On outposts – Rami Khouri being interviewed by democracy now:

‘JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Rami Khouri, I wanted to ask you: In terms of Israel’s strategy, if Israel does want to prevent a regional war, why, for instance — what’s your assessment of its repeated now bombings of airports in Syria and what the impact that could be on spreading the war? RAMI KHOURI: Israel has been doing that for many years, bombing Iraq and Syria and Lebanon. And they are probably mostly bombing units that are close to Iran or linked to the transport of equipment or people from Iran to these different outposts where it has allies across the Arab world. That’s the assumption that most people have. And these attacks are designed to disrupt this linkage between Iran and allies in Syria and other Arab countries.
It doesn’t work very well, though. You know, the Israelis are quite sophisticated, but they’re also quite simplistic and stupid when it comes to not learning the lessons of their own repeated strategy that doesn’t work. You know, they say now they want to wipe out Hamas and take away the threat, and they say if Hezbollah gets involved, they’re going to wipe out Lebanon. They said that four or five times. They occupied Gaza. They occupied south Lebanon. I was in Lebanon. I lived there for 20 years, and I was there in the 2006 war. So, they’ve done these things. They’ve caused great misery to Lebanon and Gaza. And where are the two strongest forces now that challenge Israel in a way it’s never been challenged before? They’re in Lebanon and Gaza. Why? Because Israel, in its tough guy, Joe Palooka cartoon approach to diplomacy and warfare and relations across the region, relies simply on its ability to beat the hell out of anybody and destroy countries. And you’re seeing it in Gaza today. It’s unbelievable what they’re doing in physically destroying a society’s basic infrastructure and human needs. But it doesn’t work. They don’t realize all this does is generate greater resistance a year or two down the road, with greater secrecy, higher technology levels, more coordination and a stronger sense of defiance.
And I should add here that, you know, Hezbollah and Hamas — Hamas is an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, which means the Islamic resistance movement. “Resistance” is the key operative phrase in Hamas. Hezbollah calls itself, you know, informally, the resistance, the Muqawama. And resistance is a key — maybe the key — driver of what these groups and others in the region are doing. And the Israelis don’t seem to understand this, because they’re the ones being resisted. And with the resistance, there’s also defiance. So, when the U.S. sent the forward naval task force a couple weeks ago and it warned Iran and its allies not to do anything, the next day there were three or four small little attacks against American targets or American-allied targets in Iraq and in Yemen and in other places. So, defiance and resistance are two dynamics that are so significant in the mind of people who are standing up to both Israel and the United States and others. And this has to be appreciated much more seriously for anybody who’s trying to analyze the region, and certainly for anybody who’s trying to act politically or militarily or diplomatically, including the Israelis and the Americans and the Europeans and others.’

Read the whole interview here.

Khouri has something to say, even if you don’t like it or disagree with him.
Israel is seen by quite a few people as a colonial enterprise. Of course the US, to name just one other example, has been a colonial enterprise as well, but it’s too late to reverse that enterprise. For all kinds of reasons, also because of Israeli hubris, the state of Israel seems to be something that can be reversed.
(I’ve often asked the question, also in my novels, how is this is going to work, given the fact that Israel has nuclear weapons, but maybe they’ll work around it.)

As I sated before Hamas has already won this war, on the first day, the fact that much what happened that day indeed resembles a pogrom doesn’t matter so much.

And the quiet on the Lebanese border might less have been the result of deterrence, and just a clever game of Hezbollah and Iran.

Israel has been revealed as weak, or at least as less powerful than Israel wanted to be, there are no attractive options for Israel to regain this image of strength of invincibility.

The comparisons with Afghanistan and Iraq are appropriate, but unlike the US Israel doesn’t have a homeland somewhere else, neither have the Palestinians, this why this conflict might get out of hand in a way that will threaten the rest of the world as well.