As we consider the nature of the astonishing events both in Gaza and in Lebanon over the past month, we should recognize this one clear fact: Israel spent the last year not only fighting a two-front war in real time but learning from its every step and every move how to win the war that had been thrust upon it. And now it is.

I don’t need to rehearse it all for you, but I will, because it’s just so…exhilarating. The elimination of Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah since 1992, brought to a climax a period of daring Israeli actions that included, but are not limited to:

—the assassination in the spring of leaders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Tehran’s most elite military unit, in a building in Syria.

—Israel’s use of some kind of science-fictional weapon we normies still don’t have a bead on against an Iranian site after the ineffectual missile attack Iran launched in response to the Syria killing—a clear message to the mullahs that Israel possesses terrifying capabilities Tehran cannot predict and that therefore Iran would be wise not to try and find out. And it hasn’t.

—the assassination inside Tehran in an apartment complex owned and run by the mullahs of Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh—a plan so daring and melodramatically implausible it seemed to have been lifted from the pages of one of Daniel Silva’s glorious Gabriel Allon novels.

—the trapping of senior Hamas leadership in a corner of the city of Rafah following a months-long halt outside this southernmost point in Gaza—a pause largely due to the historically embarrassing pressure exerted by an increasingly pusillanimous and morally impotent Biden administration and its fear of an electoral blowback in one state out of 50 in a country generally extremely supportive of Israel’s efforts.

—the relentless grinding down of Hamas to the point that in the past week Israel is now openly declaring that Hamas no longer functions as a military but has been downgraded into some kind of counterinsurgency at best.

—Operation Grim Beeper, in which Israel wounded or took off the fighting map literally thousands of Hezbollah operatives in a single second, followed a day later by the same attack on the secondary communications devices Hezbollah resorted to with their pagers blown up.

—Operation Northern Arrows, a series of Israeli strikes that did more damage to Hezbollah’s colossal missile stash in six hours than it had done in the 34 days Israel had fought Hezbollah in a conventional war in 2006. In a day’s time, the Israeli airforce hit 1,600 sites in Southern Lebanon and the Bekaa valley.

—The picking-off of Hezbollah leaders systematically wherever and whenever they have been accessible for such elimination, beginning with military commander Fuad Shukr and reaching its apex on Friday with 83 tons dropped directly on the head of Hamas’s command-and-control superbunker—killing Hassan Nasrallah, the world’s most destructive terrorist over the past 32 years, thus decapitating Hezbollah, an enemy of Israel, the United States, and the Jewish people worldwide for four decades.

—the continuing elimination of Hezbollah leaders following Nasrallah’s death, three so far, demonstrating that the decapitation of Hezbollah is not going to be followed any time soon with any kind of regeneration.

And after I finish writing this and before you begin reading it, more will have happened to boost Israel’s side of the war-fighting ledger. And if you had told me just a month ago at the end of August that I would be writing these words at the end of September, I would have thought you mad.

Just one month ago, Israel had plunged into a despair deeper than it had experienced at any time after October 7 when the nation learned that six hostages, including the Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, had been murdered just minutes before they might have been rescued. Throughout Israel and the Jewish world, even some hawks found themselves all but ready to give up the fight because the continued plight of the hostages had just become too great to bear. A ceasefire was needed. Bring them home now.

The problem wasn’t an Israeli unwillingness to achieve a ceasefire. The Netanyahu government and its negotiators  accepted general ceasefire terms at multiple moments over the summer. Rather it was Hamas that would not proffer any kind of hostage return that even the United States, which wanted the ceasefire desperately, could view as minimally acceptable. But Israelis and Jews around the world had, without even knowing it really, been surviving on a kind of desperate optimism that things were really going to work out in a movie-ending sort of way. The loss of that optimism was soul-crushing and once again threatened to turn Israel inside out against itself even as the war was not won.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah was firing rockets, killing Druze children, and keeping the North depopulated. Israeli military leaders and Israelis have long known they would not be spared from directly engaging in this war on the northern border. But a country in mourning and a Jewish people worldwide overwhelmed by a degree of open hostility toward us most of us had never known could hardly bear the thought of that second front. Not to mention Yemen. Not to mention Iran.

Which is why September 2024 may go down in the annals of Jewish history as the time our people looked despair in the face and refused to submit to it. Israel said, through the proper democratic vehicle of the Jewish state’s duly elected government, that it would no longer hold itself back in hopes of a deal that would not emerge or tie an arm behind its back to manage a relationship with the United States when the U.S.’s position in all these matters had become all but inexplicable in its inconstancy.

The Netanyahu government acted, and with a kind of determination and confidence that has breathed new strength and a new sense of resolve into the Jewish people. Whatever the divisions and concerns and cautions inside the corridors of power about the astonishing onslaught of Israel against the Iran Axis of Evil, the fact is Israel stared into the abyss and said, “Not today. Not this week. Not this month. Not ever.”