Why Israel Won’t Change

The War in Gaza Will Likely Reinforce the Country’s Rightward Tilt – By Dahlia Scheindlin

Almost from the moment Hamas broke through Israel’s security barrier with Gaza on October 7 and began its rampage, it felt like Israel would never be the same. Within hours, Israelis were forced to confront the reality that many of the assumptions that had long guided Israeli policy toward the Palestinians had crumbled. The state’s 16-year-old policy of blockading Gaza had failed to make them safe. The government’s calculation that it could lure Hamas into pragmatism—whether by allowing Qatari funding for Hamas or by giving work permits for Gaza laborers—had instead lured Israel into complacency. And the belief that most threats from Hamas could be neutralized by high-tech surveillance, deep underground barriers, and the Iron Dome missile defense system had proved dead wrong.

On a broader level, the attacks showed the terrible failure of the idea that the Palestinian political question could be sidelined indefinitely without any cost to Israel, a belief so axiomatic among Israel’s leadership that commentators found names for it: conflict management, or “shrinking the conflict.” Thus, there had been no Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on a final status peace deal for years, even as Israel pursued normalization with a growing number of Arab states. Over the course of more than two decades, the right-wing parties dominating the Israeli political scene had promised voters that the country was more secure than it would be under any other policy, and the majority of voters agreed. But on October 7, Hamas’s attack brought the status quo crashing down.

Yet in one major way Israel remains unchanged. Although Israelis blame the country’s leadership for the catastrophic security failures surrounding the attacks, their basic political orientation seems unlikely to change. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may well be forced to step down when the war is over—if not before, since the war has no clear endpoint. But as Israeli history has repeatedly shown, especially in recent decades, episodes of war or extreme violence like the current one have only reinforced a rightward tilt in Israeli politics. If that pattern holds now, Israelis might elect a new government, but they might also endorse the same flawed assumptions that have defined that tilt and which have helped shape the current crisis.

BLAMING THE LEADER

Unsurprisingly, many Israelis put the country’s disastrous security failure squarely on the shoulders of Netanyahu, the man at the top. What is more striking, however, is that they are voicing their opposition amid one of the most difficult wars Israel has fought in decades. Thus, in the weeks since the attack, there have been several demonstrations calling on Netanyahu to resign; the head of the opposition, Yair Lapid, joined the call, as have some families of victims who were killed or kidnapped by Hamas. Numerous polls suggest that Netanyahu would be roundly defeated if elections were held now.

Even a survey taken on November 22 and 23—after the government announced a hostage release deal that could have boosted its position—showed the ruling coalition would lose 23 of its 64 seats in the Knesset (out of 120). Support for Netanyahu’s own party has fallen dramatically: if elections were held now, polls show Likud losing nearly half of its 32 Knesset seats. Perhaps most striking, more than three-quarters of Israelis think that Netanyahu should resign, after or even during the war.

These numbers stand in stark contrast to the burst of support that most leaders are accorded when their country is attacked or at war. For example, Americans threw themselves behind U.S. President George W. Bush following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, and the approval ratings of U.S. leaders rose by double digits during the 1990–91 Gulf War and the Iraq War that started in 2003. Similarly, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky enjoyed an overwhelming rise in popularity after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Israelis have often soured on their government after war breaks out.

For Israelis, however, turning against their wartime leaders is not new. The country’s voters have often soured on their government after war breaks out, regardless of the political orientation of the parties in office. In 1973, Prime Minister Golda Meir was blamed for failing to anticipate the attack by Egypt that started the Yom Kippur War and was ultimately hounded out of office. The second intifada, the violent Palestinian uprising that began in 2000, led to the collapse of Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s government, with Barak losing to Ariel Sharon by 25 percentage points in 2001.

Yet another example was Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah. By August of that year, 63 percent of Israelis felt that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had failed to manage the war properly and ought to resign. By early 2007, Olmert was also facing corruption investigations, and more than three-quarters of Israelis were dissatisfied with his job performance, the same portion who currently want Netanyahu to relinquish power. (Olmert ultimately resigned in 2008 due to his looming indictment for corruption.)

From this well-established pattern, it seems likely that Netanyahu will suffer the same fate. Long before the Hamas attacks, his far-right coalition government, formed in late December 2022, was widely reviled. For much of the past year, huge numbers of Israelis have been taking to the streets to oppose the government’s highly controversial judicial overhaul plan in what had become the longest-running protest in Israeli history: October 7 would have marked the 40th straight week. Already in April, only 37 percent of Israelis backed the prime minister; since the attacks, that figure has plunged to 26 percent. By mid-November, twice as many Israelis, or 52 percent, favored former Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, Netanyahu’s main political rival and current partner in the emergency war cabinet.

Moreover, Netanyahu has also been dogged by corruption allegations. Between the active corruption cases against him, the security failures on his watch, and the current war, it will be difficult—if not impossible—for him to remain in office. But the larger question remains: would his departure lead to a fundamental change in the direction of Israeli politics or policy?

RESPONDING RIGHTWARD

Time and again, in moments of war or extreme violence, Israelis have moved to the right. When Israel first elected the right-wing Likud in 1977, it capped the slow downfall of the Labor government that began after the 1973 war. The victory was in fact driven mainly by a long-brewing rebellion against the ruling Alignment/Labor elites, but it legitimized more nationalist and hard-line ideologies as a significant force in Israel. It also ushered in the second phase of the country’s political history, dominated mostly by governments on the right.

During the 1980s, two major conflicts helped drive more Israelis to self-identify with the right: the 1982 war and the first intifada, which started in 1987. The shift is reflected in poll numbers: in 1981, survey researchers found that among the Jewish population (hardly any public surveys included Arabs at this time), 36 percent of respondents said they planned to support a right-wing party. By 1991, that portion who self-identified as right-wing had risen to about half of all Jewish Israelis.

Nevertheless, in the 1992 election, Labor leader Yitzhak Rabin won on a campaign of advancing a peace process with the Palestinians, seemingly countering the expectation that conflict leads to right-wing electoral victories. Some analysts later concluded that Palestinians’ use of force in the first intifada may have contributed to Israel’s support for peace and dovish governments. But that conflict was vastly less violent than later wars. Palestinians largely employed civil disobedience tactics, with light clashes limited mostly to the occupied territories. The 1992 election was also the last time Israelis voted for the left following any sort of conflict with Palestinians.

The effect of the second intifada on the electorate was almost immediate.

Although Rabin’s government signed the Oslo accords with Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, extremists on both sides soon thwarted the process. Between 1993 and 1995, militant Palestinian groups carried out 14 suicide bombings in Israel; in 1994, Jewish fundamentalist settler Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Muslim worshippers in Hebron. Then, in November 1995, Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli religious ultranationalist at a peace rally in Tel Aviv.

Many Israeli analysts and even former negotiators believe Rabin’s assassination killed the peace process: Rabin had made it a centerpiece of his leadership and had the political stature to carry along significant parts of the Israeli public. But another interpretation is that, without Rabin, Israelis simply reverted to their natural ideological preferences. In early 1995—before Rabin’s assassination—about half of Israeli Jews labeled themselves right-wing, compared with 28 percent who labeled themselves left and 23 percent who described themselves as centrist, largely mirroring the 1991 polling. And in the 1996 election, despite polling showing post-assassination sympathy for Rabin’s successor, Shimon Peres, voters went on to elect Netanyahu, who ran on a populist right-wing platform and opposed the “peace process.”

Yet if violence pushed Israelis further to the right, there was also evidence from the Oslo years that calmer times could cause a commensurate, if moderate, swing to the left. For example, during Netanyahu’s first term in the late 1990s, as suicide bombings fell, the proportion of Jewish Israelis who identified as left-wing rose to 35 percent, while those who described themselves as right fell to 42 percent. According to available polling data, that seven-point difference was the narrowest gap between the two sides in the previous 30 years. Then, in 1999, Barak, a leader most Israelis then considered left-wing, was elected to office on promises to revive the peace process and end Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon which at that time had dragged on for 17 years.

But Israeli support for the left didn’t last. At the Camp David summit in July 2000, Barak tried to reach a full-fledged two-state agreement with Arafat. Instead, the talks failed and the second intifada broke out, quickly becoming far more violent than the first. The effect on the electorate was almost immediate: in my surveys, the percent of Jewish Israelis who identified with left-wing attitudes tumbled ten points within the first year of the intifada, and it kept falling after that.

CEMENTING CONTROL

During the first decade of this century, Israelis shifted further to the right. The first half of the decade was characterized by four years of suicide bombings and Israel’s re-invasion of Palestinian towns in Operation Defensive Shield. The second half included the 2006 war in Lebanon, as well as Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, which contributed to Hamas’s victory in Palestinian elections and its violent takeover of Gaza in 2007. This led to Israel’s blockade of the Strip. Rocket fire from Gaza into Israel became more frequent, culminating in Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s massive invasion of Gaza in 2008–9. Shortly after that war, Israelis voted Netanyahu back into office, with his Likud taking an increasingly populist-nationalist orientation. By 2011, more than half of Israeli Jews described themselves as right-wing, more than three times as many who said they were on the left, a number that had declined to 15 percent.

During the 2010s, the trend continued. As Israel fought numerous conflicts with Hamas—including its more extended Gaza operation in 2014—Jewish Israeli voters’ identification with right-wing ideology climbed steadily. Though this indicator still hovered at around 50 percent in the mid-2010s it reached 60 percent by 2019, according to my surveys. By this point, Arab Israelis—about 20 percent of the Israeli population (but roughly 17 percent of the adult citizen electorate)—were regularly polled, as well, and their low levels of support for right-wing ideology brought down the overall average. Nevertheless, even when Arab Israelis were included, about half of the total Israeli public counted themselves as right-wing. (Arab Israelis did boost the left-wing total to about 18 percent of the total population in most surveys of recent years.)

The years leading up to the current war further reinforced this trajectory. In May 2021, a new escalation with Hamas led to unprecedented street violence between Jews and Arab citizens in Israel, followed by a smaller round of violence in 2022 and a quick fight with Palestinian Islamic Jihad in May 2023. Despite widespread outrage at the Netanyahu government for its judicial overhaul plan, the majority of Jewish voters continued to identify as right-wing in surveys.

Notably, just five days before the Hamas attacks, aChord, a social psychology research center affiliated with Hebrew University, conducted a survey that found that two-thirds of Jewish Israelis identified as right-wing (either “firm right” or “moderate right”) while ten percent identified as left. This meant that for every Jewish Israeli voter on the left, the trend was moving toward nearly seven on the right. Based on this stark data, it would be remarkable if Israelis didn’t move further to the right in the wake of the worst episode of violence against Israelis since the country’s founding.

MORE OF THE SAME?

Despite enormous popular disaffection with Netanyahu’s leadership, concerns about political instability will likely allow him to stay in power through the current war. Moreover, much could still happen in the war itself, and voter inclinations may also depend on how much time passes before the next election takes place. But if Netanyahu is ultimately forced out of office, it is far from certain that Israel will take a different ideological path.

Current polls show voters flocking to Gantz’s center-right National Unity party. According to a poll published November 24, if elections were held now, Gantz’s party would receive 43 seats—11 more than Likud won in the 2022 election and well over double what Likud stands to receive now. But it is too soon to know whether these numbers will hold, let alone if they reflect a broader shift toward the center. One problem is that, since all of Israel’s far-right parties are in the deeply unpopular ruling coalition, voters angry with the original Netanyahu cabinet are supporting National Unity—now a wartime partner in that government—by default. Gantz, with his strong military credentials, also seems to be benefiting from “rally round the flag” support in the war itself.

Gantz is unlikely to veer from the right’s existing approach to the Palestinian problem.

But if Israelis resent Netanyahu yet seem likely to shift right, why aren’t they cleaving to the far-right parties in the coalition? So far, polls show no rise for the ultranationalist Jewish Power and Religious Zionism parties. Paradoxically, the Netanyahu government’s extremist program, its attack on democratic institutions, and the catastrophic misgovernance leading up to the war might actually hold back the electorate from making what could have been a reflexive slide toward a more theocratic, antidemocratic, and irredeemable right.

One plausible outcome of the current crisis, then, would see Israel shifting to a new Gantz-led government. Gantz would likely avoid Netanyahu’s constant stream of divisive populism and presumably his corruption scandals, and he would almost certainly avoid the messianic drive of his predecessor’s governments to expand settlements or formalize annexation. Still, with Gantz’s long military record and the presence of former Likud members in his party, he carries legitimacy on the right and will want to maintain it. Moreover, there is little in Gantz’s own rhetoric to suggest he would veer significantly from the right’s existing approach to the Palestinian problem. Neither as a candidate nor since joining the war cabinet has Gantz openly supported a two-state solution, or any political resolution of the Palestinian issue for that matter. As recently as last year, he referred to the idea of “two states for two people,” and said, “I am against this.”

One of Netanyahu’s worst mistakes was to view the Palestinian problem purely in security terms, as if the politics behind the conflict could be ignored. That, of course, led to the blind spot that helped make the Hamas attacks so deadly. But as an IDF man, Gantz seems likely to view the Palestinian problem in much the same way—as a security threat to be contained rather than an acknowledgement of the Palestinian right to self-determination. And if that is the case, for all its horror, October 7 seems likely to result in more of the same—including future cycles of misery on both sides.

[Foreign Affairs]

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