The war is over: Israel declares victory in region-shaping conflict – The Jerusalem Post

The war is over. The catastrophe that began with 6,000 gunmen’s surprise attack on 32 Israeli communities is over, because even if Gaza returns to spew fire, as it likely will, it will not reignite the regional war that it sparked in October 2023. 

The 15-month war that ended Sunday had three tiers: the military, the geopolitical, and the ideological. 

The military war was between the IDF and the jihadist armies that attacked the Jewish state, one from its south, one from its north, and two from afar. The geopolitical war pitted Israel against the jihadist axis and its two supporting superpowers. And the ideological war was about the jihadist idea that drove this war’s engineers. 

The ideological war is far from over, but that war isn’t against Israel alone, and it isn’t Israel’s to win. It’s mankind’s. In the two other wars, the result is unambiguous: Israel won. 

THE WAR’S military outcome was hinted already on its first day. Yes, Hamas’s motorcycles, zodiacs, pickup trucks, and hang gliders successfully crossed the border, and their 6,000 riders did a lot of killing and pillaging, but it took hardly 48 hours to kill, wound, capture, and chase away the entire invading force, to the last man.

The invaders’ plan, to reach the West Bank and join hands with its own militants, was thwarted, despite the IDF’s woeful unpreparedness. The Gazan fighter, once in combat, proved militarily undertrained and logistically naked. To accomplish the deeper invasion Hamas had in mind, it had to supply its troops with food, gas, and ammunition. If it had such capabilities, it never displayed them. 

This tactical flaw was compounded by fateful strategic misjudgments. 

Hamas’s assumption, that Hezbollah would invade the Galilee while it invaded the Negev, was dashed, but that was the smaller miscalculation. Hamas failed to predict that Hezbollah would be floored, as it was in multiple ways: its leadership was annihilated, its troops were decimated, its hardware was incinerated, and its outposts were razed. 

Hamas certainly failed to predict Hezbollah’s political crash, as its Lebanese rivals installed a president whom Hezbollah opposed, and thus broke Hezbollah’s stranglehold on Lebanese politics. 

Hamas’s miscalculations concerning Israel were even worse. Its invasion’s overarching assumptions, that the IDF would not dare enter Gaza’s dense urbanity, and that Israelis had lost the will to fight, proved unfounded. 

Gaza was invaded big time; Israel’s soldiers fought tooth and nail; Hamas’s troops were killed by the thousands; and Gaza’s houses, roads, plazas, and pavements became piles of rubble, cement, and dust. 

Yes, Hama’s offensive – as noted here the week it was launched – will be counted among military history’s most successful surprise attacks. However, by the same token, its planners’ strategic dilettantism will be counted alongside Hitler’s when he stormed Stalingrad and Japan’s when it bombarded Pearl Harbor. They had no idea what they were provoking. 

Much has been said about the Israeli intelligence failures that enabled the October 7 fiasco. Yet the massacre’s planners, all of whom are no longer with us, had their own intelligence failures: the ignorance of the IDF’s abilities and the underestimation of its esprit de corps. 

This is besides the broader failures of the war Hamas started, failures that it could not have predicted, but are still its attack’s results. 

Hamas’s attack triggered Iran’s attacks on Israel, which resulted in Israel’s counterattacks, which exposed Iran’s military weakness. Hamas’s attack also caused Hezbollah’s downfall, because it gave Israel the pretext to launch the gloveless attack it had prepared for years. 

Lastly, Hezbollah’s attack caused the downfall of the Syrian regime, and its army’s demolition by the IDF. Hezbollah supplied the best warriors who confronted Assad’s enemies in the Syrian civil war. Hezbollah’s defeat thus made the Syrian rebels decide that the time for their assault on Damascus had arrived. 

Yes, it was some chain reaction, and it now leaves Hamas all alone, staring at defeat through the ruins of Gaza’s tunnels and the haze of its scorched earth. 

This doesn’t mean that Israel’s victory is complete. It isn’t. The hostages have yet to return home, Hamas has yet to be replaced, and the pain of our losses – 1,844 killed and 23,907 wounded while 143,000 Israelis were displaced – will haunt us for decades.

Even so, the war as it unfolded since October ’23 has ended, and it ended in Israeli victory, because Hamas lost its Iranian roof, its Lebanese backyard, its Syrian flank, and also its geopolitical umbrella, after Russia’s loss of its Syrian fort.

It’s an incredible aftermath, a cataclysm, in fact, and the question is who are the Israelis who made it happen?

THE FIRST victors in this war are the Israeli foot soldier, the college-age regular who stormed Hamas and Hezbollah, and each of the 300,000 reservists who left home, family, and work to risk their lives in this war’s multiple fronts. 

The second victors are the same security forces whose failures enabled the October 7 debacle: the intelligence agencies that located and harpooned the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah in Gaza, Beirut, and Tehran; the ground forces that overran Gaza and south Lebanon; and the air force that launched flawless attacks in multiple arenas between Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran. 

Beyond them lurked the military industries, whose drones did wonders in Gaza’s alleys and tunnels, and whose interceptors helped fend off some 350 ballistic and cruise missiles fired here from Iran. 

In between all these, one man looms tall as the embodiment of what we have been through since the October 7 attack: Chief of Staff, Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi 

Halevi will be recalled as the soldier whose failures of judgment, operational wisdom, mental resilience, and humble leadership encapsulated everything that happened here during the war that began with Hamas’s massacre and ended with its masterminds’ defeat. 

www.MiddleIsrael.net

The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.