This is the most difficult thing to assess, right? It seemed much clearer at the time that the original attack was aimed at being a spoiler (to say the least), and that an Abraham Accords II (A^2?) would be the basis for an ending. Learning more about Bidenworld (and Trumpworld's) thinking regarding the Saudi role in normalization convinces me that smart folks, and some not-so-serious folks, take this route very seriously.

This, however, is where I have (as a VERY non-expert person with a sudden and particular set of interests; I know you have a much more direct and longstanding viewpoint on these issues and even on my particular new home) three thoughts.

The first is that N. has also got some serious conflicts of interest, in that he is coming close to being *the* example of a democratic leader with a near-autocratic leader's interest (per Goemans/Chiozza and others) in prolonging conflict--and if he thinks he's gambling with Washington's chips, not his own, he has every incentive to keep doubling down. That produces spoiling dynamics of its own, even before we consider what the current coalition's more extreme members (and as I understand it N. is the centrist wing of this government...) would like to achieve.

The second is that public opinion beyond Israel is universally belong angry. Autocrats have a certain measure of freedom but not total freedom, and although we can debate how and how much "public opinion" matters this is one of those issues where it will, for some time. Both 1) and 2) point to a much longer timeframe for the "ultimately" than I am comfortable contemplating--almost but not quite a Keynesian "long run". And in the interim, ugly possibilities--an atomic Iran emboldened?--present themselves.

The third is that N. sometimes calls his risks exactly correctly but also errs on the side of optimism (perhaps because of a meta-calculation that he is, again, not playing with his own chips). That each escalation northward has been presented as "incremental" (publicly _and_ privately, it appears) suggests that he's sufficiently risk-acceptant (see also 1, but this is separate) that he might continually play the role of a spoiler himself.

Fourth, in this list of three, is my strong belief (weakly founded!) that if Gantz had been PM on the day of the attack (or anyone from the other wing of the Knesset) that any peace process would have been indefinitely scuttled. That it is Likud who "owns" the intelligence failures (and did you read the story about the women in the monitoring post? galling) is the only thing keeping any road to anything that looks like post-conflict alive.

So this is in some ways a "yes but" but it is also my sense (and, again, ironically this is not "my" region!) that the "but" is very large. Tying everything up with a bow would be challenging enough, but doing so under the domestic conditions shaping foreign policy--someone should coin a nifty term for that idea--seems very difficult.