Israeli Press
Former lawmaker Ofer Shelah tells Israel to end its forever war
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Two reserve paratroopers killed in Lebanon this week are the newest casualties of a war that has stopped being policy and become a way of life, the former Knesset member Ofer Shelah wrote Thursday in the Israeli daily Haaretz — and the only answer left, in his words, is simply to end the war.
Shelah, a longtime defense commentator, named the dead — Harel Benstock and Tamir Vaknin — and set their deaths against the machinery that consumed them: an open-ended Order 8 call-up entering its third year, with the defense establishment putting the reserves' cost at 100 billion shekels since October 2023 out of 280 billion in direct war spending.
He questioned the arithmetic — the stated 30-billion-shekel reserves bill for 2026 implies an impossible 22 to 30 million duty days — but insisted money is not the story. Thirty-seven percent of those called up are parents, he noted, and some have become professional reservists the army retains on double pay for half service.
The sharpest turn in the piece is against Shelah's own camp. He quoted the army strategy document Gadi Eisenkot once signed, committing to shorten every campaign — and observed that Eisenkot and the politicians claiming to speak for reservists now talk of "decision," never of ending the war.
Israel pays for the endless war in its international standing, its army's discipline, its economy and its society's broken spirit, Shelah concluded. Protecting the reservists means ending it.
