A metaphor quickly emerged after Hamas’s barbarous attack casting it as Israel’s 9/11. That’s the day we will look back on, dividing the before and after times. This misses the mark. Oct. 7 is our Dunkirk—the decisive start of a massive and prolonged war of survival, the beginning of a historic test whose outcome is still uncertain. …

Britain understood that getting its soldiers home was a life-and-death matter, not only for them but for the country. Without a serviceable fighting force, Britain couldn’t have fought the Nazi machine.

So too with Israel. In 2001, the U.S. faced a loose network of terror groups. In 2023, Israel faces an entrenched axis of state and statelike powers that spans Hamas, Russia, Turkey and Qatar but swings on the fulcrum of Iran—not a group of ruthless jihadists hiding in caves, but a genocidal ideology that, like Nazi Germany itself, sees the extinction of Jewish power, of Jews themselves, as its messianic mission.

[I’m not sure that either analogy really works; Dunkirk was an evacuation, not a win or even the start of a serious offensive operation. Even Winston Churchill in the moment of Dunkirk warned that wars were not won by evacuations. The closer parallel would be Pearl Harbor, I suspect. But this analogy works better than I thought it would when I first read the headline. — Ed]