You end a war when you win it. Or you end it when you realize you can’t win it.
But in the Middle East today, we have an endless war. To be precise, a war Israel is winning but not ending.
A war whose hostilities are being forever extended and prolonged. Even though Gaza has been razed to the ground, Lebanon is being put through the wringer, and no one knows what’s left of Hamas or Hezbollah, which threatened Israel’s security.
What we can be sure of is that their leaders aren’t in the best of health.
Of course, Iran clearly has a lot more resources at its disposal, though (despite the assessments and aspirations of the “Axis of Resistance”) the broader region has not erupted or shown any inclination to do so.
So the plan the Hamas leadership attempted to set in motion with the incursion of 7 October has failed.
One year on, one conclusion we can draw is that the West and moderate Arab countries have “proved incapable of stopping the war” (Le Monde, 9/10).
The other is that Israel is prolonging the war until certain objectives, which remain somewhat unclear, are achieved.
Even so, it would be a mistake to believe a war can be ended by force of arms alone, without negotiations of some sort.
There is no doubt that, after the initial shock of 7 October, Israel has taken the upper hand and is in full control of where its operations go from here.
If the aim was (as Israel originally announced) to dismantle Hamas and Hezbollah, it has largely succeeded. It will take the terrorist organizations years to get back on their feet.
But if the goal was to redraw the geopolitical map of the region, then that will be very difficult to achieve without sitting down around a negotiating table.
And this is the crucial question the Israeli leadership and their Western allies have to answer. Still more so, if we accept that the war has gone well for them and that could well be the best time for them to come to the table.
To recall an observation made by Napoleon Bonaparte, who no one could accuse of not knowing how to fight.
“You can do a lot with bayonets,” he said. Except sit on them!”.
