After the Ceasefire: The Gathering Storm
James Quillian,Economist, Political Analyst, Natural Law

The formal end of the war settles nothing. It merely clears the ground for the next round of fighting to begin with almost no interval. Hatred of Israel already runs vast and deep throughout the Middle East. The conflict has raised that hatred to a pitch never recorded before. At the same time, the war has planted the seeds of open contempt for Israel in capitals and streets far beyond the region. That contempt has not yet found its full expression, but the conditions for it are now in place and will not remain dormant.

No agreement signed at a negotiating table can erase the central fact that the war failed to satisfy the deepest ambitions of the principal actors. The desire to remove Israel as a functioning state endures. It is voiced in the language of anti-Zionism by some and in the language of resource control by others. Neither motive has been extinguished. The parties that hold these ambitions have not surrendered them.

Behind the visible governments, the unseen hands that shape policy for both sides remain active. Their objectives have not been abandoned and will not be abandoned by a signature on paper.

Any settlement therefore evades the real contest rather than resolves it. The fighting has left the main belligerents diminished. Israel, in particular, now confronts the probability of being overwhelmed by a coalition whose precise membership is still forming. That coalition will appear. When it does, Israel is likely to be overrun and thereby removed as a standing threat in the eyes of much of the Middle East.

The war has changed the arithmetic of power in the region. It has not altered the underlying will to see the Jewish state disappear. That will has simply been given new time and new space in which to organize. The next phase will not require another formal declaration. It will arrive through the steady accumulation of hostility that the recent fighting has made both deeper and more widely shared.