For many of us, the despair of October 7th was compounded by what we knew would follow. There was no quick resolution of October 7th. This was never going to be another one of those endless skirmishes we call 'wars.' From the moment October 7th happened, this would be the real thing, the total war, the point of no return, the revolving node which all sane people feared would start spinning, because once it starts, it could spin for decades.
October 7th was perpetrated by a cult of death determined to visit their death on their own people. Were the initial attack not met with a crushing response, Iran would go about planning a second October 7th, then a third, until such time as Israel visits unprecedented calamity on its neighbors to deter them. It is so much easier to destroy than create, and Iran is secure in the knowledge that however many soldiers were killed from Hamas and Hezbollah, their ranks would replenish from the hatreds engendered by those who lost loved ones.
People who think of Israel's actions as Israeli slaughter visited on Palestine have failed to answer the most basic question: What is Israel supposed to do? You cannot negotiate with Hamas. You cannot negotiate with Hezbollah. You cannot negotiate with Iran. You just can't. Every promise from them is a lie, not only to Israel but to their own people. They are determined to end Israel and end the Jews who live there: and Israel is shunned for successfully stopping them.
All of which plays into the hands of an Israeli government that has no heavy heart about executing Israel's responsibilities. What should be the gravest business in the world is practically a lighthearted divertissement for them. The moment this happened, I knew Netanyahu would survive even as everyone I knew predicted his downfall. Netanyahu has now survived the demands for his resignation. Believe it or not, he's actually leading in the polls, and the one right wing holdout party from his cabinet, the New Hope party under Gidon Sa'ar, has joined, giving Netanyahu an almost completely secure government until the 2026 election, which he now can win. The Netanyahu era stretches farther and farther to the future nd the line between democracy and authoritarianism blurs ever further. Far right partners in Bibi's coalition threaten to leave if Netanyahu does not pursue complete decimation, but the truth is, Netanyahu would have pursued complete decimation anyway, knowing fully well that in the long run, total victory against radical Islamic movements is impossible.
Now, it should be said, if you're going to wage a war, you can't do it much better than Israel has done thus far against Hezbollah, hitting hard at the beginning so that you have the option to get out quickly. But if this war is short, I will eat my shoe. Netanyahu encouraged Lebanon to rise up against Hezbollah to avoid a long, Gaza-like war. The fact that he needs to appeal to the Lebanese people to rise up against Hezbollah is a sign that no matter how many Hezbollah members are killed, they can't break Hezbollah's hold on Lebanon. Netanyahu is encouraging Lebanon to plunge itself back into civil war, and if there's civil war, the end result will be that Israel occupies southern Lebanon yet again.
In Gaza, Netanyahu deliberately placed unreachable goals for victory - the complete dismantlement of Hamas replaced by a government supervised by Israel, knowing fully well that this total war makes the death of hostages that much more likely. Even now, when it appears Hamas is defeated militarily, its ranks are replenishing with a fresh round of radicalized mourners. Radical Islam is a hydra with a hundred heads, always replenishing itself with fresh reasons to radicalize new generations of young men, and now it will replenish itself in an era when Gaza's population has doubled in a single generation. Only a naif could think this the defeat of Hamas or anything Hamas stands for.
And when, for the moment, the Hamas forces were depleted and war slowed down, Netanyahu wasted no time carrying the war onto Hezbollah. Netanyahu knows that if the pace of war slows down even for a minute before he can eke out an appearance of total victory, his administration is toast and he is in danger of prison yet again.
The nature of Israel's wars are always the same: a strategy that military, diplomatic and journalistic circles euphemistically call 'lawnmowing.' Depleting the weapons, expenses, and manpower of their opponents so that there's an extended period before they again can mount a serious attack on Israel.
Realistically, this is the only strategy available to Israel for a long, long time. Also realistically, if this is the only strategy, lawnmowing will eventually work no longer and Israel will eventually lose their longer war. If China ever decides to get involved with the Axis of Resistance, they will have a supply of all three that can never be mowed. This is the ultimate lawnmowing operation. Israel is clearly moving in for what it hopes is the kill on Hezbollah and Hamas, but you can't kill an idea, particularly if your only plan is to be the continual overseer of territories you mean to keep in perpetual submission.
Furthermore, even now, Israel has designs on influencing American policy. Joe Biden has been tested for his loyalty to Israel as no American president ever has. His reward for it is for Netanyahu to cast himself in the role of standing up to Biden, whom he paints as simultaneously weak and a bully. He clearly wants America to bomb Iran's nuclear facility, and seems hellbent on provoking the Middle East into a wider war until America has no choice but interfere on Israel's side. Furthermore, I'm not good at predictions, I predicted that Israel doesn't want to provoke war in Lebanon, and I could not have been more wrong about that, but it would seem that Iran will get involved just in time for the American election, and if Iran gets involved, the world's price of oil can balloon, and if the price of oil goes up, the incumbent American president gets blamed. There is no question that even after all of Biden's help against so much resistance in his party, Netanyahu still wants to help Trump get elected.
That's all I have to say for now. Anything I have to say about the Hamas side of this is too obvious to write, and most of the crowd opposed to this war is so blinded by anti-Israel hatred that their critiques of Israel have no basis in reality. If you're too naive to see nihilistic evil when it stares you in the face, there's nothing I can do to demonstrate the evil of Hamas to you. Israel is shunned for successfully preventing Hamas from committing acts that would make Israel's actions in Gaza look like a picnic, but that does not absolve Israel of sins that increasingly look like the sins of its enemies. To resemble Hamas even slightly should be cause for shame, and if you don't see that Israel has cause to feel shame in this, there's equally nothing I can do to convince you.
This is why I stopped regularly writing about this war. Whether I get predictions right or wrong is immaterial, but what's futile about this conflict is that nearly everyone refuses to stare obvious realities in the face. This is the nature of the Middle East in generation after generation, millennium after millennium. Israel is the small strip of land on which billions pin their hopes of a transcendent reality, but the human story is the story of hoping for a trranscendence that never happens, and if there is a god, God is there to watch our hopes dispelled so that we can learn a humility before His acts that few people learn before it's too late to prevent yet another historic disaster.
