A Year On, Israelis Still Haven’t Found a Name for the Current War

“One year after October 7,” wrote the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman earlier this month, “this is still the first Arab-Israeli war without a name and without a clear victor.”

Militarily, Friedman is mistaken. No matter how many Israeli soldiers they can kill in isolated incidents, or rockets or drones they can still manage to launch, Hamas and Hizballah have been beaten in the fighting. About the name, though, he is right. There is still no agreed-on way of referring to the current, war, which Israel tentatively code-named at its onset “Operation Iron Swords” in an allusion to the Iron Dome anti-missile system that had protected the country until then. This is not necessarily surprising. As I observed in this column last November: “Since the names of wars are sometimes determined long afterwards, this one, too, may have to wait for the perspective that time alone can bring.”

Time has already eliminated the three names that were most likely, so I judged then, to end up being given to the war. It won’t be called “the Gaza War,” because it long ago spread beyond the confines of Gaza. Neither will it be called “the War against Hamas,” having become a war against Hizballah and Iran, too. And it most definitely won’t be called (as I predicted it might be) “the War of the Accursed Sabbath.” The phrase shabbat ha-arurah, though much bandied about in the weeks after October 7, is rarely heard any more and many Israelis no longer remember that the day Hamas attacked was a Saturday. They do recall that it was Simchat Torah, the day of the “Rejoicing of the Law” that follows immediately the holiday of Sukkot, but to call a war that began with the worse catastrophe in Israeli history “the War of the Rejoicing of the Law” would be grotesque.