Anshel Pfeffer

Jerusalem For weeks the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had been preparing for an assault on Rafah. Yet when the order finally came on Monday night, it caught Israel’s generals by surprise. This was despite the fact that two armoured divisions had been deployed on Gaza’s southern border, and hundreds of thousands of leaflets printed warning the local population to evacuate to a ‘humanitarian area’ on the coast. Twice the plan to drop the leaflets over Rafah had been postponed, following American pressure. On Monday morning, when the green light came, the plan was to give civilians at least a week to move. Ten hours later the tanks moved in. There was another reason for the generals’ surprise.

Jerusalem The idea of a Saudi-Israel rapprochement would have been unthinkable not so long ago, and yet, shortly before the 7 October attacks, it was on the cards. The Emirates and Bahrain had recognised Israel’s sovereignty. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) was positioning Saudi Arabia to do the same. Now Joe Biden – who on Tuesday said he was ‘outraged’ at a convoy strike that killed seven people – is desperately trying to see if he can get things moving again. Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, is in Saudi Arabia this week meeting with MBS in a last-ditch attempt to save Biden’s grand design for Middle East peace.

Jerusalem On 7 October, Israeli security officials were already questioning how long they would be allowed to fight in Gaza. As the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) hurriedly mobilised more than 300,000 reservists, one official told me that ‘destroying Hamas depends on the length of our window of legitimacy’. Last week, I was on an embed with an IDF unit in Gaza City. As the sun set over the Mediterranean, I checked the date on my watch and realised the 18th day of the ground campaign had just ended. During the 2009 and 2014 Gaza ground offensives, the IDF was forced to stop fighting by the 18th day and accept a ceasefire (brokered both times by the Egyptians and forced on it by the US).

Jerusalem Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza is rapidly evolving into a war with all of Iran’s proxies on its borders, including Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah. Its outcome will determine the country’s future for a generation, perhaps longer. The conflict is not even in its third week, and as I write these words the inevitable ground invasion of Gaza has still not begun, and yet this is already proving to be an epochal episode in the country’s history.  The Hamas terror attack on 7 October not only revealed a conceptual flaw in Israel’s regional strategy, exposed glaring problems within its celebrated intelligence services and caused the terrible deaths of some 1,400 Israelis. It also shook the self-confidence of Israelis to their core.

Jerusalem ‘Netanyahu’s coming back soon, and he’ll be back with a vengeance!’ Simcha Rothman’s eyes flashed as he made his bold prediction. The normally mild-mannered lawyer, an ultra-nationalist Knesset member, was convinced. ‘He’s coming back and it’s all the left-wing’s fault for demonising him. If it wasn’t for them, the right-wing would have found a different leader by now. But the left made him into an icon and much more dangerous.’ Will Rothman be vindicated soon? It’s been a year since Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, was forced into opposition by an eclectic coalition of parties united only by their determination to keep him out office.

Jerusalem For nearly ten months now, ever since his surprising elevation to the Israeli prime minister’s office, Naftali Bennett has been focused mainly on one thing. He has been trying to prove to Israelis that he can be every bit the master statesman his predecessor, the eternal Benjamin Netanyahu was. And by all accounts that has worked well. He’s had two successful meetings with Joe Biden and met twice with Vladimir Putin as well, the second of those meetings, a surprising flight to Moscow after the invasion of Ukraine began, was made in the hope of brokering a ceasefire between the two countries.

The world’s eyes are, naturally, all on Ukraine. But elsewhere in Europe, diplomats are locked in a series of talks to prevent an altogether different war in another region. In a hotel in Vienna, negotiators from Britain, Germany, France, Russia and China have been meeting their Iranian counterparts. In an adjacent hotel, negotiators from the United States are waiting to see Iran’s latest proposals. This is the eighth — and perhaps the last — round of talks which have gone on intermittently for the past ten months over the potential return of the US to the Iranian nuclear agreement, which Donald Trump’s administration withdrew from in 2018.