The Israeli government has no idea what it is doing. Literally. The current government was a barely held together coalition prior to October 7. In the direct aftermath, they formed a unity government and war cabinet that collapsed last week.

Their prime minister has been indicated on corruption and bribertmy charges, which are currently on hold for obvious reasons. By most indications his primary motivation in this matter is to stay in power himself, with Israel’s national interests being secondary.

Individual members of IDF leadership have called Israel’s stated objectives “unachievable”.

Israel simultaneously wants to live in peace as a liberal Jewish state without commiting any form of ethnic clensing; and achieve its manifest destiny of establishing a Jewish theocracy across Judea and Samaria.

These are deep questions that get to the core of what Israel is and stands for. Questions that are to be answered by the Israeli constitution in the 50s. That never happened because Israel was never able to agree on a constitution [0].

Right now, Israel is just reacting, without any long term strategic vision. Various factions are trying to use that chaos to advance their own long term vision.

[0] Which led to the big judicial reform constitutional crisis that was a giant political crisis before October.

“Treat others the way you want to be treated”.

Go back in time 20 years and make better policy decisions that would have prevented such an extremist government from taking power in Gaza. [0].

Or, go back in time several months and back off on the Gaza offensive before Hezbolla felt compelled to get involved.

That might sound like a bunch of hindsight. However, today is 20 years ago in 2044. The decisions Israel is making now are setting the stage for its future security challenges.

Today might also be the several months ago for Iran getting involved directly. Given how constrained they have been up to this point, the way to avoid it is clear: deascalate the conflict; Iran has no desire to start a war with you, stop giving ammunition to the forces that want them to declare war on you [1].

I will grant that policy solutions take time. However, Israel has time. Prior to October 7th, they were in a holding pattern with everyone but Hamas. There were still tensions and security concerns, but no one was interested in poking at it. Further, Israel was building relationships with its neighboors in an anti-Iran block which is critical for its long term security.

This leaves just the question of how to deal with Gaza. Again, a long term solution requires long term policy. In the immediate after math and commision of the October 7 attack, I have no objectification to the responce. An accute military threat requires an accute response.

However, it is important to remember that the only reason the October 7 attack succeeded was a massive on the part of the IDF. This means that once the accute attack was resolved, Israel could have simply fixed its defenses and then would have had time to pursue different policies that would gradually lower tensions and might eventually lead to actual peace.

[0] I’m not going to go over 20 years of policy blunders here. But they include rather explicitly propping up and legitimizing Hamas at the expense of more moderate factions.

[1] Note that one of those forces is Netenyahu, who has been trying to start a war with Iran for years. Although the bigger issue for Iran is loosing the respect of its regional proxies.

The difference between physics and magic is that physics works by describing the forces acting on a system. To predict an outcome, you just progressivly apply those forces over time.

With magic, you just specify the outcome, but not how you get there.

This is how we know that thermodynamics is magic. Conservation laws and Lagrangeans too.

https://xkcd.com/2904/