The Arab-Israeli Conflict Has Come to an End

Since 1948, the Arab nations’ struggle to eliminate the Jewish state—whether through conventional war, terrorism, or economic and diplomatic boycotts—has dominated Middle Eastern geopolitics, and, even more so, American perceptions thereof. No more, writes Michael Oren. And with its conclusion, many other myths about the conflict are also losing their hold:

The duration and frequency of [Arab-Israeli] clashes, and the intense media attention they received, no doubt contributed to the conflation of the Arab-Israeli conflict with all Middle Eastern conflicts in general. Iraqis and Iranians could engage in a brutal eight-year war, and the Lebanese could massacre each other for fifteen, yet the term “Middle East conflict” referred almost exclusively to that between Israelis and Arabs.

This misconception was instilled in generations of American students whose universities offered popular courses on the Arab-Israeli conflict and all but ignored other regional disputes. Not surprisingly, successive American administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, subscribed to the notion of “linkage.” This held that the core conflict in the Middle East was that between Arabs and Israelis. Resolve it and all other struggles would fall dominolike in peace.

The Abraham Accords merely dealt a coup de grace to this myth, but it had in fact been dying for decades.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Abraham Accords, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Middle East

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF