Even a decisive Israeli military victory is unlikely to end the country’s increasingly perilous security challenges.
It’s not even clear what “winning” means. “There’s no question Israel can inflict tremendous damage on Gaza—on its infrastructure and on its people—and can also target Hamas leaders,” Dan Kurtzer, a former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, told me. But
movements regenerate, and “sometimes the next leadership turns out to be more radical, more extreme, than the one that was beheaded,” Kurtzer said.
Al Qaeda of Iraq, for example,
evolved into the Islamic State of Iraq and then, after a U.S. air strike
killed its founder in 2006, into
isis in 2013.
Hamas has already achieved some of its objectives in terrorizing Israelis and stunning a country that long seemed almost invincible in the region. “
If the war stopped today, or even after Gaza looks like another war zone, Hamas has effectively won,” Kurtzer told me. Their immediate goals “have been achieved or are achievable.” The conflict has also, at least for now, almost certainly scuttled U.S. diplomacy to broker formal rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Israel, a pivotal step for Israel to gain recognition from a long-standing adversary. Over the weekend, Saudi Arabia
condemned the “continued occupation, the deprivation of the Palestinian people of their legitimate rights, and the repetition of systematic provocations against its sanctities.”
The scale of the violence, death, and destruction has triggered alarm about a wider regional conflict.
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