J.E. Dyer
The Optimistic Conservative, Oct. 20, 2024
“So Israel has to win, not just look for an excuse to “settle.” To invoke the framework of motives and methods laid out by Basil H. Liddell-Hart in his 1954 book Strategy, Israel has to seek a “better peace.””
In the aftermath of Yahya Sinwar’s death, it’s easy to get distracted by both the incessant deluge of new events and the erroneous but common assumption that “ending the war” is now about getting the remaining hostages back.
In the interest, precisely, of not being thus distracted, I want to keep this brief and start not with a summary from the last 24 hours, absorbing though its details may be, but with a direct statement of priorities for the immediate future.
The summary is this. Israel’s priority must be winning the war, meaning not having to fight this war again, or spend any more time trying to tend an inherently unstable situation like the one in which Hamas rides along inviolate, on the constant invocation of an “Oslo” framework end-state that quite obviously is never going anywhere.
Winning the war must also mean that neither Hamas nor Hezbollah functions as a forward outpost of Iran snuggled under Israel’s armpit. The terror organizations must be neutralized for that purpose. It’s possible to rid Gaza of Hamas, and therefore that’s what must be done. It isn’t necessarily possible to entirely rid Lebanon of Hezbollah, because there’s a nominally separate government there that has to be dealt with. It may see its interests as continuing to involve Hezbollah. … [To read the full article, click here]
