Uh oh. Billy Kristol is making predictions again. This time, he almost assures us, the Israelis are going to come out of this war significantly better off than they entered it. Why? I don’t know. Something about the terrain and setting more realistic goals. It’s idiocy, basically. But the most glaring idiocy is a talking point someone emailed Kristol directly from Tel Aviv. Gaza, it seems, is actually part of the nation-state of Iran, and the Israelis have actually just invaded Iran. If they succeed, they will have defeated Iran, but if they do not succeed, Iran will be victorious. I don’t know what they hell the people pushing this line are smoking, but it must be some Grade A shit.
I understand that Hamas is getting some military and financial support from Iran. That’s a little bit unusual because the people of Gaza are almost all Sunni Muslims (plus a few Christians) and Iran generally supports Shi’ite movements (like Hizbollah in Lebanon). So, the Gazan government, which is not very popular in Egypt, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia, is willing to accept aid from the heretical Persians. Nonetheless, cooperation between the two can only go so far. The truly hardcore members of Hamas are not natural friends of the revolutionary government in Tehran. An imperfect analogy might be the cooperation between Stalin’s Soviet Union and Churchill’s United Kingdom during the Second World War. They were united against fascism, even though they saw each other as mortal enemies (as became apparent immediately after the war). Would it make sense to say that the Battle of Stalingrad was really a fight against England? No, not really.
There is no obvious way for Israeli aggression in Gaza to restore Fatah to power there. It’s not clear that they can incentivize the Gazans to stop rocket attacks. And, by taking these actions, Israel is suffering another terrible blow in world opinion, which could translate to more boycotts and other painful repercussions. It could even begin to erode U.S. opinion to a point that politicians are forced to respond.
Even if this war were a war against Iran, it’s pretty stupid to wage a war that is almost ensured to benefit Iran. No? But that’s just a silly short-term talking point to try to justify something really idiotic. Israel is too weak to stop rocket attacks by force. They are too strong to worry about Iran. The Israelis are collectively hyperventilating. The whole nation needs to go Yoga class or something.
