While unprecedented in scale and horror, the Hamas terrorist attacks on 7 October that killed more than 1,400 people were tactically and geographically limited. They did not pose a strategic, let alone an existential threat. The state – and the idea – of Israel were not placed at immediate, serious risk.
That’s changing. Since that terrible day, Israel has been drawn with astonishing rapidity into a complex web of five interlinked crises that together pose the biggest challenge to national survival since the Yom Kippur war 50 years ago, perhaps even since its founding in 1948.
