For a great many Israelis, the hardest moment of the 40-day war with Iran—harder than the thousands of rockets and missiles fired at the country and the deaths of 42 of our citizens—came with the ceasefire. Prior to that announcement, at 3 a.m. on Wednesday morning in Jerusalem, the vast majority of Israelis supported a war they hoped would result in a fundamental alteration of their reality. The ceasefire seems to have smashed those hopes.
Since Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, Israelis have dreamed of a lasting end to fighting with their neighbors, and of the advent of permanent peace. Successive generations cherished the song “Yes, It’s Possible,” written by the Palmach self-defense force veteran Haim Hefer in 1948, which enshrined their longing:
Yes, it’s possible. Yes, it’s possible
That it will simply happen tomorrow.
It’s possible that in the jeep passing by,
The boys will roar, “It’s over.”
