A coalition against Netanyahu’s forever war is growing in Israel
An Israeli army tank rolls in southern Israel along the border with the Gaza Strip on 24 January 2024
Meron Rapoport writes in Middle East Eye:
It is too early to say whether the loss of 21 Israeli soldiers in one day in central Gaza’s Maghazi refugee camp will turn out to be a pivotal moment of the war in Gaza.
There are, certainly, precedents. One is the loss of 73 soldiers when two helicopters collided over Northern Galilee in 1997. That was the starting point of a protest movement which led to the withdrawal from Lebanon three years later.
But the loss at Maghazi of soldiers who were mostly reservists could certainly add to the growing war fatigue of the Israeli public, who are increasingly at a loss to understand what the war on Gaza is achieving.
While a majority continue to back the war, they are not buying the army’s claims that 17 out of Hamas’s 24 battalions have “collapsed”, that one-third of the Palestinian movement’s fighters have been killed, and that the Israeli military controls 60 percent of the territory in the Gaza Strip.
The soldiers at Magazi were mining houses for demolition in an area under army control. “Control” is becoming a relative concept, as Hamas’s hit-and-run strikes prove only too clearly.
Nor is it clear what the army is achieving in Khan Younis, more than six weeks after the army spokesman said that they have entered it. Khan Younis is not that big a place, and it’s certainly no Stalingrad.
There are two competing coalitions at play in Israel and yet neither have the decisive upper hand, for the moment.
This is Netanyahu’s war
The first coalition is led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As the conflict drags on, it is very clear that this is his war. It’s his war because the moment he stops it, his government crashes and Israel will turn on him for having let Israel’s guard down on 7 October.
It’s his war because he has raised the stakes so high, stressing each day that it has been his life’s mission to prevent a Palestinian state being created, and by saying Israel should have a permanent presence in Gaza – an objective that has not been approved by the war cabinet, which contains former rivals.
The army absolutely does not share that objective and is resisting Netanyahu’s wish to reoccupy the Philadelphi Corridor that runs along Gaza’s border with Egypt, without which no permanent Israeli military presence in Gaza can function.