Even after the completion of the Gaza “war” Israel will still have a big security problem up north.
IMO there’s a big temptation for the Israeli hawks to try and get the US to help fix that. Why stop at ethnic cleansing in Gaza when you can use the provocation of the war to cause a wider conflict and drag in the US to clobber all around them.
That would fix their northern security issue with Hezbollah and rattle the cages of Iran and Syria. Meanwhile the theft in the West Bank could be accelerated.
So, as if things weren’t bad enough already, it’s in Israel’s interest to escalate the situation.
Interesting, but as always with Friedman, not pithy enough. He needs a management summary first paragraph. Plus, have you ever noticed he often reveals something that’s pissing him off in his columns. In this case those pesky “campus based Hamas apologists” Grrr
There is no way Gaza could ever have become a Dubai but that doesn’t invalidate the comment about leadership. Except it wasn’t just Hamas leadership at fault, it was US leadership, the wider western leadership and fundamentally post Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli leadership. While the sins of the West over the last 16 years of the Gaza concentration camp are ones of omission, Israel’s are those of commission. Friedman first tries to dilute Israel’s culpability, but then does attribute some blame to Netanyahu later in the article. Which I found inconsistant. .
But I think in the end he comes fundamentally to the same conclusion as above. He cites regimes that need conflict to maintain their control, from Hamas to Putin and beyond, and that is exactly where Netanyahu and his rightwing pals are today. They need the conflict to continue.
I always go first to Mr Friedman’s columns. He merits all your accolades.
Speaking of “hoping that it would lose” as in allowing Hamas to run in Gaza’s election, makes me think how often the world hopes for the best, thinking people will evolve positively. We misread Brexit. We misread Putin even as he massed along Ukraine’s borders. We said China’s economic advances would lead a democratising spirit. And we’re saying that neither these bastions of democracy, the US and Europe, can possibly turn reactionary!
I suspect the human race suffers from a triumph of optimism over experience. Or unclear vision.
I think that people are people, whether Pakistani, Palestinian, Filipino, Berber, Irish, Chinese, Dutch or Maori. They may have different cultures, but these just overlay the same set of needs and inclinations, varieties and qualities of character. In the democratic west we’re lucky to have been able to organise into relatively decent societies for now but it hasn’t always been that way, and there’s no reason to think it has to continue either. And some cultures already reject western ways as fundamentally wrong.
We will need to be very careful if what we perceive as the present freedoms and rights are to continue. Mankind’s natural inclination is brutality and oppression by a few powerful individuals against a weaker majority. In my opinion.
A ceasefire now is the only way to diffuse the situation. That’s why Netanyahu and extremist ministers, like the two I reference below (read about them, they’d be in prison if they lived in Europe, not in power) don’t want one.
Israel is using genocide in Gaza to goad its neighbours and assuming weak Biden will be fooled into supporting a wider conflict. Never has a shittier tail wagged a more stupid dog.
In this case those pesky “campus based Hamas apologists” Grrr 
