Every election in Israel seems to be the most important. We are a small country and the government that forms has direct impact on the lives of all of us.

We are also a nation that is tired, beat up, exhausted and traumatized. Three years of war, over 2000 killed, hundreds of thousands displaced from their homes and made into refugees in their own country for 2 years, and the many thousands in the north who have not returned to their homes and in the south, still waiting for their homes to be rebuilt.

The Thousand-Day War has been unlike any war we have experienced because the home front became the war front and no place was immune.

As someone born in the US, I look back at what I learned happened there during WW2. Much like Israelis following October 7, the Americans at home pitched in for the war effort. There was much that was done in a voluntary basis and much that government instituted and enforced.

Then, with the men fighting in Europe and Asia, the women went to work in the factories, anyone with a tiny bit of dirt planted a Victory Garden, there was food and gas rationing and a diversion of resources to the war effort.

When the men came home from war, they had many benefits such as free education, low-cost mortgages, business and farm loans, unemployment insurance, among others.

The US government made every effort to take care of the returning soldiers, their families and businesses to rebuild a post war economy. But it didn’t end there. Following the disastrous lessons learned from the end of WW1, a day after plan was put in motion to rebuild the devastated Europe and Japan. There was the Marshall Plan for Europe and other plans for Japan. Together with end of war agreements that Germany and Japan would never build offensive militaries again, it was recognized that these two countries needed their economies to be rehabilitated and strengthened.

But that is not what has happened here. Instead of a Marshall Plan for the home front, instead of a Victory Garden or a war bond drive, the Israeli government—led by the same man who has been on trial for corruption—had and has no strategy for the day after any part of this war. Not for Gaza. Not for the north. Not for the hostages. Not for the hundreds of thousands of internally displaced citizens. Not for the traumatized children who had barely been in a classroom for two years. Every military operation is launched with a vague goal, and every ceasefire collapses because there is no political endgame. The result is endless war—precisely the condition that allows a sitting prime minister to avoid a state commission of inquiry, potentially postpone or cancel elections, and cling to power.

In doing so, Netanyahu has........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)