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Commentary
Wall Street Journal

A Middle East Wake-Up Call

Hamas’s atrocities make complacency much harder to sustain. But will we face up to the Iranian threat?

walter_russell_mead
walter_russell_mead
Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship
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Caption
Israeli Flag Flies Over Western Wall, Jerusalem, Israel. (Paul Souders via Getty Images)

Almost a week after Hamas fanatics bent on murder slipped across the borders of Gaza, the world is still struggling to process the shock. It will be months or perhaps years before the full consequences of this attack can finally be assessed, and we do not know if the war in Gaza will spread across the Middle East and possibly beyond.

But three consequences of the attack can already be discerned. First, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahuhas been seriously and maybe irrevocably wounded. Mr. Netanyahu has argued that he was the indispensable man who alone had the stature and vision to guide a small nation in a rough world—even if the price of his continued leadership involved bringing an unruly and chaotic coalition to power and a year of all-consuming domestic political strife. That seems harder to justify now.

Read the full article in the Wall Street Journal.