In his recent book Israel Victory: How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated, Daniel Pipes makes the case that the strategies pursued by both the Jewish state and Western countries to solve the Israel-Palestinian conflict will never succeed, and argues for a very different approach. Michael Mandelbaum writes in his review:

The people of Gaza have not—unlike the Israelis Hamas attacked on October 7—been targeted for massacre. Gazans have, however, lost their homes on a large scale. Hamas’s tactics have obliged the IDF to damage or destroy an appreciable proportion of the buildings in Gaza. That may diminish the commitment to rejectionism there.

In the West Bank, [Pipes] recommends that the fall of the Palestinian Authority be followed by “tough Israeli rule . . . along the lines of what exists in Egypt and Jordan,” which should be accompanied by a concerted, protracted campaign to change Palestinian attitudes toward Israel. This exercise in what was once called “winning the hearts and minds” of the target population forms the second component of the author’s formula for Israeli victory.

The prospects for the Pipes strategy’s success are uncertain. What is certain however—and what emerges from Israel Victory with a clarity that is either bracing or dismaying, depending on one’s point of view—is that the other, prevailing ways of ending the Israel-Palestinian conflict have failed.

Yesterday, the beepers used by hundreds of Hizballah operatives were detonated. Noah Rothman puts this ingenious attack in the context of the overall war between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group:

[W]hile the disabling of an untold number of Hizballah operatives is remarkable, it’s also ominous. This week, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters that the hour is nearing when Israeli forces will have to confront Iran’s cat’s-paw in southern Lebanon directly, in order to return the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along Lebanon’s border under fire and have not yet been able to return. Today’s operation may be a prelude to the next phase of Israel’s defensive war, a dangerous one in which the IDF will face off against an enemy with tens of thousands of fighters and over 150,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israeli cities.

Seth Frantzman, meanwhile, focuses on the specific damage the pager bombings have likely done to Hizballah:

This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hizballah, but they will not have access to one of their hands. These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile.

Hizballah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hizballah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep [supply of recruits]. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but also because it draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

The overall challenge for Hizballah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to . . . roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hizballah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. . . . It will also now be concerned about the penetration of its operational security. When groups like Hizballah are in chaos, they are more vulnerable to making mistakes.