How will Israel know when they have beaten Hamas and secured their nation?

[Chainfire]

33. While generally true, a war can be also won when the enemy are all killed or displaced as well as by surrender.

I have no doubt that Israel will come out of this war with something that has the look and feel of victory. There will be speeches and parades heroes, martyrs and marble monuments to the fallen; but there will not be a lasting peace.

I believe that Hamas started this war in such a brutal manner that so that Israel would overreact. If that is so, even in surrender, even with thousands of dead, even with tens of thousands of homeless refugees, they will have scored a strategic victory, for they attained their goals. Nothing else makes any sense because Hamas knew what would happen if they brutally massacred a thousand innocent people. The leadership of Hamas may be cunning and evil, but they are not stupid.

The way that this war has been prosecuted will insure that there will be no more Arabs or Muslims anywhere that believe that there is any path to a peaceful solution to the problems in the region, and Israel will never live in peace. The bad thing is that it is not just Arabs and Muslims that believe that the war, as it is being fought, does not have the feel of justice. It is not anti-Semitism but humanism in play.

If Israel claims new territory they will never profit by it. If the far-right government of Israel think that that is victory the are deluding themselves. Israel may have done in Palestine what the Japanese did in Pearl Harbor and the "victory" may come back to haunt them.