Here's the news: The Gaza Strip is not Lebanon. In other words, yes, it has Arabs, terrorism, Iranian involvement and a terribly low standard of living, but it is still not Lebanon.
Lebanon is a sovereign state. Conflicted, divided, mired up to its neck in desperate debt – but a sovereign state, with a border, currency, diplomatic relations and government responsibility for the population. Gaza is a strip of territory with a population that no one wants – not Israel, not Egypt, not any of the 22 Arab countries or dozens of countries where "free Palestine" demonstrations are taking place. It relies economically on Israel, the Palestinian Authority and the United Nations, and its government shoots hungry civilians so they don't dare take food that is supposed to fuel the terror machine.
Despite these stark differences, our government is for some reason trying to solve the October 7 disaster by stepping back – not to October 6, but to June 10. June 10, 1985, the day the fighting began in the security zone in Lebanon.
Even the terminology is the same. Senior defense officials wave the term "security zone," as if we didn't go out with our tails between our legs 15 years later, in May 2000, without a real security achievement and after hundreds of soldiers fell, only to return to the same Lebanon only six years later, with the exact same Hezbollah.
The fact that the Israeli army was based on the sovereign territory of another state consists of many aspects of diplomacy and international relations. But in forgiveness, what is sacred on the Gaza border? Who marked it, what is its topographical logic, what recognized sovereign entity (recognition as a terrorist organization does not count, unfortunately) declared it a border? True, it is a pity that Israel invested NIS 3 billion in a smart fence along the border, but let's put it gently – it seems that the fence has already finished its historic function.
Why is the official State of Israel horrified by the thought that the Gaza border should look different after the war? You don't necessarily have to be in favor of Gush Katif 2.0 to say something simple: Israel needs to think about its security interests, and from them to derive the border route of the day after. Trying to do the opposite cost us an unbearable price.
But let's not just say what isn't. It has been two months since a picture was published here that is historically incomprehensible: the commander of the German air force donating blood to the wounded in an Israeli hospital. How many revolutions had to happen in 80 years for the heir of the despicable criminal Hermann Göring to come and save Jews.
Postwar Germany was a Western project that, with a supreme effort of carrots and sticks, succeeded in pulling the country from the clutches of Nazism into the bosom of civilization. The process included difficult years for the Germans, including dispossession of lands occupied during the war, expulsion from Poland and Czechoslovakia, and the need to clean up the enormous damage from the war and rebuild Germany.
Unbearable poverty, millions of wounded and orphaned, a deep leadership crisis, widespread suspicion and economic debt were the music that accompanied Germany out of the dark days. Alongside these, huge investments came from the United States, the replacement of all officials with non-Nazi ones, the disappearance of Nazi symbols from the public sphere, and the integration of prominent German scientists in American studies.
Israel needs to think about its security interests, and from them derive the border route of the day after. Trying to do the opposite cost us an unbearable price.
The change was so radical that the new Germany, eager to prove that it was radically different from that Germany, defines the day of its surrender to the Allies on May 8, 1945, as its "zero hour": the moment when it all began all over again.
With a combined, deliberate and sober effort by Western (and not Arab) countries, Gaza can also have a revival. It may not become Singapore, but it can become a place that is not bad to live in and not bad to live alongside if we only bring about the end of the current war as "zero hour."
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