Pushed across the Rubicon

Hamas has made old Gaza an impossibility in the minds of Israelis

Julius Caesar crosses the Rubicon River, Adolphe Yvon

The various Palestinian uprisings (see Wikipedia list below) have all been about keeping Israel on notice and on edge: this problem is not going away.

• In the Israeli–Palestinian conflict:

  • First Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation lasting from December 1987 to 1993

  • Second Intifada, also called Al-Aqsa Intifada, a period of intensified Israeli-Palestinian violence, which began in late September 2000 and ended around 2005

  • 2014 Jerusalem unrest, a series of violent acts and attacks in Jerusalem in 2014 sometimes referred to as "Intifada"

  • 2015–2016 wave of violence in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict – 2015 escalation in Israeli–Palestinian conflict, sometimes referred to as "Al-Quds Intifada" or "Jerusalem Intifada" or "Knife Intifada"^[19]

  • 2023 Israel–Hamas war, referred to by some commentators as the Third Intifada^[20]

Just enough violence and terror, systematically applied, is believed to wear down an opponent.

Except the history of terrorists getting their end goal is sparse, because, in the end, organized military power is superior (meaning, traditional military effort + terror < traditional military effort alone). Thus, you can make a bad situation worse but you cannot fix it with terror. Yes, you can ward or drive off intervening powers through your staying power (primarily military resilience), but, even there, your victories tend to be pyrrhic (an environment that much more damaged instead of a return to some hope-for, better past).

You either win out militarily or you don’t win at all.

The Palestinians are never going to win out militarily over Israel. The Arab world simply does not sufficiently care about their plight to risk it — much less make it so. They never have and they never will.