The shock waves this war will unleash will not only thrust Israel and the Palestinians of Gaza into turmoil but will also slam into Ukraine and Saudi Arabia and most likely Iran.
When I need the most accurate analysis about Israel, the first call I always make is to my longtime friend and reporting partner there, Nahum Barnea, a veteran Yediot newspaper columnist. When I called him Saturday afternoon for his read on theon Israel, I was stunned by his first response: “This is the worst day that I can remember in military terms in the history of Israel, including the blunder of the Yom Kippur war, which was terrible.
Second, he noted, Israel has always prided itself on the ability of its intelligence services to penetrate Hamas and Palestinian militants in the West Bank and get early warnings. For the past few weeks, as anyone following the news from Israel knows, Hamas was conducting what appeared to be practice manoeuvres for just this kind of attack all along the Gaza border — right before the eyes of the Israeli military.
This is going to be a huge problem for Israel. In a previous term, in 2011, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traded 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, including 280 serving life sentences, to get one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, back from Hamas in Gaza. Bibi may be called on to empty every Israeli prison of Palestinians if Hamas is holding older people and children in Gaza, Nahum noted.
So they must now conduct this war, make excruciating decisions about trade-offs among deterrence, retaliation, getting hostages back from Hamas and maybe even invading Gaza, knowing all the time that even if they manage all of these perfectly, some kind of inquiry awaits them at the end of the road. It is not easy to think straight under those conditions.
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