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A few thoughts on today, in no particular order. First, among Israelis: impossible to overstate the level of shock. The intelligence failure resembles 1973, but you almost have to go back to 1948 to find an analogue for the violence that played out in cities and towns. 🧵
It'll take a few days to know the scale of Israel's response. Netanyahu has historically been cautious about using military force. But he's now surrounded by a coterie of incompetent ideologues, and public opinion will probably be in favor of a dramatic change to the status quo.
The presence of so many Israeli hostages in Gaza will be an argument against a major ground offensive. But they are worth far more to Hamas alive than dead: the group will want to exchange them for prisoners to score a political victory.
That gets at a second point: why Hamas did this. The backdrop to today is not just the miserable conditions in Gaza, it's also a looming succession struggle in the West Bank, the historic unpopularity of Mahmoud Abbas and the possible collapse of the PA.
There is a bizarre analytical tendency to forget that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is decades old and rooted in real grievances. Or maybe not bizarre: it serves a political purpose to ignore that and blame everything on geopolitics ("Iran wants to sabotage normalization").
Third: not only will today's events put talk of normalization on hold, they should also put to rest the discredited idea that Israeli-Arab normalization would magically make the Israeli-Palestinian conflict go away.
And finally, a thought for far too many people on here: you shouldn't celebrate anything in this fucking conflict. It always ends in tears.
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