Eight months into the war on Gaza, support in Israel for the campaign is waning.
Columns in the Jerusalem Post have spoken of compassion fatigue, while reserve soldiers on the Gaza frontlines have told American journalists of the toll the relentless violence has taken.
This concern, or compassion fatigue, does not extend to the more than 36,000 Palestinians who have been killed so far.
“I believe Israeli public support for the war is declining,” Shai Parnes said by phone from Jerusalem, “but probably not for the reasons you’re thinking.”
War fatigue for a divided people
Parnas, a spokesman for the Israeli NGO B’Tselem, which documents human rights abuses in Palestine, spoke of the absence of detainees taken to Gaza on October 7 via shaky connections, the economic cost of the war and the impact on reserve soldiers who often left their jobs or studies to wage war in the besieged region, which is now mostly rubble.
Bank of Israel Governor Amir Yaron warned at a conference in late May that the total military and civilian costs to Israel from the war are estimated at 253 billion shekels ($67 billion) between 2023 and 2025.
Among reservists, who have been given no date for the conflict’s end, support for the war remains strong, even as the weariness of life under endless interruptions begins to show.
“I really want to know what the end point will be,” Lia Golan, 24, a reserve tank instructor and student at Tel Aviv University, told The Washington Post this week. “And no one has told us what that point will be.”
Golan described the emotional trauma of the unknown fate of Israeli detainees, killed soldiers and homeless Israeli civilians. At no point did he mention the Palestinians who were killed and displaced.
Yechezkel Garmiza, 38, a reserve soldier in the Givati Brigade, told the Post that if the army doesn’t rule Gaza, “everything will come back to normal again and again”.
“We have to get the job done,” he said — a reflection of a broad but carefully crafted consensus that prevails in the Israeli media.
In Tel Aviv, protests demanding the return of detainees are growing in intensity.
This week, thousands of people gathered in Democracy Square and other locations across the country to demand the release of detainees and the ouster of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
However, demands for the return of prisoners and criticism of the government are not the same as demands for an end to the war. A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center from March to April showed that public support for the conflict remains strong, even if divided along political lines.
The roots behind this divide were recently exposed in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, through two stories that highlighted the strict controls imposed by Israeli censors on what information Israeli citizens are allowed to access and what they are not.
Any information deemed “sensitive,” including everything from the reasons behind the continued detention of Palestinians caught in Israeli police nets to the intimidation campaign against the former prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), is withheld from the Israeli public by law.
According to Parnas, in recent weeks, the request by the ICC’s current prosecutor for an arrest warrant for Netanyahu and his Defense Minister Yoav Galant has been dismissed by most Israeli politicians and media as a “new anti-Semitism.”
Similarly, the decision by Ireland, Norway and Spain to recognise Palestine could be dismissed as a rejection of Israel rather than an action of its own.
Apart from official protests that Israel was being targeted, there was no significant change in public opinion in favour of the war.
“If you asked me what the mood was two weeks before all of this happened, my answer would be the same: Support for the war is declining … not on humanitarian grounds, but for direct, personal reasons,” Parnas said.
Recent initiatives, such as the peace plan announced by United States President Joe Biden after Parnas’ interview – presented as an Israeli proposal – have also served to divide and weaken public enthusiasm for the war, which to many appears to have no end in sight.
Israel launched its war on Gaza on October 7, when a Hamas-led incursion into Israeli territory left 1,139 people dead and more than 200 taken prisoner.
Since then, Israeli attacks on this tiny strip of land have killed more than 36,000 Palestinians, wounded over 81,000 and destroyed any sense of normalcy among a traumatized and traumatized population.
“The Israeli government is leading its country into crimes that are hard to understand, even as it abandons its hostages,” Parnas said.
Last week, Israel’s national security adviser Tzachi Hanegbi told Kan public radio that he expected the war to continue for another seven months if Israel destroyed Hamas and the smaller Palestinian Islamic Jihad group in Gaza.
“The majority of Israelis want to see the hostages returned and do not support endless military operations in Gaza,” Eyal Luri-Pardes of the Middle East Institute told Al Jazeera last week.
Politicians divided
Within Israel, conflicting views about the fate of the detainees and the future of Gaza have divided politicians as much as the public, making an end to the fighting seem out of reach.
The gulf between the two sides widened further on Friday when Biden announced a peace proposal, which he claimed came from Israel.
This proposal has created division rather than unification.
Far-right cabinet members Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have threatened to rebel at any suggestion to stop the fighting.
Netanyahu’s rival and perceived centrist Benny Gantz has spoken out heatedly about the deal and has already threatened to resign from the three-member war cabinet, in which he sits alongside Netanyahu and Galant, if a plan for Gaza beyond the conflict is not agreed upon.
“In mid-May, Gantz threatened to leave the cabinet by June 8 if a plan was not reached,” Lurie-Pardes said. “However, that date is getting closer and we are still waiting.”
While the current peace proposal may be the basis for averting that threat, any plan on Gaza’s future is unlikely to satisfy Gantz and his supporters or the Smotrich-Ben-Gvir camp, which is open about its ambitions to colonise the region.
In the short term, opposition leader Yair Lapid has pledged to support Netanyahu in parliament on the peace plan, but this is not an open endorsement for the prime minister, as Lapid has also expressed his intention to form an alternative government.
Last week, Lapid met with politicians Avigdor Lieberman and Gideon Sa’ar to plan a rival government, which he also urged Gantz to join.
“All this manoeuvring and division will have no effect on the death toll in Gaza,” said Mairav Zonszein of the International Crisis Group.
“There is no political will to stop the fighting. Both Lieberman and Sa’ar are far-right. They are not capable of stopping the war.
“Gantz is unlikely to offer any real alternative to the current approach, except to act in a way more acceptable to the US,” he said.
“Public confidence in Israel’s war aims is declining, but people are still struggling to find alternatives to fighting,”
Endless war?
Lurie-Pardes said, “At first glance, Israel’s war objectives — to destroy Hamas as a military and government force and to return the hostages — were straightforward.”
However, he added that these goals are not possible without a political solution to the Gaza administration, and Netanyahu cannot do so without risking his coalition, which is dependent on the far right.
Many analysts also suspect that Netanyahu is pursuing the war for his own personal purposes, namely that he wants to remain in office, since he is on trial on corruption charges.
“All Netanyahu has to do is keep his coalition together for the next two months of the Knesset’s summer session. If he manages to do that, we’re not really expecting elections before March 2025, because election laws in Israel have different requirements,” Lurie-Pardes said.
For those trapped in Gaza, even if they survive, March is a long way off.
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