It didn’t take long after Secretary Clinton arrived in the Middle East for Egypt to successfully broker a cease fire between Israel and the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. If more rockets are fired into Israel, the cease fire will be violated, so it appears that Netanyahu has succeeded in stopping the rocket fire, for now. He also had the opportunity to test his Iron Dome missile defense system (which appears to have worked surprisingly well). And, of course, he was able to diminish the Gazans’ stock of rockets and to take out a bunch of people on his kill list. He can claim tangible successes.
Egypt’s leader Mohamed Morsi was able to walk a very fine line in maintaining his country’s relationships with Israel and the United States without losing credibility at home. He emerges from the conflict with some credentials as a statesman.
The Gazans get some street cred for resisting, but that’s about all they get. They now have more broken infrastructure which will make it still harder for people to maintain a civil society. A lot of people got killed, including women and children, but also various leaders. Life in the Gaza Strip was a living nightmare before this conflict, and it will now be even worse.
I’m not sure what the Palestinians should do to try to keep up their quest for a state of their own, but resisting Israel with sporadic and ineffectual rocket fire is stupid and counterproductive. And if they think that they repelled a ground invasion with their rocket fire, they are simply wrong about that. They avoided a ground invasion because they agreed to stop firing rockets, and because the United States put tremendous pressure on Israel not to invade.
Things may look pretty good for Israel right now but they should be concerned that some of the rockets reached the outskirts of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. They should be concerned about how little support they had for their bombing campaign, including from American Jews. Their relationship with Egypt held, but just barely. Israel met its immediate goals, but the whole spectacle exposed some glaring new weaknesses and vulnerabilities. The status quo is bad for the Palestinians, but it’s bad for the Israelis, too.
