On another war of attrition – Uri Misgav in Haaretz:

‘David Ivry is worried. "We are entering a war of attrition," he says in his quiet voice, and sighs. We are speaking in early January, when the Israeli casualty toll was far lower than they are today. "I am familiar with this dynamic from Lebanon, when I served as Israel Defense Forces deputy chief of staff [1983-85]. We are in a place that we conquered, people get used to the situation and we gradually shift from being conquerors to being targets. And this time it's more serious than it was in Lebanon, because of the 'Metro' [labyrinth of underground tunnels] and other subterranean [infrastructure in Gaza]. The question is how long we'll be able to ride it out, and how you even do that when the government refuses to talk about political solutions."
We will sink into the Gaza mire? "I'm telling you that we are already in the Gaza mire. We don't have a clear solution about what will happen, so we keep saying we'll be there for a very long time. And we haven't yet said a word about what's going on in the north."’

(…)

‘The polls show that there is no confidence in the government at all, and the degree of personal trust in the prime minister is only being eroded. During a time like this there is no alternative but to hold an election. It has nothing to do with the war situation. Over time, there must not be a situation of no confidence between the nation and the government. It's absolutely unhealthy. It creates a situation in which the government doesn't care about the nation because it see that the nation is not with it. So it [the government] does something that is not good for the nation, the nation's confidence in the government drops even lower, and it's a slippery slope. So there is no alternative, despite the war, but to hold an election. The sooner the better.’

Read the article here.

The sooner the better, yes, but what will be after the elections? A government of peaceniks, of course not.

The question is where the pressure the US exerts on Israel will end, this has of course lots to do with the elections in November.

If the existential threat is from within elections won’t be a miracle ointment. The existential threat from within won’t disappear after the elections, it’s not even sure that this threat will diminish.