Should Israel falter in its response against Hamas, the Middle East could explode into a renewed era of rampant Islamism and violent extremism.
More than 1,000 are dead in Israel, including more than a dozen U.S. citizens, following a massive campaign of brutal violence by the Islamist terror group Hamas.
Officials from across Israel have condemned Hamas’s atrocities as a 9/11 moment. There’s little reason to doubt that the new war between Israel and Hamas will carry all of the geopolitical consequences that such a comparison merits.
Key among those consequences is the possibility of a new era of state-sponsored Islamic terrorism.
The United States is sending munitions and other equipment to Israel and moving a carrier strike group to the eastern Mediterranean to support embattled Jerusalem.
White House officials say that there are no plans for the United States to have direct involvement in the new war. The carrier group is there as a warning to other nations to not engage in the fight.
That warning alone, however, underscores what makes this moment different in scope and severity than all of the previous bouts of violence between Hamas and Israel.
Israel is on the precipice. Violated by Islamist terrorists, it’s also surrounded by nations that could choose at any moment to support those terrorists should they feel it would overwhelm and, ultimately, destroy Israel.
Put simply, should Israel falter in its response against Hamas, the Middle East could explode into a renewed era of rampant Islamism and violent extremism such as that which followed 9/11. This time, however, the nations of the Arab world wouldn’t stay on the sidelines.
‘ISIS-Level Savagery’
There’s no doubt among officials that something fundamental has changed.
Hamas, a designated terrorist organization, has promoted the absolute destruction of Israel for more than 30 years.
There were attacks—wars even—but those rounds of violence always underscored a certain understanding between Israel and the Hamas terrorists that détente was the norm. Peaceful coexistence, however distant a thought, was a possibility.
The similarities between Hamas’s new war and the barbarism displayed by al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in recent decades suggest something different, however—something darker and more lasting.
It’s a difference that the United States is all too aware of.
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