![\"Israeli](\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2023\/10\/28\/multimedia\/25friedman-khjg\/25friedman-khjg-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale\")
\u9605\u8bfb\u7b80\u4f53\u4e2d\u6587\u7248<\/a>\u95b1\u8b80\u7e41\u9ad4\u4e2d\u6587\u7248<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n This war is being fought by and through nonstate actors, nation-states, social networks, ideological movements, West Bank communities and Israeli political factions, and it is the most complex war that I\u2019ve ever covered. But one thing is crystal clear to me: Israel cannot win this six-front war alone. It can win only if Israel \u2014 and the United States \u2014 can assemble a global alliance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unfortunately, Israel today has a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and a ruling coalition that will not and cannot produce the keystone needed to sustain such a global alliance. That keystone is to declare an end to the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the overhaul of Israel\u2019s relations with the Palestinian Authority so that it becomes a credible, legitimate Palestinian partner than can govern a post-Hamas Gaza and forge a broader two-state solution including the West Bank.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If Israel is asking its best allies to help the Jewish state seek justice in Gaza while also asking them to look the other way as Israel builds a settlement kingdom in the West Bank with the expressed goal of annexation, that is strategically and morally incoherent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It won\u2019t work. Israel will not be able to generate the time, the financial assistance, the legitimacy, the Palestinian partner or the global allies it needs to win this six-front war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And all six fronts are now hiding in plain sight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n First, Israel is fighting a full-scale war against Hamas in and around Gaza, in which, we can now see, Hamas still has so much residual capacity that it was able to launch a seaborne attack on Israel on Tuesday and on Wednesday fired long-range rockets toward Israel\u2019s southern port city of Eilat and northern port city of Haifa. Hamas\u2019s dream has long been the unification of the fronts surrounding Israel, regionally and globally. Israel\u2019s strategy has always been to act in ways to prevent that \u2014 until this Netanyahu coalition of ultra-Orthodox and Jewish supremacists came to power last December and began behaving in ways that actually helped foster the unification of the anti-Israel fronts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How so? The Jewish supremacists in Netanyahu\u2019s cabinet immediately began to challenge the status quo on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which is revered by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and where one of Islam\u2019s holiest sites, the Aqsa Mosque, stands. The Netanyahu government began taking steps to impose much harsher conditions on Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza held in Israeli jails. And it laid plans for a huge expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank to prevent a contiguous Palestinian state from ever coming into being there. This is the first Israeli government ever to make annexation of the West Bank a stated objective in its coalition agreement.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n On top of all of this, the United States appeared to be getting close to forging a deal for Saudi Arabia to normalize diplomatic and commercial relations with Israel \u2014 which would have been the crowning achievement of Netanyahu\u2019s effort to prove that Israel could have normal relations with Arab and Muslim states and not have to give one inch to the Palestinians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which leads to the second front: Israel against Iran and its other proxies. That is, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, Islamist militias in Syria and Iraq and the Houthi militia in Yemen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All of them in recent days have launched drones and rockets toward Israel or at U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria. I believe that Iran, like Hamas, saw the U.S.-Israel effort to normalize relations between Israel and Arab-Muslim states as a strategic threat that would have left Iran and its proxies isolated in the region. At the same time, I believe Hezbollah came to realize that if Israel obliterated Hamas, as it declared it would, Hezbollah would be next. It would also be much weaker without Hamas draining energy and focus from Israel\u2019s military. Therefore, Hezbollah decided that, at a minimum, it needed to open a low-grade second front against Israel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a result, Israel has been forced to evacuate some 130,000 civilians<\/a> from its northern border along with the tens of thousands of Israelis evacuated from the southwestern border with Gaza. This whole displacement puts a huge stress on housing and the Israeli treasury.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The third front is the universe of social networks and other digital narratives about who is good and who is evil. When the world gets this interdependent, when \u2014 thanks to smartphones and social networks \u2014 nothing is hidden and we can hear each other whisper, the dominant narrative has real strategic value. That social media was so easily manipulated by Hamas that the episode of a misfired Palestinian missile hitting a Gaza hospital was initially blamed on Israel is deeply disturbing, because these narratives shape the decisions of governments and politicians and the relationship between chief executives and their employees. Be advised: If Israel does invade Gaza, corporations everywhere will be facing competing demands from employees to denounce Israel or Hamas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The fourth front is the intellectual\/philosophical struggle between the international progressive movement and Israel. I believe that some elements of that progressive movement, which I realize is big and diverse, have lost their moral bearings<\/a> on this issue. For instance, we\u2019ve seen numerous demonstrations on American college campuses that essentially blame Israel for the barbaric Hamas invasion, arguing that Hamas is engaged in a legitimate \u201canticolonial struggle.\u201d These progressive demonstrators seem to believe that all of Israel is a colonial enterprise \u2014 not just the West Bank settlements \u2014 and therefore the Jewish people do not have the right either to self-determination or self-defense in their ancestral homeland, whether it\u2019s within post-1967 borders or pre-1967 ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And for an intellectual community seemingly concerned about nations occupying other nations and denying their right to self-rule, you don\u2019t see a lot of progressive college campus demonstrations against the biggest oppressing power in the Middle East today: Iran.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Besides crushing its own women seeking greater freedom of thought and dress, Tehran is effectively controlling four Arab states \u2014 Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq \u2014 through its proxies. Lebanon, a country I know well, has not been able to elect a new president for a year in large part because Iran refuses to allow the Lebanese to have any president who will not always bend to Tehran\u2019s wishes and interests. Unfortunately, independent Lebanese are powerless to remove Iran\u2019s grip over their Parliament and government, exercised largely through the barrel of Hezbollah guns. Middle East Eye reported<\/a> that back in 2014 Ali Reza Zakani, a Tehran city representative in the Iranian Parliament, was boasting about how Iran now rules in four Arab capitals: Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Sana, Yemen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is terrifying to see how many resources Hamas diverted to build weapons rather than Gaza\u2019s human capital \u2014 and how effectively it hid that from Israel and the world. Indeed, it is hard not to notice the contrast between Gaza\u2019s evident human poverty and the wealth of weaponry Hamas has built and deployed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n