Thread by @ArminRosen

As I've tweeted before, there are aspects of this proposed ceasefire agreement that are very bad for Israel and the US. Seems like Trump wants a spectacular quick win on the hostage issue before inauguration day, regardless of the long-term cost to US interests. Not ideal. But:

Israel's great underrated achievement of the war has been its ability to maintain a diverse range of high-tempo operations against its enemies for well over a year, without much diplomatic, economic, or even social cost...

Proceeding from the counter-intuitive insight that a long war actually favors Israel—something no one would've thought like, two years ago—Netanyahu has proven brilliant at extending the operational timeline against overwhelming pressure to wrap things up...

Meanwhile the Israeli people and the IDF have proven capable of fighting such a war. The social fabric has held, the ecnomy is actually growing, and the IDF has done things (whipping Hezb, routine Yemen strikes, destruction of the whole Sy military in two days etc) over the past year that would've seemed unlikely or even impossible for it before 10/7

I've tweeted before that Israel's current war might be a 5-10 year event, with various phases of intensity. The key, from Jerusalem's perspecitve, is to figure out how to keep fighting. Imo any hostage deal has to be seen in that context...

Again, time favors the Israelis. They are not fighting coherent or united societies—the Iranian regime is weak and internally loathed; the West Bank Palestinians are in an incipient state of civil war, and Hamas is about to lose much of its last strategic asset, ie the hostages

Ie, this can be a very bad hostage deal on paper. It is insane that they aren't getting every hostage out at once, and deeply galling that the Americans aren't being released—unlike the Thai and Russian hostages, who were released well over a year ago. Giving up Philadelphi is deeply reckless...

But if the goal is to create a broader horizon for a bigger victory, it might not look like such a disaster a year from now. There were those who feared the first hostage deal was capitulation. They turned out to be very wrong.