What October 7th Did and Didn’t Change About Israeli Politics

Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel, in which more than twelve hundred people were murdered, revealed a woefully unprepared Israeli government, as well as—it was later discovered—a government that ignored warnings about the raid. As a result, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest-tenured leader in Israel’s history, has seen his approval ratings crater, with a majority of Israelis saying that he should leave office at the end of the war in Gaza. But, with the war showing no signs of ending, and with Netanyahu’s record of near-invincibility, it remains unclear what any future government will look like.

To understand what may come next for Israeli politics, I recently spoke by phone with Dahlia Scheindlin, a political scientist and an expert on Israeli public opinion, as well as a policy fellow at the Century Foundation and a columnist for Haaretz. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed who might succeed Netanyahu, whether October 7th and the war in Gaza have opened up new space for a different kind of politics in Israel, and how to understand Israel’s long rightward drift.

What can we say about Netanyahu’s popularity right now? Has the war—as wars often do, at least initially—done anything to boost his standing after the calamity of October 7th?

By every possible indicator we have in survey research—and there have been lots of surveys done since October 7th—his popularity is abysmal. It’s the worst I’ve seen, certainly since 2009. I’d like to say ever, but I would have to check every single survey done since the early nineties.

I can think of four or five different questions that are regularly tracked over time. One of them is the question of how his party, Likud, is doing in a theoretical vote—in which case his party loses close to fifty per cent of its support. His coalition has lost its majority—even before October 7th, but now even more so. They had sixty-four out of a hundred and twenty seats in the beginning. They’re down to thirty-two. According to the Israel Democracy Institute, there are record-low levels of trust in the government, and his personal ratings have gone down to the point where if you ask who’s more suitable to be Prime Minister, between him and Benny Gantz, he only gets about twenty-five per cent. Benny Gantz is over fifty per cent. [Gantz is a retired army general who is part of Netanyahu’s current wartime coalition.]

Add to those a newish question since this war: Do you want Netanyahu to resign? And we have between seventy per cent and seventy-five per cent, depending on different surveys, that say they want him to resign.

Do the questions ask about resigning right now or, rather, when the war is over?

Different surveys ask that in different ways, but most of them try to give some sort of gradation of: Do you want him to resign right now or after the war or after the active fighting of the war? And the number that I gave you is what the different surveys have as the total. The bigger portion, like forty-five per cent, would prefer for him to resign after the war, even though it’s very hard to have an exact definition of what “after the war” would mean. The smaller portion—about twenty-five per cent, depending on the survey—would like him to resign right now. So we see about a quarter of the population who’d be willing to even switch leaders in the middle of a war because they’ve lost confidence in his leadership.

How do you understand the desire to not want to get rid of him right away if he is so unpopular? Is it that logistically it would be too hard?

It’s important to keep in mind that nobody really understands what an end date to the war would look like. Everybody understands the idea that there is one clear measure of getting the hostages back, and there’s another stated aim of destroying Hamas. But the second one is what the public thinks the government has adopted as the first aim. Nobody really knows what the measure of that would be. So, when people say they want him to resign after the war, there’s no consensus on how we would know when it’s here.

In terms of your first question: I think that the Israeli public is going through something that is more extreme than anybody remembers in our lifetime, and there’s a strong argument to be made that it’s the most extreme situation Israelis have been in, ever. I think that the fear of the kind of political instability that it would require to change the Prime Minister right now is simply another layer of fear that the majority of Israelis don’t want to deal with. Except for roughly twenty-five per cent, who find it more fearful and more dangerous for the country to continue with him even right now.

Israel has become famous for having multiple elections, but what would be the mechanism for new elections, or for him to fall?

The usual mechanism for new elections is that there is some sort of coalition crisis, and then there’s a no-confidence vote. In that event, if there are a sufficient number of defectors from within the coalition who vote on the side of the opposition, then they get an absolute majority.

There’s all sorts of other rumors about an internal rebellion within the Likud, with a portion of Likud breaking off and either defecting, starting a new party, or joining an old party. Then you get into all sorts of technical laws about when you can or can’t do that. There have also been rumors about an internal rebellion within the Likud leading to some sort of a deal that would try to get Netanyahu to agree to step down as Prime Minister without going into elections, and trying to create a new coalition with the opposition parties or with Benny Gantz’s party—which is currently in this emergency coalition—on the condition that Netanyahu will no longer be Prime Minister.

Right now, those things are salacious political headlines. The most likely scenario for the government to collapse is that there is some sort of political crisis. When the government had to decide on voting for the hostage deal, the two further extreme right parties both said that they would be against it, and one of them even threatened to leave the coalition. Nevertheless, one of them changed their mind, the other one voted against it; the coalition didn’t fall. It didn’t turn into that kind of a no-confidence vote, but subsequently the Jewish Power party led by Itamar Ben-Gvir threatened to break up the government if the fighting didn’t restart. That’s just the theoretical mechanism—I’m not actually predicting it’s going to happen, because personally I think it’s more likely not to happen.

In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, you wrote, “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.” You meant the right-wing tilt in Israeli politics. Why?

Israel has had numerous kinds of wars and escalations in order to test the sorts of observations and hypotheses we might have. It’s almost a myth that, after periods of extreme war or violence, Israelis become more conciliatory. And I think the case is overstated, because the last time you could see anything like that process happening, it was 1973. After the Yom Kippur War, the government made the decision to move ahead with the peace process with Egypt. It wasn’t exactly driven by public opinion. So, if we’re talking about public opinion, we don’t really see a softening of attitudes. It’s the opposite.

Even if you could argue that after the first intifada the Israeli leadership did decide on some sort of process that was intended eventually to lead to a comprehensive political resolution that involved concessions . . . first of all, it was much lower-intensity violence. And it was top-down, driven by the leadership. After there’s a war, particularly when these are wars that involve major violence against Israeli civilians—and the best example we have of that is the second intifada—then we see Israelis taking a more rightward perspective.

So, if you judge by the second intifada onward, the Israeli public certainly moved to the right. It’s a long-term process. Now, if you had leaders that were inclined to say, “We need to change the paradigm, and even if the Israeli public is feeling militant and hard-line, we’re going to move ahead with some sort of recognition that this is the time for a political process and maybe even concessions,” then it’s not impossible that would happen. But, instead, what we’ve seen in the last few decades is that the Israeli public moves far to the right and then elects the kinds of leaders who are sworn against moving ahead with any sort of process that seems to involve concessions to the Palestinians or acknowledge the need for Palestinian independence.

I interviewed the analyst Nathan Thrall recently, and he told me about the broader strategy of ignoring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He said, “The onus now is on the Israeli government to provide the public with an answer to how October 7th won’t happen again. There is no plausible answer that they can give that doesn’t include actually resolving the Israeli-Palestinian issue.” I think what he’s saying is that what’s different about this moment is that this wasn’t just a security failure, an intelligence failure, but it represented in a blatant way how counterproductive the Netanyahu policy vis-à-vis Hamas and the Palestinians has been from a purely Israeli-self-interest perspective. I think what Thrall is saying is that that may open up some political space that didn’t exist, even if, as you say, that is not the way this tends to trend. What do you think about that idea?

I think that it’s one scenario, but I think that it could be really misleading. There’s been a tendency on the part of the international community and well-meaning observers and probably even many on the Israeli left, who think that that is the natural conclusion. It may very well be a natural conclusion that the policy over all failed. If we presume that the Israeli government can no longer get away with saying, “We’ll ignore this conflict, we’ll manage it, we’ll shrink it”—even if the Israeli public concludes that that’s wrong, the conclusion they come to may very well be the opposite. That, instead, Israel needs to be much more hard-line about it, right?

Israel might decide that it needs to park its tanks inside Gaza, north and south, for the next eighteen years, like it did in Lebanon. Consider the fact that all of the votes that are currently leaving Netanyahu’s government, most of them are coming from Likud, and some of them are coming from the far-right party. All of them are going to Benny Gantz, and he’s the leader of this party called National Unity.

But his main credential is that he’s a military man. He was a former chief of staff, and he joined the war cabinet. He’s getting all the credit for being a pragmatic leader, but this is a man who has never articulated anything like a political-resolution-based vision for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He doesn’t even really talk about resolving the conflict. A year ago, he said he was broadly opposed to the idea of a two-state solution, and I have every reason to assume that, being a career military person, he views it primarily as a security problem.

I also have lots of reasons to believe, based on what we’re seeing in the survey dynamics since October 7th, that the Israeli public is pretty much with him on that. They may very well conclude that, yes, it needs to be resolved and it needs to be resolved through a security-based policy that has nothing to do with recognizing Palestinians’ right of self-determination and the dangers of Israel continuing to control the Palestinians militarily. They may see that the necessary conclusion is more extensive control over Palestinians.

You have to realize that many mainstream analysts are saying that one of the things that went wrong is that Israel gave some relief measures to Palestinians in Gaza. From my perspective, I think that this is almost meaningless because, yes, there were twenty thousand work permits, but there were a hundred thousand who needed them. The way it’s being understood in Israeli society is, look, we gave them concessions, and, instead of responding peacefully, they exploited them by gathering information that they then gave to Hamas in order to attack them.

It signifies a pretty big divide based on the wishful thinking of many who are outside of this conflict that this will provide an opportunity for a political breakthrough. We have to be clear-eyed that the analysis I just portrayed is very prominent as well. You can’t ignore that that’s one of the most important directions Israel could take.

But wars often lead to large-scale social and political changes. Your comment earlier that the impact on Israel of October 7th was beyond all these previous things does suggest that political possibilities may open, even if your comments are totally warranted.

So now that I’ve made you feel very bleak, let me also point to a couple of very limited factors that could lead to something like what you’re talking about. The best example I can think of is, after World War Two, the countries that had been in one of the most bitter and unprecedented levels of barbaric wars then created one of the most inspiring, peaceful alliances that helped to keep the peace relatively well ever since. I think that’s a great inspiration for us here, too.

Some other factors: in terms of public opinion, we are not seeing rising support for the further-right parties within the coalition. So the Jewish Power party and the Religious Zionism party—these Jewish-supremacist, theocratic, authoritarian parties that won fourteen seats out of a hundred and twenty in the November elections are currently down to about seven in most polls. Now, I have to qualify that a little bit based on some technicalities. It could be as high as ten. But they’re certainly not growing, and that is consistent and a little bit lower than they were getting throughout the course of the year. So far. All of this is subject to change, but that’s interesting—that we didn’t see people racing over to the further extreme right in answer to what happened on October 7th.

The other thing that I think is interesting is about survey research that tracks support for the two-state solution. Listen, it’s not good. It was bad before October 7th. Surveys of both Israelis and Palestinians had showed that support was sinking to somewhere between thirty-five and forty per cent. After October 7th, the lowest survey that I found showed between roughly twenty-five per cent—maybe a little bit higher—and about thirty per cent in total who supported the two-state solution. Most recently, the polls are showing about thirty-five-per-cent support, which is not that different from where it was before. And the breakdown of who supports the two-state solution, left, right, and center, is very similar to the way it was before. About three-quarters of the left support it. About twenty per cent of the right support it. Support has fallen among the center of the Israeli political mass from about two-thirds from years ago to roughly forty-five per cent, but that’s where it was before October 7th, too.

I am not seeing dramatic change in the basic configuration of how the Israeli public views a political resolution. Now, it’s not that that’s terribly encouraging, because those reasons are partly why we were in this stagnation to begin with. But, given how they could have gone, maybe it’s better. I could easily have expected the Israeli society to completely reject anything that involves political resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Everybody’s capable of change. Benny Gantz has not indicated any sort of genuine conciliatory vision or support for comprehensive political resolutions of the conflict based on two states. But he is almost by definition somebody who takes pragmatic strategic analysis seriously. Together with what I think is a major shakeup of international actors who had been lulled into thinking the same thing as the Israeli public and the Israeli government—that this could be marginalized—hopefully they will now realize that they have to be much more assertive, and they have to not only talk about supporting a two-state solution but put their policy behind it. The confluence of factors could lead to some sort of a breakthrough. ♦