Latest on Israel and its Gaza war: Jon Alterman (CSIS)

[ionelv]

The Nation's Tony Karon and Daniel Levy have an excellent oped on the Israel Gaza War and which quoted from Jon B Alterman's Israel Could Lose in CSIS (my emphasis):

Hamas’s concept of military victory…is all about driving long-term political outcomes. Hamas sees victory not in one year or five, but from engaging with decades of struggle that increase Palestinian solidarity and increase Israel’s isolation. In this scenario, Hamas rallies a besieged population in Gaza around it in anger and helps collapse the Palestinian Authority government by ensuring Palestinians see it even more as a feckless adjunct to Israeli military authority. Meanwhile, Arab states move strongly away from normalization, the Global South aligns strongly with the Palestinian cause, Europe recoils at the Israeli army’s excesses, and an American debate erupts over Israel, destroying the bipartisan support Israel has enjoyed here since the early 1970s. [...]

Hamas need not be strong to follow this strategy; it merely needs to be steadfast. Rather than relying on enough strength to defeat Israel, it seeks instead to use Israel’s far greater strength to defeat Israel. Israel’s strength allows the country to kill Palestinian civilians, destroy Palestinian infrastructure, and defy global calls for restraint. All those things advance Hamas’s war aims.