The Same War, on a Loop
· The Atlantic
In Israel these days, unless your apartment has a blast-resistant room, it’s best to go to bed in something that you’re comfortable wearing in a bomb shelter. Your phone is likely to wake you with the clatter of an alert for incoming missiles: First comes a text message that says to be near a protected area. Several minutes later, a second screech brings a message to take cover.
The government has approved the reopening of workplaces that have shelters, but most children are home, attending school online. This is a burden for all parents, but particularly for those who are single or whose partner has been called up for reserve duty.
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I live in Jerusalem. My adult daughters are in Tel Aviv, which is targeted much more often. On the phone one day, one daughter told me that she had been woken six times the previous night. A moment later, she said, “Gotta go, Dad. An alert.”
I’d spoken with her sister earlier. The Tel Aviv light rail isn’t operating, because underground stations are being used as bomb shelters, so she’d taken a cab to work. Mid-ride, her phone clacked a preliminary warning. She reached her job, and a shelter, moments after the second alert.
Hezbollah in Lebanon, supposedly vanquished in the fall of 2024, has resumed firing at our cities and towns. Two soldiers were killed on the Lebanese front by a Hezbollah anti-tank rocket on March 8. Seemingly, those were the first Israeli military deaths of the current war.
But only seemingly. In our lives, the current war has gone on for two and a half years, with intermissions just long enough to raise hope of normalcy that is shattered when fighting resumes. This morning’s siren is a replay of June’s siren, and the siren of autumn 2024, and that of autumn 2023. This is not a new war. It is the same war on a loop of exhaustion, adrenaline, and worry for your children. To those feelings I must add despair and frustration with the apparent determination of my government to maintain the loop endlessly.
The start of the war wasn’t Israel’s choice. It was the catastrophic decision of Hamas’s then-leader, Yahya Sinwar, to launch a wide offensive from Gaza into Israel on October 7, 2023, massacring civilians. At some point, however, the war became Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s choice, as he cleaved to his avowed goal of “absolute victory” over Hamas, in an effort to hold together a coalition with extreme rightists who wanted to conquer all of Gaza.
In June, Netanyahu, together with Donald Trump, made the decision to bomb Iran. Renewing the fighting there now was also his choice.
Throughout Netanyahu’s career, his signature sleight of mind has been to divert attention from the unresolved conflict with the Palestinians by shouting “Iran!” loudly and often. Then Israel was taken by surprise on October 7, and the prime minister avoided accountability for that intelligence failure by keeping the war going—in part by constantly changing the conditions for a cease-fire. Now he has combined both magic tricks.
In the middle of last month, Netanyahu flew to Washington for a meeting about Iran. The next day, speaking with reporters, Trump renewed his demand that Israeli President Isaac Herzog grant Netanyahu an unprecedented preconviction pardon, which would cut short the prime minister’s trial on corruption charges. Trump has since attacked Herzog twice for not paying immediate attention to the matter, most recently saying that the Israeli president is “full of crap” for following the required clemency procedure. Whatever happened in that White House meeting—whoever actually persuaded whom to attack—Trump has since escalated his effort to rescue the prime minister from the courtroom.
In his first press conference after the Iran campaign began, 13 days in, Netanyahu insisted that Trump was merely speaking from his heart. Then the prime minister demanded that Herzog “end this absurd circus” of the trial to “give Israel the time and me the time to do what’s needed to defeat our enemies.” In other words, the nation’s victory depends on his triumph over the legal system.
Netanyahu also seems to expect that during the fighting that he has reignited, he can banish criticism and constraints on his actions and those of his political allies. For example, on March 4, Israeli Attorney General Gali Baharav Miara filed a brief in a citizen’s suit that had come before the supreme court. The suit called for the dismissal of the far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir on the grounds that he had illegally politicized the country’s police force. Baharav Miara’s brief supported his dismissal. Netanyahu’s office issued a statement saying that for her to take such a position was “inconceivable” while Israel was “in the midst of an existential war against Iran.”
[Read: The two extremists driving Israel’s policy]
“Existential war” is a great distraction from all kinds of ills—for instance, the fact that two of Netanyahu’s aides are being investigated for allegedly working in the pay of Qatar and leaking a top-secret document. Netanyahu has managed to evade police interrogation about an alleged attempt to cover up that leak. Then there is the prime minister’s corruption trial, and his government’s refusal to allow an impartial inquiry into who is responsible for Israel being taken by surprise on October 7.
War is three-card monte with Netanyahu as the dealer. Strikes on Tehran divert news coverage from the bills that the ruling coalition has introduced to disempower the attorney general and subject the broadcast media to government control. A mass protest against the government was supposed to take place on the night of February 28: It never happened, because missiles began falling that morning. Most dangerous of all, those missiles are driving to the far margins of public attention the escalating campaign of terror that West Bank settlers are carrying out against Palestinian villages, with the acquiescence, or worse, of the Israeli army.
Missiles falling on Israel have not, however, kept the cabinet from meeting one night to approve nearly $2 billion in pork-barrel funding for Netanyahu’s coalition partners. Most of these funds will subsidize the ultra-Orthodox community, many of whose men continue religious study into adulthood rather than serving in the military or working. Another chunk will go to West Bank settlers. With that, Netanyahu bought his coalition partners’ support for a national budget that must be approved in Parliament by the end of this month to avoid early elections. The payout comes at the same time as a nearly 30 percent boost in defense spending that will force across-the-board cuts to other government programs—including the reconstruction of communities on the northern border that are once again under Hezbollah fire.
Such callousness is the leitmotif of two and a half years of war under Netanyahu. It is also the opposite of the core value of Israeli society, weakly translated as “solidarity”: the conviction that each of us is in this not for herself or himself but for one another. That cohesion has always been a national strength not measurable in warplanes or divisions. Netanyahu has fractured it.
Surveys show high support among Israelis for the war with Iran. In my experience, which dates back to the 1982 Lebanon War, this is normal at the start of a conflict and is the product of reflexive patriotism, fear, and the government’s ability to shape the media narrative. With time, the initial burst of adrenaline fades, and questions grow.
I suspect that polls would more accurately reflect public opinion if they presented a series of sentences and asked which best reflected respondents’ mood. One statement might be “I’m glad Ali Khamenei is dead,” but others could include “I constantly think about my partner, who just got called up again” and “I can’t focus on work,” or “I’ve completely had it”—again, a weak translation of a Hebrew phrase, in this case much more vulgar, that I see on social media.
[Read: The Iran war has four stages. We’re in the second.]
A more objective indicator of the effect of the long war might be the sharp rise in emigration. Last year, according to the state’s Central Bureau of Statistics, nearly 51,000 more Israelis emigrated than returned from abroad. In the years before 2023, the number was about a third of that. A study by Tel Aviv University researchers found that emigrants tend to be young and well educated. In 2023 and 2024, nearly 1,000 physicians emigrated from the country of about 10 million people.
This does not mean that Israel is emptying out. But it does hint at malaise, at doubts about the future. It suggests that war without a perceivable endpoint has the same effect as a missile falling far enough away from a building to leave it standing but close enough to create thin fissures.
To distract myself, not very well, I turn from my screen to a book: The Art of War, by the fifth-century B.C.E. Chinese theoretician Sun Tzu. “It is best to keep one’s own state intact; to crush the enemy’s state is only second best,” he wrote. In this repetitive war, Netanyahu is aiming only for second best.