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I don't really see why the IDF spending years in Gaza would be bad for morale. After 10/7, it's hard for me to imagine any Israeli soldier not being happy to spend a few months patrolling an occupied Gaza, especially given that now that Hamas' military strength is mostly broken, an Israeli soldier would be unlikely to die over there. But then, I'm neither an Israeli nor a soldier. I guess in practice, it would not be that great. For one thing, it probably does sap morale for most non-insane people to patrol an occupied population.
I'm surprised that the IDF and Mossad would want a peace deal. My mental model of both those groups is that they are controlled by hard-liners who want to destroy their opponents. But I don't know much about the inner politics of Israel and I'm pretty sure that you know much more about it than I do.
The situation with the Gulf states is one that I probably didn't spend too much time thinking about when I made my original post. I did think of them, but my initial thought was that pretty much no matter what Israel did short of an actual genocide, they would figure out how to spin it to their populations as being close enough to a draw that they would not face any major unrest, and even if they did face unrest as the result of such an outcome, they would not be seriously threatened. But when I think over it again, I can see how maybe an Israel that does a deal with Hamas that leaves Hamas effectively destroyed for the near future is better for the region's stability than Israel going all-out to destroy its enemies. After all, Israel has in the last year shown that it is not a country that you want to fuck with if you have the typical second/third world minor country type of corrupt, ineffective, and technologically/organizationally relatively primitive military.
I wish this were true. Military leaders may recognize that their corrupt inept armies cannot take on Israel at all, but there are plenty of stupid jihadis on their private telegrams who celebrate having defeated Israel comprehensively in every engagement. In these telegrams and social media the Israelis have retreated in shame from every battle, having lost thousands of soldiers who spontaneously disapparate to spare the jews the shame of having dead soldiers paraded before the victorious Palestinians. Palestinians keep crowing about their indomitable will and ingenuity coming up with novel solutions to defeat the Israelis and western sympathists are eager to signal boost the victories of the underdog because victory=moral support. In this information environment, the Palestinians do not think they have lost anything. So long as a single Palestinian is alive, the Jew is defeated, and the Jew being defeated means the Palestinians have won every battle. The logical order does not follow, but Palestinians and their supporters are uninterested in using logic, much less understanding it.
I believe this is the same phenomena playing out on Wikipedia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_engagements_during_the_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war
Oh, it's been changed since I last saw it. It previously had a result column that listed Hamas as the victor to most engagements. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_military_engagements_during_the_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war&oldid=1265753911
Wikipedia is particularly captured. Source pollution and semantic abuse have allowed pro-Palestinians to cite dubious sources as fact instead of opinion. The page you cite already stares Oct 7 is a tactical Hamas victory, and on its Oct & attack page it cites a Haaretz article for the IDF being responsible for killing its own people oer the Hannibal Doctrine, conveniently locking the Haaretz article behind a paywall.
There is endless denial by Palestinian supporters that there was any crime committed by Hamas, and that if Hamas did do it then that it was glorious and the Jews deserved it anyways. Bafflingly the most prominent apologists are privileged western (including Israeli* like Haaretz journalists who write for leftist publications such as Vox or Jacobin) activists who do all the intellectual laundering to sanewash Palestinian objectives. A cursory glance of what the Palestinians themselves say they want - mass extermination of Israelis as per the Hamas charter, repeats of Oct 7 as often as possible - is ignored in favor of paeans to theoretical harmony that would exist the moment Israel lays down its arms. This utopianism flies in the face of reality for a theoretical unified Palestinian state, for the Palestinians have been engaged in Fatah-Hamas civil wars since... pretty much the beginning of the PLO.
A charitable interpretation is that underdog support blinds pro-Palestinians to the genocidal intent stated by the Palestinians themselves, using evolving language of 'trauma' to whitewash such language as temporary maledictions brought about by (maximally traumatizing) ongoing Israeli actions. Such an interpretation required willful self deception regarding what the Palestinians themselves openly celebrate and have done to great glee.
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IIRC the IDF is one of the few militaries that sits(very slightly) to the left of Israeli society as a whole, because everyone serves except the most hardline conservatives.
Wouldn’t that get balanced by the lack of conscription for Israeli Arabs?
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Israel’s economy and security situation can’t afford a permanent occupation of Gaza. Israel would need to keep 250,000 reservists mobilized, a significant proportion of their reserve force. Those guys all have day jobs, participating in the economy. The occupation force would be taking a small amount of casualties, every month, for as long as it was there. And it would leave the IDF badly undermanned in the event of any of the many, many other nightmare scenarios, like a full uprising in the West Bank, a major flareup by Hezbollah in Lebanon, an invasion by a neighbor, or a major civil conflict.
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There are enough handgrenades left and little kids to carry them to the soldiers.
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I suspect you’re wildly underestimating how much it sucks to spend months in a combat zone, regardless of how often someone you know dies.
Most of those arguments applied equally well in spring 2003. 15 years later, people were a lot less enthusiastic.
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