The Victory After Victory: Israel’s Imperative for Renewal

When we arrived in Israel with my family this past August, the air itself seemed to hum with paperwork. The country felt suspended in a state of systemic malfunction, a society staggering under an impossible burden. We were approaching the two-year anniversary of the October 7th war, and the lines at government offices were not long so much as heavy, and even when they moved, it felt like the floor under them did not. I watched the clerk at the ministry window rub his temples and apologize to a roomful of strangers as if he had personally failed each of us.

More than twenty Israelis remained hostages in Hamas’s hands. Tens of thousands of businesses were shuttered, their chairs stacked like barricades behind glass. The faces of the reservists I passed, many carrying 600 days of service, were etched with a profound melancholy. In the supermarket queue, in taxis, in the pauses outside school gates, the same drift of sentences returned like dust after a slammed door: reserves measured in years, not months; war without an end, and an end without a plan. Even the ordinary heroism—the alarm-clock fidelity of paying taxes, showing up for shifts, walking kids through a new hallway—had a gray cast, as though routine were a species of melancholy. It felt like hopelessness.

September arrived with a different pulse. The country’s posture stiffened. The map on the evening news showed an envelope tightening, then loosening, as if a fist were learning to grip again. Soldiers were called up and called home and called up. September brought hard edges: the encirclement of Gaza City, renewed reserve call-ups, and the failed Israeli strike on Doha that nonetheless telegraphed a message to Hamas and its sponsors—there is no sanctuary. The attempt missed its primary targets, but it clarified intentions. The screws began to turn, not just on Hamas, but on its enablers.

The holidays threaded through it all with the impertinent regularity of the calendar. “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” Hillel’s ancient cadence sounded less like ethics and more like orders of the day. Voices that had grown precise in despair discovered a register for resolve.

October unfolded like a contradiction. A U.S.-brokered ceasefire framework moved from brinkmanship to signatures at Sharm el-Sheikh. The American president addressed the Knesset, casting the moment as an inflection point and helping to midwife a deal that included hostage releases and the return of some remains. Within days, a “yellow line” marked a new, contested reality on the ground—temporary in theory, but already hardening into a de facto boundary with Israel holding just over half the Strip. Maps were repainted to the color of a pause; homes remained unhome for those who would not come back; talk of lines and percentages as if grief could be measured with a yardstick. Hope visited in responsible daylight and, by night, receded. Yet there was, for a handful of weeks, a sense of lift—the idea that the country could pivot from survival to design. It was a collective, national exhale.

Then November lowered its familiar sky. A new, more insidious feeling has settled in. Scandal sprouted at the exact altitude where the public and the private blur—the military advocate general’s resignation amid a leak scandal, the prime minister’s court calendar, the arrest of another Iranian spy. A nuclear clock in a hostile capital flicked forward by analysts on television who smiled the way surgeons do when they are trying to help you accept the odds. IAEA snapshots through mid-2025 showed a large stockpile of Iranian enriched uranium to 60%, with verification gaps since the summer attacks. Abroad, the great powers’ attention wandered in the way attention always does when distance and time cooperate against memory. The front pages that had once learned to pronounce our towns returned to their usual alphabets.

The war is ostensibly over, but the quiet that has descended is not the peace of a victor. It is the silence of complacency. A disturbing “pre-October 7th” mindset has returned, as if the last two years of staggering loss were a bad dream. At home, the war’s fiscal price is now measured not just in grief but in deficits—6.9% of GDP in 2024—and debt ratios that will shape our policy choices for years. The country was not back where it began, but its posture felt troublingly familiar.

What, then, follows a season like this, when the soldiers come back to small kitchens and crowded living rooms and the fights at the dinner table are finally about who forgot to buy milk? When reservists learn the weight of their keys again, and the calendar of summons gives way to a clock that needs changing because the time actually matters? When national debt and sleeplessness and moral nausea meet in the body and refuse to leave? What follows victory that is partial, or ceasefire that is not yet a victory, or quiet that can be broken by a single, well-timed text?

This return to a semblance of normalcy is a strategic delusion. The war may be done, but the victory is not yet won. A ceasefire is not a surrender. A pause is not a peace. We are forgetting the central lesson of this entire conflict: you cannot “manage” an existential threat. The old doctrine of containment, of “mowing the grass,” failed catastrophically. It was a failure of imagination that we paid for with the blood of our citizens. As Ze’ev Jabotinsky warned us, “the only way to reach an agreement in the future is to abandon all idea of seeking an agreement at present.” We abandoned that idea and fought with a terrible resolve. We must not now, at the final hurdle, exchange the bitter truth of victory for the sweet poison of a temporary quiet.

The answer begins with admitting that the war after the war is fought at home. It is fought in ministries that must learn to move as quickly as the brigades they equip. It is fought in classrooms where a generation will decide whether the words “state” and “citizen” still belong to each other. It is fought in clinics where the night is treated without shame. It is fought in courts that must convince the public that justice is blind rather than absent. It is fought in the economy, where small businesses must not be left to pay the price of national courage. It is fought in the imagination: the only front on which we get to choose the terrain.

When the soldiers come home, what nation will they be returning to? They are returning to a society that has lost its most precious asset: faith in its institutions. This crisis is three-layered, each compounding the next.

First, there is the crisis of institutions and trust. August exposed state capacity under extreme load—school placements delayed, benefits snarled, permits stalled. These are not “small” issues; they are the interface between citizen and state, the face of sovereignty in peacetime. When bureaucracy is sloppy, citizens assume the state is unserious. When it is swift, citizens relent and believe. We cannot afford a government that fights beautifully and files badly.

Second, there is the crisis of social cohesion and burden-sharing. The war asked more of some than of others. Many reservists served hundreds of days; many families absorbed the shock of lost incomes. Meanwhile, too many Israelis concluded—quietly or loudly—that the covenant of mutual obligation had frayed. Universal service—civil, military, and social—offers the country a grammar for belonging that does not humiliate difference and does not excuse neglect.

Third, there is the crisis of demography and talent. Since 2022, emigration has surged, with a reported 125,000 long-term departures through 2024. This brain drain is a national security threat, a quiet hollowing-out of the Zionist dream, even as the tech sector remains the country’s growth engine. We have demonstrated our military might and our capacity to impose a new security architecture. But that power is meaningless if the society it is built to protect is fractured, cynical, and hollowed out from within.

For years, a simple idea has pressed against the old peace-process orthodoxy: conflicts end not when they are politely negotiated into stasis, but when defeat is internalized and rejectionism ends. Call it a victory doctrine—less a boast than a sober theory of conflict termination. The “victory doctrine” was never a hymn to violence; it was an insistence on first causes—a refusal to mistake a ceasefire for a cure, or rhetoric for remedy. It argued that conflicts end when one side concedes that its war aims are impossible, and that policy must be designed to hasten that admission. We have said this for years; the last two did not refute it. They clarified it.

This doctrine culminates in an outward-facing vision sometimes described as a Pax Israeliana—Israel as a security provider that dampens regional chaos rather than perpetually absorbing it. The concept is not arrogance; it is responsibility borne of hard power made legible as public goods: air defense that works across frontiers, intelligence fusion that stops the next slaughter before it leaves a chat group, economic corridors that yoke stability to prosperity in ways our neighbors can measure at the dock. The idea has been articulated; it is time to move it from theory to statecraft.

That vision recognizes where the decisive lever sits. Iran is not just another tentacle but the head of the octopus, tightening or loosening its regional coils at will. Even after strikes and sanctions, the nuclear file remains perilous. The transformation of Israel from a security consumer into an unembarrassed security provider requires confronting the octopus, not just the arms.

But as Isaiah Berlin wrote, “Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.” Victory abroad is sterile if defeat takes root at home—in our social trust, in our sense of fairness, in the everyday functionality that lets working families thrive. Security policy that ignores domestic resilience leaves the flock exposed in quieter ways. The task now is to marry strategic clarity with civic reconstruction.

This is not an argument about replacing leaders so much as replenishing leadership. In our history, renewal has rarely arrived as a ballot surprise. David Ben-Gurion’s admonition—"In Israel, in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles"—was not an invitation to passivity but to the discipline of improbable work. It requires a program that is both moral and material—a program that can be printed, yes, but more importantly lived.

I call it a program for renewal, though it resists the neatness of a list. It begins, as so many Jewish arguments do, in a kitchen. A mother at midnight still wearing the day’s dust opens a laptop to register her son for school and discovers a maze. Renewal, here, is not rhetorical. It is the difference between a line that lasts an hour and a line that lasts a week.

The state must move like the army does when it is right: with clarity of mission, with the humility to measure itself, and with the honor of admitting error. Our ministries should publish their backlogs as openly as they publish budgets, the way a medic calls out bandage counts during a long night. To rebuild legitimacy, you show your work.

We need a 90-day rule: a legal service standard for school placements, disability benefits, and small-business permits. Anything not resolved in 90 days auto-escalates to an ombudsman with binding authority. We need a unified, multilingual digital portal for displaced families, reservists, bereaved, and new arrivals—benefits, housing, mental health, and schooling, all in one workflow - not the current Gov.IL portal, unavailable to many citizens. This is not merely administrative efficiency; it is the restoration of trust between citizen and state.

National service must be the next common language. It will not do to outsource solidarity to those who already have a uniform. Universal national service for all 18–24-year-olds—military, civil defense, health/education, or infrastructure—with accommodations for faith and culture but no blanket exemptions. The Haredi teenager teaching literacy in a hospital ward and the Arab software apprentice hardening municipal cyber systems should one day bump into each other at a street-food cart and nod, knowing they carry the same citizenship in their pockets.

Incentives should be front-loaded: tuition, housing stipends, and hiring preferences tied to completed service. We must expand pre-service academies that mix secular, religious, Arab, and Haredi cohorts around common projects—EMS certification, elder care, cyber hygiene for municipalities. Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh—all Israel is responsible for one another. This ancient principle must become modern policy.

The economy is a moral instrument because dignity is expensive to maintain and priceless to lose. We speak about businesses as if they were interchangeable storefronts, but each is a family biography, a loan co-signed by a cousin, an old man’s retirement stitched to his daughter’s courage. The country cannot prosper by applauding sacrifice and amortizing it over the quiet deflation of small shops shuttered for good.

A state that could maneuver entire brigades overnight can, if it chooses, deploy working capital with similar precision—bridge financing that arrives on time, tax deferrals that feel like oxygen rather than bureaucracy, procurement that prefers the local workshop that kept a platoon fed to the multinational that kept a lobbyist happy. We need a wartime fiscal pact: freeze new permanent entitlements through 2026; protect targeted safety nets; shift at least 1% of GDP from consumption subsidies to growth drivers. Israel’s deficit demands consolidation that is both credible and humane.

To reverse the brain drain, we must make the new tech-return incentives predictable and portable, with equity taxation clarity and recognition of overseas options. We need regional hubs outside Tel Aviv to spread growth. Money behaves like ammunition when funneled through cutouts; it should behave like infrastructure when routed to citizens.

Education will decide whether the country can outrun its enemies’ next idea. A curriculum that teaches our children to read poetry and patents in the same breath will make them useful to both their ancestors and their descendants. “The old shall be renewed and the new shall be sanctified,” wrote Rav Kook, sketching the country’s paradox years before we had the bandwidth to perform it. An education system that turns engineers into humanists and humanists into citizens is not ornamental—it is strategic depth. University rankings are not a national fetish; they are a proxy for how much of our future we manufacture ourselves.

The soldier returning from two years of interruption should be guaranteed not a slogan but a pathway—into classrooms, municipal offices, startups, labs—with credits that transfer and doors that open. We need to fast-track veterans and reservists into municipal management fellowships, with training in budgeting, procurement, and service delivery. We need trauma-aware schools with a Teachers’ Corps of retrained reservists and clinicians to staff school-based mental health programs for three years.

The culture of leadership needs a new supply chain. We have relied too long on the idea that generals translate automatically into governors. Some do; some do not. The next cohort must arrive from the laboratory and the clinic, the city council and the orchestra pit, the women who ran battalion kitchens like small cities and the men who rebuilt logistics convoys in the rain. The habit of command is not a monopoly; it is a craft. We should treat it the way we treat elite units: identify talent early, train it ruthlessly, test it without mercy, and then entrust it with real work.

The law must do something unfashionable: it must inspire. Trials must be boring, which is to say faithful. Investigations must feel invisible until the moment they are not, and then they must be clean, quick, and devastating. The public’s belief that no one is above the law is a national resource as vital as natural gas. If it is ever exhausted, we will breathe, but we will not live.

Diaspora is not an audience; it is a reserve. No one abroad needs to be lectured about how to love this place. But love can be operationalized. A Diaspora Service Track—sabbatical contracts for teachers, short tours for pediatric surgeons and cybersecurity analysts, a two-summer-to-ten-year pipeline that makes coming here to build something the most natural interruption in a professional life—would replace the occasional check with a constant arrival gate. Yehuda Halevi’s line—"My heart is in the East, and I am at the ends of the West"—described a separation; we can turn it into a commute.

Recent U.S. data show antisemitic incidents at record highs; this is the moment to deepen—not narrow—our democratic Jewish culture. Israel must be more than a fortress; it must once again be a beacon.

Memory and meaning must be tended with the same care as budgets. Our poets have always done this work when our politicians were too busy. H. N. Bialik taught us how to name catastrophe without surrendering to it; Yehuda Amichai found room in tragedy for a child’s sandwich. It is not sentimental to say that song and story are part of national security. They are. A people that can narrate itself survives. And a country that can narrate itself truthfully can govern itself without cruelty.

We must institutionalize two obligations—annual national day of commitment and continuous funding for recovery care. We need emergency grants tied to research excellence, security of campuses for all students, and depoliticized governance reforms to protect merit. We must fund small venues, youth orchestras, civic journalism, and municipal arts residencies. Culture is connective tissue, not luxury.

Beyond our borders, a sober strategy is required. Call it a regional peace enforced by competence, an Israeli peace—a Pax Israeliana—built not on denial but on demonstrated capacity. The ceasefire and Sharm el-Sheikh summit are only phase one. Implementation will rise or fall on whether the “yellow line” remains a temporary mechanism or ossifies into a permanent fracture.

Israel’s task now is to win the peace with the same seriousness it brought to the war: to design the “after” rather than drift into it. That “after” includes a rigorous deradicalization enterprise in places where incitement has been education’s unofficial curriculum—a program that uses the best tools of our century to make moderation the most persuasive option in the next one. We have sketched what such a post-victory peace could look like—an unflinching campaign against the infrastructure of hatred, paired with a relentless construction of civic life. It is possible to be both hard and humane.

All of this demands a rhetorical shift that precedes policy. For too long, we have tried to shame euphemism with facts. It does not work. Euphemism cannot blush. It can only be outpaced. The media battle is not an ornament on the war effort; it is the oxygen mask for democracies trying to breathe under the pressure of bad faith. We learned, sometimes the hard way, that you cannot win a conversation you enter too late. In the years behind us we built the habit of naming first causes and of refusing to let balance harden into falsehood. We will need that habit in the years ahead, when fashionable fatigue returns and the world asks us again to apologize for insisting on truth.

Security policy must aim at ending rejectionism and its state sponsors while constraining our own appetite for “forever emergencies.” You don’t make peace with friends, Yitzhak Rabin reminded us, but with very unsavory enemies. That requires cold-eyed clarity and democratic restraint, both. Putting Israel in the role of security provider only works if our conduct is bounded by law and animated by purpose. Otherwise, the phrase collapses into power without legitimacy.

We do not need a single savior. We need a generation—a Ben-Gurion for budgets, a Rabin for burden-sharing, a Begin for democratic restraint, a Peres for science, and a Kook for renewal. “All real living is meeting,” Martin Buber insisted. We need leaders who can create civic “meetings” that feel worthy of sacrifice.

Some will be mayors; some, hospital administrators; some, school principals; some, social entrepreneurs; some, Knesset members who remember that institutions are not spoils. Golda Meir said that a leader untroubled by the decision to send soldiers into battle “is not fit to be a leader.” The next cohort must be troubled—in the best sense—by the human realities behind every line item and every line of advance.

Ahad Ha’am wrote, “More than the Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews.” Institutions keep a people; they also keep a generation of leaders from believing their gifts are accidents.

Israel will not be saved by a single election, any more than it was imperiled by one. Personalities matter; institutions matter more. The program for renewal is not a manifesto stapled to a coalition agreement; it is a decade of choices made in offices where no one ever asks for a selfie. It is budgets that reward competence and punish delay. It is appointments based on seriousness rather than soundbites. It is a national temperament that shrugs at performative outrage and reserves its admiration for the unglamorous miracle of a form filled out correctly the first time.

To those who left, I say: we need you back. Not because leaving was a betrayal, but because coming home is an act of hope. The poet Nachman of Breslov taught that “the whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the main thing is not to fear at all.” Fear curls societies inward. Hope builds institutions and invites scrutiny. Hope is budgeting honestly, arguing fiercely and fairly, paying taxes, volunteering on the ambulance at 2 a.m., editing a high-school newspaper, starting a small factory in Kiryat Shmona, and running—yes—for the school board and the city council and the Knesset.

Jabotinsky’s “iron wall” was never meant to be a wall around our imagination. It was meant to protect the space where political creativity could finally work. September’s strike in Doha, October’s Knesset speech and Sharm el-Sheikh framework, and the hostages who came home—these did not deliver utopia; they delivered a narrow opening in which Israelis can do the slow, civilian work that makes victory last.

We live, as all Israelis do, under a double injunction: to be both ancient and new. Rav Kook’s sentence makes it sound simple; it never is. The poets grant us courage; the shopkeepers grant us discipline. The soldiers bring home a quiet few will ever understand; the judges keep the windows from rattling when the winds return.

“Men and nations,” Abba Eban observed, “behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.” We have exhausted them. Wisdom now looks like sobriety, service, and the courage to build. If there is a single sentence that captures the posture we need, it belongs to no statesman and all of them: be stubborn about hope, and meticulous about everything else.

The task of this generation, the one standing in line at the ministry window and the one standing at attention, is to make realism and miracles shake hands. The program for renewal is that handshake. It is not glamorous. It is not fast. It is simply the only way to deserve the country our grandparents imagined and our children deserve.

“If you will it, it is no dream,” Herzl promised. Renewal is the will, disciplined. Peace is the dream, earned. Between them lies the work. And that, at last, is something we know how to do.

The world will move on. The cameras will swivel elsewhere. But the task before us is quieter and more consequential. Make the state work. Share the burden. Grow the economy. Secure the borders. Keep faith with the hostages and the fallen. And raise up leaders—artists and engineers, medics and teachers, jurists and mayors—equal to the hour.

If we will it—not the dream of a frictionless peace, but the hard labor of a just order—it is no dream.