While we watch the horrific and increasingly senseless immiseration of the civilian population of Gaza, it’s important to look clearly at why it’s happening. “Why” may be too big a question. It may be better to try to answer not that big “why” but, in a more focused and discrete way, why this war hasn’t stopped. Prime Minister Netanyahu has managed to lose even President Trump now on the question of whether people are starving in Gaza. More significantly, Netanyahu some time ago lost even fairly hardcore Israeli hawks who are not members of his governing coalition on why the war is still going on at all.
You’ll remember that for about a year, between 2021 and 2022, Netanyahu was actually out of power and Naftali Bennett was Prime Minister. Bennett is from the “religious Zionist” world and political camp, and from almost every perspective that’s a very right-wing and nationalist world. But he was heading a coalition of basically every part of the Israeli political world which wasn’t behind Netanyahu. That stretched all the way from his own religious Zionist political party right through the center and left of Israeli politics, such as it is, and all the way to one of the Arab Islamist parties. A few weeks ago Bennett said again: we need to end this. Stop the war. Get the hostages home. We’re not going to have a final victory over Hamas. It would be great if we could, but that’s not going to happen. Leave that for another day.
