…All wars eventually end. The question most Israelis are asking is whether this one [in Gaza ] has merely gone on vacation.

So why are the top echelons of ’s political and military establishment delighted by the war’s result? Long answer: They think that Israel has re-established a reputation for invincibility tarnished in the 2006 war with Hezbollah; that they bloodied and humiliated Hamas while taking few casualties; that they called overdue international attention to the tunnels… [and] that they put the onus to end the violence squarely back on Hamas’s shoulders.

 Short answer: They think the war may be a regional game changer.…

“We have no desire to go back into Gaza ,” [the military official] says. “We decided we’re not going to spend five years [in Gaza] like the five years Americans spent in .”

On the contrary: Far from seeking regime change in Gaza, the official seems at ease that the Palestinians will remain bifurcated between Hamastan and Fatahland for many years more, the way Germany was divided during the Cold War.… [Hamas could relate to the West Bank] somewhat in the way East Germany served West Germany as a monument to everything that was wrong with communism.

This leads the official to his second remarkable comment, after I ask whether deliberately chose not to kill Ismail Haniyeh, the elected Palestinian prime minister and Hamas’s political leader in Gaza . “ tried to target people from the security apparatus and military wing,” he answers. “At this moment, we prefer that the less-radical wing will take over.”…

Palestinians, he says, no longer look to Hamas as the party of clean and competent government. Instead, they see a group whose leaders needlessly provoked a ruinous war they didn’t have the courage to fight themselves. No wonder the third intifada in the West Bank , on which Hamas had counted, never materialized.

Elsewhere, Hamas’s former patrons in the Arab world have split with the group ever since it became a client of Tehran . A dozen Arab states, along with the Palestinian Authority, boycotted an emergency summit of the Arab League, which had been intended as a show of support for Hamas supremo Khaled Mashal.

Then there is . For years, it took an ambivalent view of Hamas: partly worried by the threat it poses to its own secular regime, partly delighted by the trouble it causes . Now the Mubarak government at last understands that Hamas is also a strategic threat to . “An Iranian base can play against the same way it played against ,” says the official.…

 Now the Israeli government is prepared to believe that the Egyptians will finally clamp down on the smuggling. might even allow to deploy its army in greater force in the Sinai, despite the provisions against it in the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.

 Finally there is . “They have drawn a lesson,” says the official. “Once again, they saw that has a good air force and good intelligence, and that the combination of the two can be deadly. Unlike in 2006, they saw a well-trained ground force. They found that asymmetrical warfare does not always play for them; that we can use asymmetrical approaches to overpower an asymmetrical threat.”

All this, of course, could be overturned the moment goes nuclear and attempts to thwart ’s freedom of action.… Bottom line: has scored an impressive tactical victory. But it has missed the strategic opportunity to rid itself of the menace on its doorstep. In the Middle East , opportunities don’t always knock twice.