chapotraphouse

You could argue they already have, but I think they're still in the transitory stage, as there are still (as far as I have heard) living Israeli hostages/POWs in the Gaza Strip. I think the clue for when that transition tips qualitatively is going to be when the hostage families, as an action group, become a pro-war force domestically rather than a relatively anti-war force.

Once there are no more verifiably-living Israeli captives in the Strip, there is going to be a campaign originating from either a) the Israeli government itself or b) a citizen group mixed with grieving families of unaccounted-for IDF captives/civilian hostages and unhinged settlers/zealots, which will subsequently be co-opted into official policy, that lump-sums the captive count and the unknown count into a rhetorical 'unknown, possibly captive' count that is used as justification to continue the war.

There’s pretty much a seamless setup for this idea to take root—so much so that I believe it is almost inevitable:

1. The promulgation of "Hamas' labyrinthine and sprawling underground tunnels" as rhetorical justification for indiscriminate targeting is very neatly slotted into a mythos of mass captivity of an unverifiable amount of people in said tunnels
2. Mass bombing and indiscriminate targeting inevitably and demonstrably leads to mass casualty and wasting of infrastructure. Ruling out the laughable idea that the IDF is an entity with iron-tight discipline among its ranks, you are going to have rank-breaking, overextension, and hooliganism (a la Looney Tunes' Greatest To Ever Do It World Cup Flag Kicker), often unaccounted for, that will have combatants buried under the rubble or generally out-of-sight in the aftermath, pumping the MIA count
3. On-the-ground journalism in Gaza has been decimated, both by the carnage and by Israel’s active hostility and repression towards outlets that don’t toe the line
4. Hostages are already being killed in Israeli airstrikes, and the indiscriminate nature of these strikes as well as there being no count (as far as I’m aware) of the current number of verifiably-alive and verifiably-dead captives lends itself to a blurring between the POW and MIA counts

I am willing to put money on this being a major facet in the domestic movement to continue the current state of the war within the decade if Israel continues to exist as the entity as it is now. The only thing that holds me back is that I think it would be irresponsible for me to take others up on that wager because I feel like I would be scamming people with an unwinnable bet.