The Israeli Officials I Speak With Tell Me They Know Two Things for Sure Chief among the reasons, Menon said, was that any military response would have quickly obscured just how outrageous and terrible the raid on Indian civilians and tourists was; “the fact of a terrorist attack from Pakistan on India with official involvement on the Pakistan side” would have been lost. Once India retaliated, the world would immediately have had what Menon called a “ho-hum reaction.” Just another Pakistani-Indian dust-up — nothing unusual here......... Moreover, Menon wrote, “an Indian attack on Pakistan would have united Pakistan behind the Pakistan Army, which was in increasing domestic disrepute,” and “an attack on Pakistan would also have weakened the civilian government in Pakistan, which had just been elected to power and which sought a much better relationship with India than the Pakistan Army was willing to consider.” He continued, “A war scare, and maybe even a war itself, was exactly what the Pakistan Army wanted to buttress its internal position.” ....... In addition, he wrote, “a war, even a successful war, would have imposed costs and set back the progress of the Indian economy just when the world economy in November 2008 was in an unprecedented financial crisis.” ......... In conclusion, said Menon, “by not attacking Pakistan, India was free to pursue all legal and covert means to achieve its goals of bringing the perpetrators to justice, uniting the international community to force consequences on Pakistan for its behavior and to strengthen the likelihood that such an attack would not take place again.” ......... it is instructive to reflect on the contrast between India’s response to the Mumbai terrorist attack and Israel’s response to the Hamas slaughter. ........... The massive Israeli counterstrike overshadowed Hamas’s terrorism and instead made the organization a hero to some. It has also forced Israel’s new Arab allies in the Abraham Accords to distance themselves from the Jewish state. ......... with some 360,000 reservists called up, Israel’s economy will almost certainly be depressed if Israel’s ouster of Hamas from Gaza takes months, as predicted. The economy is already expected to shrink more than 10 percent on an annualized basis for the last three months of the year. This after being ranked by The Economist as the fourth-best-performing economy among O.E.C.D. countries in 2022. ............ Israel, for all its faults, is a multicultural society where almost half of graduating doctors today are Arabs or Druze. Or that Hamas is a militant, Islamist organization that does not tolerate dissent or L.G.B.T.Q. individuals and has been dedicated to wiping the Jewish state off the face of the earth. ........... the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. .......... as Defense Minister Yoav Gallant put it, “wipe out” Hamas “from the face of the earth.” .............. The Israeli plan, according to Netanyahu, will be a “long and difficult” battle to “destroy the military and governmental capabilities of Hamas and bring the hostages home.” .............. they know two things for sure: Hamas will never again govern Gaza, and Israel will not govern a post-Hamas Gaza. ............. while Netanyahu and his band of Jewish supremacists are pledged to annex the West Bank without equal rights for the Palestinians there. The cost of occupying Gaza could overstretch the Israeli military and economy for years to come. ............ Just on Saturday he pointed to the heads of Israeli military intelligence and Shin Bet as responsible for missing the Hamas surprise attack while excusing himself of any blame. A day later, an outraged Israeli public forced the prime minister to retract his wartime recriminations against his colleagues. But the damage was done. .......... their prime minister is a person of such low character that he will blame them for everything that goes wrong and hog all credit for anything that goes right. .......... targeted use of force with limited, achievable goals may serve Israel’s long-term security and prosperity more than an open-ended war to eradicate Hamas. ............ Israel built an impressive society and economy, even if flawed, and Hamas took nearly all of its resources and built attack tunnels. ......... Please, Israel, don’t get lost in those tunnels.
Italy’s Prime Minister Broke Up With Her Boyfriend. It’s Actually Quite a Big Deal. she recently became the first head of government to announce on social media that she had dumped her boyfriend.......... “My relationship with Andrea Giambruno, which lasted nearly 10 years, ends here,” she wrote in October on X, formerly known as Twitter, informing the country that the couple had been drifting apart and it was time to call it a day. “I have nothing more to say on this,” she concluded. ......... the nature of power in Italy, where politics, media and business interests are toxically entwined. It says a lot about how the country is run. .......... It was a relationship made and lived in the media limelight. It would end that way, too. ........ “The revolution will never take place in Italy, because we all know each other.” The same is seemingly true for functional government.
The Two Things Worrying U.S. Military Officials About Israel and Hamas Ukraine is trying to join the West. Israel is trying to join a new Middle East. And Russia and Iran have teamed up to try to block both. ......... Iran-backed Hamas launched its war to stymie the Saudi-Israel normalization and prevent Tehran from being isolated, and that Vladimir Putin launched his war to stop Ukraine from expanding a Europe whole and free and prevent Moscow from being isolated. ...........
