Friendship from without and unity within are both necessary and important, but ultimately Israel’s future hinges on military and diplomatic victory. In discussing whether and how those can be achieved, analysts have turned to a handful of comparisons from recent history. Robert Satloff cautions against pushing those analogies too far. For instance:

The disbelief prevalent in U.S. policy circles that Israel can achieve its war aims—the dismantling of Hamas military infrastructure and the end of Hamas political control of Gaza—emerges largely from the American experience in Iraq and Syria and the sense that Israel will not have the time it took the U.S.-led forces to do the job there. While it is certainly true that the battlefield experience may compel Israel to scale back its objectives, the differences between the Gaza situation and what U.S.-led forces faced in Syria/Iraq are substantial—the latter may inform the former but it doesn’t determine it.

Then there is the parallel to the Israeli campaign 40 years ago to drive the PLO out of Lebanon:

The similarity between Beirut 1982 and Gaza 2023 will likely lead to prognostication that the Hamas war may end like the former—not with a definitive outcome but an inconclusive, “live to fight another day” non-ending, akin to the U.S.-negotiated seaborne evacuation of Yasir Arafat and his battered band of PLO fighters from Beirut to Tunis. Perhaps that is how this chapter ends, with Hamas’s leaders in the tunnels of Gaza cashing in their bargaining chips of hostages in exchange for safe passage to some Arab city. But on close inspection, the analogy breaks down.

In this environment, evacuation by Hamas to some faraway capital—Doha, Algiers, or with delicious irony, to Qais Saied’s Tunis or Beirut itself—would be a dramatic step backward.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.