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.

Yesterday I saw an unconfirmed report that the Biden administration has offered Israel a massive arms deal in exchange for a promise not to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. Even if the report is incorrect, there is plenty of other evidence that the White House has been trying to dissuade Jerusalem from mounting such an attack. The thinking behind this pressure is hard to fathom, as there is little Israel could do that would better serve American interests in the Middle East than putting some distance between the ayatollahs and nuclear weapons. Aaron MacLean explains why this is so, in the context of a broader discussion of strategic priorities in the Middle East and elsewhere:

If the Iran issue were satisfactorily adjusted in the direction of the American interest, the question of Israel’s security would become more manageable overnight. If a network of American partners enjoyed security against state predation, the proactive suppression of militarily less serious threats like Islamic State would be more easily organized—and indeed, such partners would be less vulnerable to the manipulation of powers external to the region.

[The Biden administration’s] commitment to escalation avoidance has had the odd effect of making the security situation in the region look a great deal as it would if America had actually withdrawn [from the Middle East].

Alternatively, we could project competence by effectively backing our Middle East partners in their competitions against their enemies, who are also our enemies, by ensuring a favorable overall balance of power in the region by means of our partnership network, and by preventing Iran from achieving nuclear status—even if it courts escalation with Iran in the shorter run.