Israel on the Brink
If the Israelis find themselves facing difficult choices, so do their enemies.
By Eliot A. Cohen, The Atlantic
Israeli friends report an eerie calm: The hospitals are preparing for mass casualties, while citizens go about their more or less normal lives—and in the evening drag into place the steel plates that shut the windows to their safe rooms. For the residents of southern Lebanon, the atmosphere is no doubt considerably more fearful and uncertain, living as they do in a failed state dominated by Hezbollah that may soon feel the full weight of Israeli fury.
At such a time, the temptation, not altogether misplaced, is to focus on personalities: Ayatollah Ali Khameini, the aged follower of the maker of Iran’s revolution; Yahya Sinwar, the diabolical mastermind of the October 7 massacre; Hassan Nasrallah, the charismatic Hezbollah leader infuriated by the recent loss of his chief military aide, Fuad Shukr, to an Israeli strike; and above all Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, untrusted and untrustworthy, politically skilled but no statesman, intelligent but not wise, a former commando who shuns responsibility and is loathed by many, including, according to Israeli newspapers, his own generals.