The Gaza War, A Month After

Tallying the successes of the Gaza incursion:

The skeptics say the current state of affairs is identical to the situation that existed before the war: Hamas firing rockets and Israel reacting with extreme restraint. So, they say, everything is back to square one. Defense Minister Ehud Barak says nothing could be further from the truth.

It might have been a military victory -- if the goal was to convince Hamas that it is not Hezbollah, then this goal has been achieved -- but Israelis never seem overly cognizant of the way their actions are interpreted abroad. Some of these interpretations, of course, are rooted in anti-Semitism, and there's nothing much you can do about them. Some of these interpretations, however, are not anti-Semitic, and should be reckoned with. As time goes by, I wonder how much it would have hurt for Israel to first have gone to the UN Security Council to make its complaint against Hamas. It would have lost, obviously -- this is the UN we're talking about -- but it was a box Israel could have at least checked.