Why Netanyahu’s ‘coup’ against Gaza plan risks endless war

Every diplomatic roadmap carries an unspoken premise: that the parties want an exit. The rejection of the US-led plan says otherwise. For the Israeli leader, a negotiated settlement is more expensive than a managed continuation of the war, and policy follows that arithmetic.

The headline calls it a coup, and the word does the necessary work. A coup does not require hardware. It occurs when someone overturns an arrangement others believed settled. Netanyahu has buried the only framework backed by American authority. What replaces it is not a better plan; it is a conflict without a licensed exit.

Analysts warn of endless war. The phrase sounds like a caution, but in the political arithmetic on display it functions as a program. A state of open-ended conflict keeps the threat visible, the pressure perpetual, and the alternative — a settlement that would demand painful concessions — permanently out of reach. The war does not have to be won. It only has to continue.

Measure a plan's authority by the cost of refusing it. When a superpower's proposal can be discarded for the price of a disapproving statement, the proposal was never a plan; it was a preference. The coup was always available because the mechanism to deter it was never built. That is the quiet machinery behind the headline.

So the conflict endures, not for lack of imagination, but because the people with the power to choose have priced the exit higher than the ruin. Endless war is rarely declared. It is what remains after every alternative has been costed out of existence.