We may be living through a Chanukah-level miracle in the Middle East.
Growing up in Wilmette, Illinois, Chanukah meant lighting candles on the dining room table, playing dreidel for pennies, and eating my mother’s potato pancakes or latkes. Coming to Israel, I found myself lighting outdoors, which is amazing but can be challenging with wind and rain. Also, potato pancakes were mostly replaced with sufganiyot, the Hebrew word for donuts. They have every variety: glazed, filled, and topped with anything you can imagine. My wife makes Yeminite pancakes, zalabiyot, oftentimes filled with beef and served with hummus and tahini. Chanukah is not the time to join Weight Watchers.
The miracles of Chanukah—the victory of the much smaller and weaker Jewish army over the Syrian-Greek forces and the burning of the pure oil in the Menorah in the Temple—were recognized immediately by the leaders of the day. The holiday was instituted the following year. Oftentimes, one feels as if he is going through a historically-important moment. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union certainly felt that way. We had grown up with the threat of atom bombs raining down on us, and for the first time, it seemed as if the world might be safe after the US had won the Cold War. Covid was also a historical inflection point, but not necessarily in a good way. Ostensibly liberal democratic governments destroyed personal freedom and lied their way to getting people to take experimental vaccines whose efficacy and potential health risks are still being debated today.
Are we living today in a modern version of the Chanukah story? There is no question that the days following the October 7th massacre were brutal here in Israel. There was a lot of pain, a lot of tears, and there was a general sense of not knowing what comes next. Will Hezbollah pull the same feat in the north? Will Iran attack a distracted and distraught Israel? There were still terrorists running around for days after the initial pogrom. As more stories came out, as the numbers of dead and wounded grew and as videos of the attack and the joyous reception of the murderers and their prisoners kept growing and growing, people here wondered how all of this would end.
And while the end is not necessarily in sight, maybe we will come back to look at the extraordinary events of this period as a miracle. Let’s try to imagine where things might be at the end of 2025:
*Gaza. The strip has been more or less permanently split into zones. Israeli forces hold Rafah in the south, Netzarim in the middle and Jabaliya in the north. The Philadelphi Corridor allows Israel to prevent unwanted weaponry and contraband from entering the Strip. The locals are busy for the coming decade in rebuilding the thousands of structures that have been destroyed during the war. Gaza no longer represents a threat to Israel, especially to the residents of the south of the country. The latter have rebuilt their towns and lives and once again plant and harvest without the fear of rockets or terrorist infiltration.
*Lebanon. The country that has been a basket case for most of the past 30 years finally finds that it can put Hezbollah and Shiites in their place. With the south of Lebanon and the Dahiyeh suburb of Beirut completely destroyed—and with no further aid from Iran—Hezbollah no longer controls political and economic events in the country. A new Christian-Sunni government emerges that wants to join Jordan and Egypt with a peace treaty with Israel. Lebanon experiences economic growth as a result of a new political landscape and growing relations with Israel.
*Syria. Syria no longer presents a threat to Israel. Whether the country becomes united around the rebel leadership or devolves into internal fighting between the Kurds and Turkish-backed terror groups will be anyone’s guess. But with Israel holding the Syrian side of the Hermon Mountain and UN buffer zone, and with Assad’s planes, tanks, and chemical weapons mostly destroyed, Israel no longer sees Syria as an existential threat, even if there are no formal relations between the two countries.
*Iran. Should Israel go through with a third attack to destroy Kharg Island and with it Iran’s oil production as well as the nuclear sites spread throughout the country, it may be time for the mullahs to be driven out of office. Sunnis, Zoroasters, and other minorities might finally find the conditions ripe to overthrow the government and move on to create leadership that actually represents the people and not the religious fanatics who have ruled with an iron fist for the past 45 years.
*The Abraham Accords. Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries join the Accords to live in peace with Israel and enjoy business, tourism, and investment opportunities. Donald Trump adds to his impressive collection of states that have signed the accords.
Hamas in the person of Yahya Sinwar and his overlords in Tehran believed that the surprise attack on Israel would be the beginning of the end for the Jewish state. They expected that Hezbollah would join in and that the IDF would be overwhelmed. Israelis would beg for mercy in Gaza after a few hundred casualties there and Israel would be on the ropes. But, while it is still a wee bit too early, it looks like Sinwar will be remembered with Mrs. O’Leary’s cow as having triggered cataclysmic events—but not as planned. In future textbooks, they may just hang around his neck the neutering of Gaza, the death of the two-state solution, a Hezbollah-free future for Lebanon, a non-threatening Syria and a democratic Iran.
No one expected the Maccabees to win over a far superior force, and when they did win, no one expected to find ritually pure oil for lighting the Menorah. But they won and they did find it. On the 8th of October, had I written this article, it would not have been accepted and nobody would have believed it anyhow. But, at the cost of two thousand dead Israelis from the original attack and continued fighting, as well as thousands more injured, a completely new Middle East—encouraged by a supportive Trump administration—may be in the making. Maybe I really will be able to take a tour to Riyadh and then on to Tehran.