Early in the Yom Kippur War, then-Israeli general Ariel Sharon decided that his priority should be to cross the Suez Canal into Egypt, even before Israeli forces had pushed the Egyptian army out of the Israeli bases they had captured in the Sinai Peninsula. He had multiple goals for this drive into enemy territory, which were very much in keeping with longstanding IDF doctrine: surrounding the Egyptians, putting them on the defensive, and making their leaders fear that they could suffer worse results than simply a failed invasion of Israel.

I was reminded of this episode by the recent, and so-far successful, Ukrainian assault on Russian territory. Vladislav Davidzon observes a more immediate connection between this bold move and what’s been going in Israel:

Kyiv has long been frustrated at being provided with just enough support from Washington in order to not lose—but not enough to overcome the numerically superior and better financed Russian army. The Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has expressed that frustration publicly, stating that “our partners are afraid of Russia losing the war.”

The Ukrainians had planned this type of operation for a long time—reports of Kyiv’s plots to launch incursions into Russia go back to early 2023. Tellingly, however, the decision to proceed came exactly a week after Israel had carried out a pair of high-profile assassinations deep in enemy territory.

Kyiv observed carefully how Israel conducted its strikes immediately after Prime Minister Netanyahu returned from a triumphant speech before the U.S. Congress. In fact, earlier this week the chair of the Ukrainian Parliamentary Committee on National Security and Defense, Roman Kostenko, explicitly [cited] the Israeli example in a televised interview.

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.