North Macedonia (Brussels Morning Newspaper), Hamas has decisively and unambiguously won the Iron Swords or al-Aqsa Flood war (the epithet depends on whose side you are).
1. It killed well over 2000 Israelis (of a population of 10 million), about half of them soldiers.
2. It stopped dead in its tracks emigration to Israel (Aliyah) and encouraged immigration by those who came from Israel, amounting to a debilitating brain drain.
3. It halted foreign direct investments in Israel (especially in the burgeoning hi-tech sector).
4. It decimated the Israeli economy, plunging it into a massive contraction as defense-related spending climbs past the 5% of GDP mark. Israel’s credit rating has already been downgraded and more is to come. The costs of the war hitherto are in the billions, with almost a billion USD spent in a single night to fend off an Iranian aerial attack with drones, cruise and ballistic missiles.
5. The issue of Palestine and the Palestinians has now become by far the most pressing item on the geopolitical agenda. A Palestinian State is just a question of time. It could serve as a launchpad for attacks on Israel which would ultimately lead to its demise as the sole Jewish state.
6. The war and Hamas conclusively turned ill-informed, Jew-hating, and virtue-signaling public opinion against Israel and the Jews on both the woke left and the al right, but also among the denizens of the mainstream. Governed by a far-right, intransigent, and dumb political leadership, Israel’s blatant war crimes in the Gaza campaign have rendered it an overnight pariah state whose image in the West and even in the USA is far worse than China’s, North Korea’s, and Russia’s.
7. The conduct of the war drove a wedge between Israel and its only ally, the mission-critical USA. Consequently, Israelis have begun to seriously contemplate the demise of Israel as a reality.
8. The prolonged operation in Gaza exposed Israel’s army and much-hyped military prowess as propaganda paper tigers. Over the past few decades, the IDF has become a glorified militia with an Air Force. The younger generations are hedonistic and not keen on sacrifice. Budgets have been cut to the quick. Seven months in, the war is at a stalemate, with crucial capabilities of Hamas still intact and half the hostages either dead or in captivity.
9. Israel’s internal cohesion has crumbled: no solidarity and no consensus are anywhere to be found. The glue that held the improbable concoction that is the State of Israel has all but evaporated, exposing the irreconcilable fault lines in Israeli society.
10. Israel and its leaders have ended up in the dock in multiple international courts, accused of a variety of crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Even Hamas could not have hoped for a better outcome of its incursion into Israeli territory on October 7, 2023.
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