This year, every Jew in the world is living the real story of Chanukah

Chanukah this year evokes not the comforting, all-purpose holiday version, but the historic conflict with deadly enemies, writes ANSHEL PFEFFER.

This isn't a year to be flippant with the calendar.  We are living in the most fateful period of Jewish history in our lifetimes, at least for anyone born after the Holocaust and Israel's foundation. One in which Israel and Jews around the world need to confront all our demons and internal contradictions.

These are days that will determine how Jews continue to live in their homelands, both the ancestral one or whichever other one they have chosen; whether they will have security and prosperity; and what type of democracy and freedoms they will continue to enjoy.

Just as the Seleucids only wanted to absorb the Jews into their Hellenistic culture, without ever intending to set the ball rolling on hundreds of years of Jewish disputes and schisms, so Hamas "only" wanted to murder as many Jews as possible – but instead forced us to finally deal with the much deeper questions of what kind of Israel and Jewish lives we want to live, and what kind of relationships we will have with our neighbours.

None of the solutions and the ways we reach them will be easy. They are already demanding great sacrifices, unbearable moral dilemmas, bitter disillusionment with institutions and people who we thought were decent allies; Jews turning their backs on fellow Jews; and a deep reckoning with so many failed concepts, which is only just starting.

The next stage, after the threat of Hamas has been removed, will bring deep internal divisions over the "day-after" strategies as well. The controversy over the government's judicial coup attempt will seem like child's play, even after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu releases us from his toxic grip and is finally banished from public life. Don't expect any respite from our internal demons.