Will the war in Gaza last for ever? It’s not a wholly rhetorical question. There are days when I fear that the death and devastation that has gone on for 650 days will never stop, that it will eventually settle into a constant, low-level attritional war inside the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict – a war within a war – that becomes a background hum to world affairs, the way the Troubles in Northern Ireland endured for 30 years. In this same nightmare, incidentally, I see Benjamin Netanyahu, who has already sat in Israel’s prime ministerial chair for nearly 18 years, on and off, staying put for another 18 years or more, ruling the country until he is 100.
Israelis don’t want either of those things to happen. Polls show that only a minority trust Netanyahu, while an overwhelming majority – about 74% – want this terrible war to end. As the leader of one of the ultra-orthodox, or Haredi, parties that this week quit Netanyahu’s ruling coalition – over the government’s failure to pass a bill permanently exempting Haredi youth from military service – recently put it: “I don’t understand what we are fighting for there … I don’t understand what the need is.”
