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The East Brunswick Jewish Center held "Israel after Gaza: An Update from the Front," on Jan. 19. The event featured Bret Stephens, the former editor of the Jerusalem Post and a currently a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, who had just returned from spending the last week of the war in Israel.

The event was also sponsored by CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), the Jewish Federation of Greater Middlesex County, and the Campus for Jewish Life.

CAMERA, which was founded in 1982, serves primarily as an organization that promotes accurate and unbiased coverage of the Middle East and Israel.

Stephens told The Jewish State in an interview prior to speaking to the audience that the war in Gaza was a tactical success for Israel, but at the same time Israel lost strategically.

"The tactical success is that is that it managed to inflict massive and really -- despite media reports -- quite precise military damage on Hamas, while hardly taking any casualties at all," Stephens said. "It did not give Hamas a chance to score a kind of military successes against the IDF or Israelis that Hezbollah obviously scored in 2006. It scored tactical diplomatic successes in focusing international communities' attention for the first time on the problem with smuggling and bringing Egyptians on board to become serious about that issue."

Ultimately, Israel isolated Hamas in the Arab world to such an extent that no one wanted to assist them, he said.

"That being said there was an opportunity here to finally get rid of Hamas there in the [Gaza] Strip," he said.

Stephens said Hamas took power in a violent 2007 coup and has no legal basis within the Palestinian government because they don't recognize the Oslo Accords, which, signed by former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat in 1993, set the framework for the peace process.

"[Israel] made the same mistake it made in 1993 with the Oslo Accords because it thinks it can tame Hamas and it thinks it can accept a neighbor on the long-term basis that is fanatically dedicated not only to its destruction, but to a second Holocaust," Stephens said. "And that's a serious miscalculation."

Stephens said for the time being the violence may stop in Gaza, but as long as Hamas is Israel's neighbor violence will always occur.

"Hamas took such a drubbing that I would be surprised if there was any rocket fire, because the only thing they can make use of is the pity party that's about to ensue when Western journalists are let into Gaza," he said. "If they're wise, they'll be loathe to once again make it abundantly clear that they were the original perpetrators of violence."

The real atrocity is the fact that Hamas is focused on destroying its neighbor rather than fixing its own economy, he said.

"There's no reason just because Gaza is a small enclave that it can't be economically prosperous," Stephens said.

Hamas will continue to be a violent, hateful terrorist organization, he said.

"Hamas is going to take every opportunity to continue to harass Israel, to prevent a regime along the border with Egypt that successfully stops the smuggling," Stephens said. "I don't see Hamas churning out a new generation of technocrats, managers, and entrepreneurs."

Stephens, who has reported in Afghanistan and Iraq, said reporting in Israel is quite different.

"Obviously when you are reporting it from Israel the proximity, the fact that you have friends that are soldiers, employees that are soldiers, all of that changes your perspective," he said. "It's hard to be as dispassionate or objective from the distance of 80 kilometers and not 10,000 kilometers."

Stephens told the audience Hamas believed that not only the Arab world, but the entire Muslim world would come to their aid. However, Hamas was dead wrong, he said.

"Hamas made a series of political misjudgments in the run up to the war and then they proceeded to perform abysmally in the war itself," he said. "Hamas was unable to bloody Israel's nose."

Israel learned their lessons from the war in Lebanon three years ago, and overall the war in Gaza was a success, he said.

"As in Lebanon, there was the same excellent combination [including] accurate air power," Stephens said. "This combination of precise air power and precise intelligence served Israel extremely well."

Israel surrounded Gaza, cut the strip in half, and inflicted damage where it was needed instead of going full force into Gaza, Stephens said.

Stephens said senior Israeli officials said Israel has no intention to invade Gaza and completely take over power.

"Israel can, in the long term, control Hamas," he said. "It can make sure that if it remains in power it cannot be any significant threat to Israel."

Stephens said he feels confident that former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be elected as the next prime minister of Israel in the upcoming elections in February.

It wasn't a coincidence the ceasefire was called two days prior to President Barack Obama's inauguration, he said.

"There's a lot of trepidation about just what Obama and his administration is going to mean" for Israel's actions going forward, Stephens said.

EBJC Vice President Eric Rabinowitz said he thought Stephens was excellent and was able to relate to the audience.

"Mr. Stephens offered an insightful analysis of the recent crisis and its aftermath that helped cut through the recycled narratives," Isabel Smith, the wife of Rabbi Aaron Benson and the communications director of CAMERA, said. "Through his first-hand interviews with top political leaders on both sides, his eyewitness account and journalistic expertise, Stephens provided a fresh perspective that broadened understanding and sparked debate."