Zalman Shoval

Israel has been caught in an impossible dilemma: how to choose or balance between the immediate fate of the hostages and the long-term national security concerns of Israel and its people.

Ireland, unfortunately, is not the only anti-Israel country in the world, though it ranks among the most obnoxious.

The elimination of Sinwar should indeed be seen as an important victory, but not yet a full achievement of Israel’s security and peace strategy. 

The rule for Israeli diplomacy, established by the late Moshe Dayan, still holds: risk a confrontation, if at all, only on absolutely essential issues.

As in the past, Israel will call on the support of its friends on both aisles of Congress, in the media, and among Jewish organizations – to come to an understanding with its all-important ally.

There is a fundamental difference between normalization leading to possible Palestinian statehood in the future, and preconditioning normalization on a Palestinian state now.

It must be clear that though this may be the beginning of the end there is still a long way to go before all or most of Israel's goals will be attained.

There is agreement that Hamas must be eliminated before we can move forward, but what happens with Gaza after the war?

Israel’s strategic goal in the war against Hamas in Gaza, in addition to its aims on the battlefield, must thus be overturning the Iran-Hamas design – a goal to be shared by the United States.

While Syrian opposition and human rights groups protested the immoral nature of rehabilitating Assad’s bloody regime, realpolitik, cynical or not, prevailed