Israel, Gaza, Trump: The Realistic Options Now

The options not long ago included: winning the war. That option has seemingly been removed.

If Netanyahu walks away from this deal, his prospects will not be good: he will have Trump against him, as well as the bulk of Israeli society.

What options remain?

1. To run up the white flag in Gaza.
2. To end the whole set of wars — not just in Gaza, but also Lebanon and Syria, withdrawing Israeli forces everywhere except perhaps the Golan Heights, where America accepts Israeli rule.
3. To plan on resuming the war after the first stage of the present deal. It might, however, be a resumption in worse conditions, without the support that had been hoped for from Trump.
4. To treat the Gaza and Lebanon truces as a good occasion for shifting the military focus to Iran.

One could envisage a deal with Trump:

“We’ll let the Gaza war end unfinished, as you say — as long as you and we together use the opportunity to take out Iran.”

Trump might well go for it. It would be a great victory for America, too, after all. It would even create a foundation, thus far absent, for the goal of some of his advisers of getting America out of the Middle Eastern conflicts. That goal is still at this point a dangerous delusion, indeed a repetition of Obama’s mistakes, which Trump had to correct already in 2017. But with the Islamic Republic defeated, it could finally gain a degree of realism.

It could be done two ways.

First, by completely destroying Iran’s nuclear program. Israel would do the bulk of the work, as long as America would fill in at the critical points where its superior bomb-power is needed.

But second, it could also be done by toppling the Islamic Republic regime. With the Islamist regime gone, air forces and special forces together could thoroughly destroy the Iranian nuclear program.

Surveys of Iranian opinion, run to be sure by Iranian exiles — but quite skillfully using scientific survey tools to get around the difficult circumstances — indicate that the successor regime would be surprisingly cooperative. It could prove to be the most cooperative regime for the West and for Israel in the entire region.

With the Islamic Republic gone, the entire Axis of Resistance – Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis – would totter much more than it already has.

Syria and Turkey, too, would have to become more cooperative with the West.

It has one thing still more to commend it: It could be the only decent way out from the current predicament.