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.

If Iran succeeds in obtaining nuclear weapons, the war in Gaza, let alone the protests on college campuses, will seem like a minor complication. Jonathan Schachter fears that this danger could be much more imminent than decisionmakers in Jerusalem and Washington believe. In his view, Israel seems to be repeating the mistake that allowed it to be taken by surprise on Simchat Torah of 2023 and Yom Kippur of 1973: putting too much faith in an intelligence concept that could be wrong.

Israel and the United States apparently believe that despite Iran’s well-documented progress in developing capabilities necessary for producing and delivering nuclear weapons, as well as its extensive and ongoing record of violating its international nuclear obligations, there is no acute crisis because building a bomb would take time, would be observable, and could be stopped by force. Taken together, these assumptions and their moderating impact on Israeli and American policy form a new Iran concept reminiscent of its 1973 namesake and of the systemic failures that preceded the October 7 massacre.

Meanwhile, most of the restrictions put in place by the 2015 nuclear deal will expire by the end of next year, rendering the question of Iran’s adherence moot. And the forces that could be taking action aren’t:

The European Union regularly issues boilerplate press releases asserting its members’ “grave concern.” American decisionmakers and spokespeople have created the unmistakable impression that their reservations about the use of force are stronger than their commitment to use force to prevent an Iranian atomic bomb. At the same time, the U.S. refuses to enforce its own sanctions comprehensively: Iranian oil exports (especially to China) and foreign-currency reserves have ballooned since January 2021, when the Biden administration took office.

Israel’s response has also been sluggish and ambiguous. Despite its oft-stated policy of never allowing a nuclear Iran, Israel’s words and deeds have sent mixed messages to allies and adversaries—perhaps inadvertently reinforcing the prevailing sense in Washington and elsewhere that Iran’s nuclear efforts do not present an exigent crisis.