We may have all recently witnessed a key piece of history play out in the Middle East. "There is a very good chance that you won't be able to understand the 21st century without understanding the Twelve-Day War," former Israeli lawmaker Michael Oren tells David Remnick of the New Yorker. Oren is a frequent critic of Benjamin Netanyahu but nonetheless praises the Israeli leader's military initiative against Iran's nuclear sites, which culminated in US strikes. In the most optimistic scenario, all this plays out in a "new era of stability" for Israel, though Remnick's piece counters with caution and a question: "What is the country becoming?"
"Israel has shown, time and again, that it is better at winning wars than at winning what comes after," he writes. "The celebrations are real, but so is the dread—about the next missile, the next front, the next generation raised amid the rubble and the rage." Remnick finds that the military offensive in Gaza is no longer forefront on people's minds, but that might not last:
- "For all the triumphalism, for all the talk about an imminent golden age, Israel's future is still shadowed by the ugly persistence of occupation, the long and bitter memory of its enemies, and the deepening moral cost of Gaza. The battered, nearly levelled cities of the Strip look like a reckoning deferred. Iran's regime may be chastened, but it is not gone, and the nuclear question may resurface before long." (Read the full piece.)
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