither, as some cynics have sniped, was it the “war of self-revival” for Netanyahu.

It was, rather, a war of survival, a necessary response to unprovoked mass murder by an enemy next door that was vowing (indeed, still is) to keep killing Israelis until our country is destroyed.

By misnaming the war, by falsifying what went wrong — his defense minister on that terrible day declared flatly on national television earlier this month that “we have a liar for prime minister” — and by refusing to allow the failures to be properly investigated by a state commission, Netanyahu aims to exculpate himself from blame. He peddles a skewed narrative that dishonors the dead, the injured, the traumatized. And he obscures the imperative to get to the root of the failures.

An oft-invoked aphorism has it that “those who cannot remember the past” — or, in this case, those who misrepresent it — “are condemned to repeat it.”

But we might also usefully recall one of many appropriate quotations from George Orwell’s 1984: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

As IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir declared on Sunday, after the attack on two female IDF soldiers who had the temerity to enter the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak, it is “an intolerable reality” that Israeli soldiers cannot walk freely around the State of Israel.

There is simply no future for an Israel in which the fastest-growing community does not merely refuse to share in the burden of the country’s defense by performing national service but is violently hostile to the Israeli mainstream that both keeps it safe and finances its freeloading distortion of Judaism.

Corrupt politicians who extort the government for an ever-growing share of the state budget to support a community much of which does not work, prominent rabbis who condemn the arrest of draft dodgers as a crime, and demonstrators who routinely vow that they will die rather than enlist and who attack their fellow Jews — are carrying out untenable acts of internal rebellion. Yet the government bows to the blackmail, tens of thousands of eligible recruits are not drafted, and the lawbreakers generally go unpunished.

There are innumerable moderate, authentically Jewish ultra-Orthodox leaders who recognize the gravity of this violent skewing of Jewish values, and who advocate for paths of internal Jewish coexistence. But they are drowned out by the mob mindset, itself empowered by feebleminded sages who have lost sight of God.

Bnei Brak on Sunday was a domestic battlefield. These were not the first such violent confrontations and they won’t be the last. The Haredi community is turning itself, and allowing itself to be turned, into the enemy within — a genuine threat to Israel’s future. This is the moment for leaders from within that community who recognize the danger to stand up, speak out, and reassert the authentic Judaism of mutual respect and shared responsibility.

Honoring the promise that ‘help is on its way’

Culminating on January 8-9, the Iranian regime massacred thousands — probably tens of thousands — of its own people, who had dared to rise up against their oppressive leaders. US President Donald Trump, making clear that he would come to the aid of the Iranian people where previous American presidents had signally failed to do so, posted on January 13: ‘”Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!… HELP IS ON ITS WAY,”

Five weeks later, there is no shortage of US military might in the neighborhood — as Trump has proudly declared, the US has built up a “big… massive… beautiful armada” to confront Iran. But actual, practical assistance to constrain the regime and help enable the Iranian people to bring it down has been in short supply.

Instead, the US is now in talks with the Islamic Republic, with the focus of American efforts having unaccountably shifted from preventing the ayatollahs from massacring their own people and expediting the regime’s downfall to trying yet again to lock them into an agreement ensuring they cannot build nuclear weapons — the kind of deal, that is, that experience shows the regime will evade and breach without compunction. The talks don’t even cover Iran’s revived ballistic missiles production, or its ongoing support for proxies, including Hezbollah and Hamas, that exist solely to expand Iran’s rapacious ideology.

It’s as though Iran holds the upper hand in setting the framework for this interaction, when it is a failing regime, loathed by its own people, facing off against the most powerful military force in the world.

Ousting the ayatollahs is manifestly no overnight operation, but it is within the capabilities of a populace determined to be free if backed by a US-led coalition radically constricting the regime’s capacity to function economically, to communicate effectively, and to mobilize its murderous forces against its people.

Trump has set his heart on acting as global peacemaker, ending conflicts rather than starting them. Where Iran is concerned, peace and stability require effectively supporting an Iranian citizenry that has shown, time and again, that it will put its lives on the line for freedom, and where, to date, the supposedly enlightened, life-affirming West has failed, also time and again, to play its vital part in the struggle.

As US senator and close Trump ally Lindsey Graham told ToI’s Lazar Berman on Monday, “If having said all the things we’ve said and done all the things we’ve done, if the ayatollah is still standing after all this bluster, then it would be a strategic victory for Iran and the force of radical Islam.”

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