In the past, write Dan Diker and Khaled Abu Toameh, Hamas has claimed to have inspired the Taliban: after all, the Afghan Islamist group believed that by persisting in its terror war it could wear down the Americans, just as Hamas—in its own understanding—drove Israel out of the Gaza Strip with the second intifada. The U.S. retreat from Afghanistan will now relay a similar message to Palestinian jihadists:

While the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan was good news for extremists, it was bad news for moderate Arabs amenable to the West. Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and their supporters have been vindicated in their longstanding ideological claims that negotiations with Israel are futile. Their conclusion is that patience pays off and that only mukawama, or [armed] resistance, can defeat the American-led Western alliance and dismantle the state of Israel.

It therefore comes as little surprise that Hamas was the first Islamist group publicly to congratulate the Taliban on its takeover of Afghanistan. . . . On August 17, 2021, Hamas’s leader Ismail Haniyeh told the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, “The demise of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan is a prelude to the demise of the Israeli occupation of the land of Palestine.”

Hamas’s support for the Taliban also renders the Palestinian Authority’s relative silence on the issue noteworthy. The PA cannot publicly oppose the Taliban Islamists, since Hamas has become a more popular competitor for Palestinian public support in Gaza and the West Bank and has proven to be a more successful alternative as a “liberation movement.” [In other words], the Taliban’s takeover and the U.S. withdrawal have legitimized and empowered Hamas as the new standard for “resistance” against Israel’s existence as a democratic, Jewish-majority state in any borders.

Examining the effects of Iran’s decision to launch nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, Benny Morris takes stock of the Jewish state’s strategic situation:

The massive Iranian attack has turned what began as a local war in and around the Gaza Strip and then expanded into a Hamas–Hizballah–Houthi–Israeli war [into] a regional war with wide and possibly calamitous international repercussions.

Before the Iranians launched their attack, Washington warned Tehran to desist (“don’t,” in President Biden’s phrase), and Israel itself had reportedly cautioned the Iranians secretly that such an attack would trigger a devastating Israeli counterstrike. But a much-humiliated Iran went ahead, nonetheless.

For Israel, the way forward seems to lie in an expansion of the war—in the north or south or both—until the country attains some sort of victory, or a diplomatic settlement is reached. A “victory” would mean forcing Hizballah to cease fire in exchange, say, for a cessation of the IDF bombing campaign and withdrawal to the international border, or forcing Iran, after suffering real pain from IDF attacks, to cease its attacks and rein in its proxies: Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

At the same time, writes Morris, a victory along such lines would still have its limits:

An IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon and a cessation of Israeli air-force bombing would result in Hizballah’s resurgence and its re-investment of southern Lebanon down to the border. Neither the Americans nor the French nor the UN nor the Lebanese army—many of whose troops are Shiites who support Hizballah—would fight them.