The Walls are Closing in on Israel

A terrific op-ed from today's New York Times about the current situation in the Gaza Strip that I wrote about here earlier today. The author is a bit more lenient towards Israel than I was. Israelis think that Israel is in trouble:

"Between 1948 and 1982 Israel coped relatively well with the threat from conventional Arab armies. Indeed, it repeatedly trounced them. But Iran’s nuclear threat, the rise of organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah that operate from across international borders and from the midst of dense civilian populations, and Israeli Arabs’ growing disaffection with the state and their identification with its enemies, offer a completely different set of challenges. And they are challenges that Israel’s leaders and public, bound by Western democratic and liberal norms of behavior, appear to find particularly difficult to counter."