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In early August 2021, amid another wave of saber-rattling with Iran, Defense Minister Benny Gantz declared that Israel was ready for a "multi-front" conflict.1 The cocksure statement, redolent of the hubris often found in Israel's military establishment, was delivered half as boilerplate and half as a warning that Israel is prepared for escalation. Viewed at the regional level, there are clear reasons for Israel's confidence. In recent years, rival regimes in Iraq and Syria have been demolished by US invasion and civil war, respectively, and Israel's new alliance with Gulf regimes, led by the UAE and, somewhat more quietly, Saudi Arabia, has borne fruit with the Abraham Accords. Moreover, little seems to stand in Israel's way as it forcibly reshapes the regional environment. It has assassinated numerous Iranian scientists, conducted ever more elaborate sabotage of Iranian nuclear sites, and regularly bombs Syria-conducting over 500 strikes in 2020 alone-all with perfect impunity.2 Yet the biting irony of Gantz's boast is that Israel was surprised by and woefully unprepared for the "multi-front" conflict that it triggered on its own "home" front in May and June 2021, when the disparate Palestinian populations it has long labored to keep separate in Gaza, J erusalem, the West Bank, and inside the Green Line rose up together against its domination.
There are many origins to what became the fourth Gaza War and the "unity intifada," but the proximate causes lay in the accelerating colonization and brutalization of Arab East Jerusalem and in the wider fever dreams, which long-time premier Benjamin Netanyahu specialized in stoking, of terminating the Palestine question and permanently cementing Israel's sovereignty over the land.3 The drama over Israel's fourth inconclusive national election in two years added further tension and may explain why things reached a boiling point when they did. To wit, altercations as Jewish settlers attempted to evict Palestinians from properties in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem spiraled into even more wanton violence after Netanyahu's attempt to form a government failed in early May. Before his competitors succeeded in forming the coalition that toppled him after twelve years in power, Israeli security services conducted a series of highly provocative raids at the Aqsa Mosque/Haram al-Sharif compound, storming it and attacking worshippers on successive days during...