Israel is already on the way to becoming a pariah state. Only the US really obstructs that in terms of global power politics.

And that protective arrangement allows Israel to behave as though it's more powerful than it is.

So, for example, the saber rattling at Hezbollah, sheer hubris.

They want to open up another war in Lebanon? I don't think they can defeat Hezbollah.

The alleged goal of destroying Hamas is meaningless, it won't happen. They claim, as of present,

to have killed 5,000 Hamas fighters. Assuming that doesn't include a large number of non-military

Hamas or just random civilians, it's still a small minority of the total fighting force.

Hamas are clearly

triaging their resources. For example, the rate of rocket fire slowed down, but the fighting

from the reporting seems to be pretty intense still, north and south. And I strongly suspect that

Israel is losing more fighters than it's letting on. So, for example, Wynet, Yed Aeronot,

recently published an article saying that

5,000 Israeli soldiers have been disabled in the war. They then edited that down to just over

2000. I'm not sure why, but even accepting that, it suggests that even with the lower figure,

the ratio of wounded an action to killed an action is either far higher than usual or Israel

has lost a lot more

than it admits to after 7th of October. So they've expended a lot of blood with little to show for it.

They precipitated a major international crisis in which they're increasingly isolated,

cost rifts within the Biden administration among the American public, particularly among Jewish

Americans.

And I think if the US was run by someone a little less invested in Cold War foreign policy

precepts, the US would already have taken a more pragmatic aloof stance by now.

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