Hamas called its Oct. 7 invasion of Israel the “Al Aqsa Flood.” Its purpose was to pave the way for the destruction of Israel through the conquest of Jerusalem. Hezbollah’s plans for the invasion of the Galilee presented the coming battle as the battle for Jerusalem, not Haifa. Iran seeks Israel’s destruction to “liberate Jerusalem.”
This week, a clip of a speech by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan showed his supporters urging him to “take us to Jerusalem.” He responded: “Patience brings victory.” Erdoğan’s proxies that have taken over Syria have similarly stated that their goal is the conquest of Jerusalem.
Israel’s control over Samaria and Jerusalem is what secures its sovereignty in Jerusalem. If the Palestinians seize control over these areas, then the fall of Jerusalem becomes a foregone conclusion. The military, political and ideological battle for these areas is the battle for Jerusalem.
The inevitability of this battle was apparent to anyone listening to what the PA has been telling the Palestinians since the 1990s. Every single leader—from Yasser Arafat to Mahmoud Abbas to the last of the minor PA officials and terrorists—told us and continue to tell us that they are fighting for Jerusalem.
Israel’s ruling elites—from the IDF General Staff to Shin Bet leadership, from the media to the legal system to academia—have refused to admit this state of affairs.
The unbridled hostility of the European Union, the United Nations and other international actors towards Israel as a whole has been used by Israel’s leftist ruling class and Washington as a means to coerce successive governments and the unwilling public to maintain faith with the fiction that the PA is a stabilizing force, whether in Judea and Samaria or in the Gaza Strip.
Most of their efforts across the years were directed not against the Palestinians calling for the conquest of Jerusalem. Their chief foe (and the focus of their anger) has always been the Israelis—IDF officers, politicians, journalists, academics and regular citizens who have insisted on listening to the Palestinians and acting accordingly.
If the war is to end, Israel must win this battle in a manner that is not open to question. To win this war, Israel needs to dismantle not only Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but the governing body that has cultivated and grown these forces. To win the battle for Jerusalem, Israel must dismantle the PA’s security forces and the notion that they are moderates, or that they aren’t fighting for Jerusalem.
The presence of advanced weapons and tens of thousands of men under arms supported by a society mobilized to use them to kill thousands of Israelis at the first opportunity has made the situation untenable. The government is well-advised to delay the reckoning until after Donald Trump becomes president in January and until after Halevi’s expected resignation in February. It is clear that the battle cannot be won so long as the IDF is led by a man who refuses to abandon the strategic conception that the PA is Israel’s partner, not its enemy.
In the past year and three months of war, the overwhelming sense has been that we are fighting for the survival not only of Israel but of the Jewish people. There is poetic justice, then, in the fact that the approaching battle for Jerusalem has come into view just as we celebrate the festival of Chanukah, the time when the Jews fought both their enemies and their internal demons to secure their religious freedom and restore Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem.
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