It’s hard for an American audience to understand the fierceness with which Israel has pursued its campaign to stamp out Hamas in Gaza following the group’s Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel.

The explanation, however, can be summed up in a sentence: Two millennia of Jewish history and 75 years of Jewish statehood have embedded in the Israeli psyche a deep fear of being subjected to persecution, violence, expulsion and genocide, along with a steely determination that it never be allowed it to happen again.

As a Jew, kin of Holocaust victims, and someone who lived and worked for a year in Israel in my youth, those raw emotions resonate with me.

The state of Israel was created in 1948 for one overriding reason: to provide the Jewish people reliable, permanent security in a way that they’d never enjoyed in the countries around the globe they’d inhabited following their expulsion from ancient Judea about 134-136 A.D. During their 1,800-year diaspora (dispersion), without a state to protect them, Jews were usually treated as second-class citizens and often subjected to outbreaks of confiscation, ghettoization, expulsion and murderous violence.

A bewildered American public, lacking knowledge of this history and constantly exposed to graphic images of Palestinian civilians being pulled from the bombed-out wreckages of homes, schools, hospitals and mosques, has gradually re-directed its empathy away from the Israeli victims of the Oct. 7 attack and towards the suffering population of Gaza.

Why, many Americans ask, won’t Israel agree to a prolonged cease-fire? Why don’t the Israeli Defense Forces conduct bombing and artillery attacks in a more surgical way, sparing the noncombatants from death or injury? Why doesn’t Israel allow the spigots of international aid to be opened wide, providing fuel, food, water and medical supplies for Gaza’s beleaguered population?

Israeli government spokesmen usually respond to these questions (often postured in an accusatory way) with stock answers. A ceasefire will give Hamas the chance to regroup, thus prolonging the war. Hamas has deliberately embedded itself into the civilian population in a way that makes it impossible to attack them without causing extensive death and injury to their human shields. Increased aid in Gaza will be re-directed to Hamas fighters, thereby strengthening their resistance. Any one or combination of these factors will prolong the war and increase IDF casualties.

While largely true, these explanations don’t tell the whole story. The fundamental reason, I believe, is that Israelis have just re-experienced their worst nightmare, and half measures won’t suffice to calm their fears or bring back their sense of security. Whenever Israelis feel that their enemies are again on the march, they put aside their differences and unite to fight for survival with all means at hand. A phrase they often use to explain their attitude to war is, “Ain berera” (“there’s no choice”)!

Israel’s birth is very much interwoven with the Holocaust, the Nazi campaign of systematic mass ethnic extermination that claimed the lives of two out of three European Jews, some 6 million souls, between 1941 and 1945. It was by far the most destructive episode of anti-Jewish violence during the history of the diaspora.

After the Nazi defeat in World War II, shattered remnants of Europe’s Jewry, about 250,000 persons, were temporarily housed in displaced persons camps run by the Allies. Most had no homes or families to return to, and those who tried often faced anti-Semitic violence from their gentile neighbors. They needed a safe haven, and their destinations of choice became either the U.S. (which allowed only limited immigration) or Palestine, then ruled by Great Britain under the auspices of a U.N. Mandate.

But the Arab countries of the Middle East, boiling with nationalist, anti-colonial sentiment, opposed large-scale Jewish immigration from Europe into Palestine, where Jews would soon outnumber the 1 million or so Arab Palestinians. And Britain, eager to maintain good relations with the Arabs, endeavored to shut down Jewish immigration and to prevent Palestinian Jews from arming to protect themselves.

In 1947, Britain relinquished its Trusteeship of Palestine and threw the territory’s future into the lap of the United Nations. On Nov. 29, 1947, the U.N. announced its preferred solution: the partition of Palestine into two sections, one Arab and one Jewish. The Jews reluctantly accepted this solution, but the Arabs rejected it out of hand.

The British Mandate officially ended on May 14, 1948. The same day, the fledgling government of Israel announced the formation of the new Jewish state. In the following days, armies from the neighboring Arab states of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon attacked Israel with the avowed goal of driving the Jews into the sea.

The 1948 war was a near-thing for Israel. Outnumbered and outgunned, it was saved only by desperate fighting and last-minute shipments of weapons from Czechoslovakia and France. In early 1949, the exhausted adversaries signed armistice agreements.

The armistice, however, proved only a temporary respite. Further wars between Israel and its various Arab neighbors took place in 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982 and 2006, and there have been four major conflicts with Hamas. In between these wars, Israel has endured numerous guerilla attacks, rocket barrages and terrorist acts from its neighbors and from radical Palestinian groups.

All this traumatic conflict has taken place over 75 years in a country with a geographic area and population about the size of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

The net result is that Israeli Jews, despite having built a powerful military establishment, still have much to fear, little room to run and nowhere to hide. Nor can they expect any quarter from their enemies if they succumb. It’s truly an existential threat. Their only choice, therefore, is to fight or perish.

So perhaps then it’s understandable why, when it comes down to a bare-knuckles brawl, Israel doesn’t always play by the Marquis of Queensbury rules.

Elliott Epstein is a trial lawyer with Shukie & Segovias in Lewiston. His Rearview Mirror column, which has appeared in the Sun Journal for 17 years, analyzes current events in an historical context. He is also the author of “Lucifer’s Child,” a book about the notorious 1984 child murder of Angela Palmer. He may be contacted at epsteinel@yahoo.com

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