There is a question about war with Iran that Israeli strategists, politicians and commentators seem to be ignoring, because the answer requires a kind of difficult admission that democratic publics rarely reward.
What kind of war is this, exactly? This question revolves around what winning actually looks like and over what span of time.
The Arab-Israeli conflict has run in phases.
From 1948 to 1973, the primary threat was conventional military. Arab armies massed their forces and attacked directly. Israel met that threat and broke it. Then came the intermittent campaigns of attrition, the rise of the PLO, and the low-grade grinding pressure that tried to make Israeli society too exhausted and too demoralized to sustain itself. That, too, Israel weathered.
Counter to both of these is what Israel faces with Iran. Iran is employing a multipronged strategy, one element of which is its attempt to acquire and (presumably) use nuclear weapons. A second is Iran’s strategy to be in a permanent state of war until the other side collapses.
Iran built a network of militias across the region, calibrated to survive periodic wars with Israel, absorb the losses, rearm and grow. Its goal isn’t to conquer territory during any single campaign, but to apply constant military pressure while simultaneously waging a diplomatic and informational campaign aimed at converting every Israeli military action into a long-term political liability.
Today, we have our own zealotrous temptations, and they are a vulnerability.
It has aimed at eroding Western support, leveraging the deep global susceptibility to anti-Jewish narratives and letting the years do what no single army can. Its aims and strategy overlap with those of its theological rival: the global (Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood, which shares the dream of destroying the State of Israel.
Oct. 7 was, in the calculus of now-slain Hamas senior leader Yahya Sinwar, the moment the trigger could be pulled. He misjudged the resilience of Israeli society. But the strategy outlives him.
Vietnam War veteran Joe Haldeman coined the phrase “forever war.” Iran’s strategy is not tied to dates. It is willing to fight a forever war to try to eventually destroy Israel.
So how does Israel win a war like this?
In the short term, wars are won by superior weapons and technology. In the medium term, they are won by logistics and resources. In the long term, they are won by the willpower of a people.
North Vietnam and the Viet Cong are an example of willpower deciding a war. They never outgunned America; they outlasted it. American society fractured under the weight of a war it no longer understood and had begun to feel it could not win. American will faltered first.
Israel’s military and technological capacity is extraordinary. Its economic growth, even under sustained pressure, has been striking. Its diplomatic corps, despite significant shortcomings, has expanded the nation’s strategic partnerships in ways unimaginable a generation ago.
But willpower has to come from somewhere.
The secular-nationalist strain that built the state drew on a real but ultimately limited fuel. Its founding narrative—the heroic Jew rising from the ashes of exile and passivity—galvanized generations. But secular nationalism is not, by itself, an answer to a multigenerational religious war.
Those who believe that Israel’s deepest resource is religious identity are correct in that something powerful lives there: the patience of 2,000 years and the willingness of generation after generation to suffer, rather than to abandon who they were. That is, historically, the most durable form of resilience the Jewish people has ever demonstrated, and it is not weakness.
However, religious passion that shades into fanaticism is its own kind of fragility. The zealots of the first and second centuries won battlefield moments, but lost the war against Rome comprehensively. They mistook short-term intensity for long-term strength.
Today, we have our own zealotrous temptations, and they are a vulnerability. At best, they can lead to a messianic certainty that there is a magical, quick-win military solution that we could achieve if only we ignored diplomatic constraints. They fall for the trap our enemies have set us.
The military “quick win” is quixotic. When it doesn’t come, they insist on demoralizing the nation by claiming defeat after every military success, since the overall problem has not been solved. At the most extreme end of the zealotry is a radicalism that can advocate for a suspension of the very values that Jews have always been willing to die for. They can contort Judaism into the most grotesque forms of nationalism.
The same applies to the secular drift of those who seek legitimacy primarily through the world’s approval. A society that cannot sustain its identity under international pressure will not outlast a multigenerational adversary.
Tapping into a national mission is key.
What Israel needs—and what the moment is asking for—is a national cohesion grounded in something true.
We need to be able to draw collectively on a Jewish national identity, rooted in millennia of patience; of commitment to do what is good and right, even if it does not deliver the immediate consequences we wish for.
The Jewish people have always been powered by the conviction that, while in the short term evil can win and cause tremendous harm, in the long run good will prevail. We have never been afraid to fight when called upon to do so, but have been even less afraid of the patient path.
But tapping into a national mission is key. It must be one that can appeal to all sectors of society and narrate our uniquely Jewish mission, which is genuinely Divine while transcending both the drive for the exertion of power and the need for global approval.
A good starting point would no doubt be the very first thing God told Abraham as he began the journey that would lead to the nation of Israel: “Through you will be blessed all families of earth.”
The Jewish people have always lived to serve that mission: to be God’s ambassadors on earth. Despite the length of exile and the depth of hatred we have faced, we are not deterred. Our resolve prevents us from reflecting the hatred we have experienced back on our enemies and prevents us from getting mired in the quagmire of the present. While our tears may be in the present, our eyes were always lifted to the future.
The Jewish belief is that our own survival and our own dreams were not only for ourselves but for the whole world, including, eventually, those who today see themselves as our enemies.
Our dreams are anathema to every dark and evil impulse; that is why it is so natural for evil to seek to destroy us.
Evil, in its current iteration, has learned to be patient and persistent, and that is precisely why our eventual victory cannot come from natural resources alone. It will not come from anyone’s approval in the short term, and it will be lost if we let ourselves internalize and reflect the evil that fights us.
Victory can only come from the strength of remembering who we are, why we are here and the future we dream of—for ourselves and for all humankind. Israel needs the kind of conviction that knows what it is fighting for, at a level deeper than politics and policy, and that can hold that conviction through loss, grief and decades of pressure without losing itself in either despair or cruelty.
That has always been the Jewish capacity, when we have been wise enough to draw on it.
The war may be long. The side that wins will be the one that still knows who it is supposed to be when it ends.
