>Really? A nation destroyed for a protest letter from Ireland? A trade union wouldn't even settle for this.

It has symbolic meaning to which Israel responded with closing its embassy. You can downplay it however you want, but these are significant developments that will be discussed in lectures and history books.

>I'm weighing it the way we do history. Goals were set. None were achieved. To the extent we can measure them, the goals are further away than before.

Hamas had the goal of derailing normalization and they achieved that. An unexpected bonus was the reconquest of Syria which made the dictators of the Arab world also tremble in fear that their continued betrayal in form of normalization efforts with israel, contrary to the will of the people, could lead to their own demise as well.

>When push came to shove, nobody came for Palestine. Hezbollah and the Houthis came closest, but the former folded and the latter was maintained.

Another desperate attempt at downplaying the efforts of the resistance. Both Hezbollah and especially the Houthis did support Palestine, within their means, at significant cost to their own population. Since Israel's main solution to everything is just to ruthlessly bomb civilians and civilian infrastructure which even a congressman, Thomas Massie, has called out Israel for: https://x.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1849165384571560052

An american congressman openly calling out Israel and receiving 111K likes - unimaginable before the Genocide, that's significant.

>Their closest regional ally, Iran, left them out to dry. Same for the Arab monarchies and America's adversaries, Russia and China. Sinwar was counting on a regional conflagration, and it never came. Before the war that wasn't apparent.

This is just the rhetoric of a person who thinks that geopolitics is checkers when it's actually chess. Iran obviously tried to avoid direct confrontation with Israel to prevent a war with the US so it primarily fights Israel via its proxies so the actions of the proxies are also the actions of Iran.

>Sinwar was counting on a regional conflagration, and it never came. Before the war that wasn't apparent.

What evidence do you have for that claim? I've seen video footage of Sinwar stating that they will derail normalization, which they achieved, and "exposing all the normalizers" which they also achieved. The world has seen Israel's true face, without a mask, and it's ugly.

>They trended on Twitter and college campuses, and I guess got a thumbs up from Ireland. But to the degree South Africa got the ICC in the ring, it largely served to (a) underline that both sides committed war crimes and (b) undermine the ICC's authority (note: not legitimacy) as a court versus think tank.

These attempts at downplaying the cultural impact of the past 15 months is just outright strange. The ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu which many people thought would never happen. The reaction to this decision then exposed America and many of its european allies as frauds who claimed to care about "international law" but never actually did because they refused to comply so they can protect their war-criminal ally. this has proven that the whole "international law" charade was always just an imperial and colonial tool to impose western will on the global south. These events are crucial and will be discussed and lectured about in universities across the world.

>Sure. Based on current patterns, the trajectory is towards a cease fire and hardened occupation with some recognition for annexations.

Well the israeli historian and political scientist Ilan Pappe thinks that "This is the last phase of Zionism", he has his opinion and you have yours, we shall see.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/14/israeli-historian-i...

>That could change--things can always change. But in a world where the rules-based international order is crumbling, now is a bad time to have only norms to fall back on.

The "rules-based international order" died the moment the crusaders of "international law" have given impunity to their colonial outpost to commit genocide with impunity and then proven that they will ignore ICC rulings when the outcome is not in their favor. If I were Russia or China, I would be extremely happy about that because the next time America or Europe lectures them about morality or international law, they can just laugh it off.