“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” W B Yeats

The decision by the Israeli war cabinet to try to fully occupy Gaza to “eliminate Hamas” will kill many, many more people, with intensified military action adding even more to the steadily mounting total of people being starved to death; and, as a side effect that Netanyahu is well aware of, ensure the deaths of all the remaining hostages. As the Duke of Warwick says in Shaw’s St Joan; “It was nothing personal. Your death was a political necessity”.

The reported stand up row with IDF commanders, and the letters from thousands of reservists and nearly 600 retired Israeli security officials and former intelligence agency heads who see no achievable military objective, also reflects the strain that the war so far has placed on the IDF itself and Israeli society more broadly.

Their casualties are tiny by comparison with those suffered by the Palestinians in Gaza of course. The 60,199 fatalities for which the Gaza Health Ministry has records are generally accepted to be a serious underestimate.

There is no doubt that, unless a change of course is forced, there will be many more dying very soon. 12,000 children under five alone are reported as suffering from acute malnutrition in July; and this number is growing as the trickle of food aid forced in by international pressure and condemnation is spread thinner and thinner as time drags on.

Nevertheless, the impact of the war on the IDF is far from negligable, and this will accelerate once they move into the quagmire of Gaza City.

So far, they have lost 454 fatalities and 2,870 injured in the 22 months since October 7th.

To think of that in UK terms, with a population almost ten times bigger – that would be 4,358 dead and 27,552 injured.

To put that into perspective, 179 UK soldiers were killed in Iraq, and 457 in Afghanistan (the latter over nearly 20 years); roughly a tenth as much at a much slower rate. It led to quite a strong sentiment against overseas interventions, even with a proffessional armed forces, that is still a factor to be taken into account.

In US terms, with a population 48 times bigger, that would be 21,798 soldiers killed and 136,320 injured. To put that in perspective, that would be at a rate almost twice as fast as the 58, 281 soldiers the US lost in their nine year invasion of Vietnam.

The Vietnam comparison is instructive, because the US and its allies killed over a million Vietnamese. And they were still defeated, partly because the scale of their murderousness became globally apparent, its inability to stop the Vietnamese became apparent with it, the morale of their conscripted soldiers was crumbling, and draft resistance fuelled a counter culture that was letting all sorts of dangerous ideas loose; so they had to cut their losses and bide their time.

What we are seeing in Gaza is a level of barbarism even more concentrated than when B52s were carpet bombing Vietnamese cities and dropping Agent Orange all over the countryside. The Gaza City invasion will make this much worse.

However, Israel is more capable of sustaining this than the US, even with conscripts, because the war is right in their faces, not in “a land far away”, a high proportion of their population are settlers on a mission to drive Palestinians out, and most see the conflict as zero sum communalism, “us or them”; which has a genocidal dynamic.

Nevertheless, the strains are real. Up to the end of 2024, 672,000 people, mostly young and educated, had left the country. Thats almost 10% of the population. This is paralelled by a 10% hit on its economy, which any Gaza City invasion will compound.

The question now is how bad things have to get before Netanyahu runs out of road, or their society cracks, or the US makes the calculation that the damage to its own global standing from underwriting all this is worse than the salutory effect of the apocalyptic warning it gives to the whole global South of what could happen to you if you step out of line, and pulls the plug. Which it could have done at any point since this began, It hasn’t.

When Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian has (almost) given up on apologetics and even Tim Stanley can write in the Daily Telegraph that “its now impossible to ignore the nevidence of human suffering (try as you have, Tim) or the sham of the official Israeli narrative that says no one is starving or, if they are, its because Hamas stole all the food“; the tectonic plates have already shifted and Netanyahu is standing on thinner and thinner ice, and every bomb he drops cracks it more.

In the period ahead, we will have to mobilise more and more against this, and break the complicity of our government in it.