Israel is running out of options

There are many misunderstandings about Israel in the international media, but one of the most bewildering is the suggestion that if it weren’t for the presence of Benjamin Netanyahu the war would end. It is one of those mistakes that at best mixes up hope with analysis, and at worst displays a dumbfounding ignorance.

Let me give you an example. In recent months I think I’ve interviewed everybody in Israeli politics who might some day replace Netanyahu. It doesn’t matter if they’re from the right or the left of the political spectrum, not one would be doing anything different from what he is doing now.

You might ask why. The answer is obvious. If you had 1,200 of your citizens slaughtered in the most barbaric ways, what would you do? If hundreds of your citizens had been taken hostage and more than a hundred were still being held in a densely populated civilian area, what would you do? Add in a few other factors. Imagine if all this had been done by a terrorist group who do not wear uniforms that distinguish them from the general population, that the terrorists want to maximise civilian casualties on their own side, that much of the civilian population are actually complicit in hiding hostages, storing weapons in their houses or hosting entrances to the terrorists’ huge underground tunnel networks then, again, what would you do?

The geniuses in the armchair class tend to say things like ‘There should be peace’, as though this has never occurred to the Israelis. Or they say: ‘There must be an end to the fighting.’ Again, as though this were some fantastically original insight. But all these things are wanted in Jerusalem. Who wants to have to fight a war in the same place for 18 years?

Still, in Washington, Paris and London the mistaken idea continues that what is happening in Gaza might stop if there were only a change in Israel’s leadership.