Israel’s ‘gains’ so far:
• reputation severely tarnished because of its ruthless Gaza invasion
• Hamas cannot be defeated, so the goal is to make Gaza as unliveable as possible hoping that this makes it impossible for Hamas to hurt Israel. Ethnic cleansing is the result, further damaging Israel’s reputation
• Iran is stronger than ever and it’s a question of time before it becomes a nuclear armed nation
• Yemen will only get better at damaging Israel
• no prospect of defeating Hezbollah
• iron dome is fine now, but would not be able to deal with a sustained rocket offensive by Iran and Hezbollah for very long. Even now we saw that when Iran attacked many rockets were taken down by the Americans, with the Iranians committed to making it mostly a symbolic move
• many Israelis have left the country, Mearsheimer says 500,000 have left since October 7th
• it cannot pull out of Gaza, because that would be equal to admitting defeat, even if it were to claim it had been successful. It’s too obvious that Hamas hasn’t been defeated. Hamas returns to places where they seemed defeated before
• Especially Democratic voters in the US are turning their backs on Israel and Arab Americans will be an important factor in the upcoming presidential election. Explains why Biden held back some bombs Israel didn’t really need for a bit
• tension within Israeli society has grown, if the war ends now, who knows what dark turn those tensions might take
• to have lasting success in Gaza now can only be achieved by killing a lot more Palestinians or by somehow driving them out (options there are limited)
• the world is zooming in on the violence perpetrated by the Israeli settlers in the West Bank, something that was on way fewer people’s radar before
• especially young people are no longer afraid to criticize Israel, criticizing Israel is becoming mainstream
• several countries are set to recognize Palestinian statehood
• Israel’s PR machine has failed miserably to sell this war to the international public, it’s become the laughing stock of the world
• It has deprived itself of a large chunk of its Palestinian work force who do a lot of the dirty, hard work inside Israel at lower wages than Israelis
• not hard to guess how this will affect tourism in Israel
• with so many of its youngsters serving in the military for this long this must have some negative impact on its economy
• many of its soldiers will return with PTSD, which will have negative consequences for Israeli society. No matter how hard IDF soldiers are trying to convince us they are having fun, it’s not possible to commit such acts of violence and not have them hunt you