Israeli Society Is in a Deepening State of Contradiction

Nearly a year into the Gaza war, the sense of dread in Israel is all-consuming. Since the twin assassinations of Hezbollah and Hamas leaders within hours of each other in Beirut and Tehran, respectively, nearly two weeks ago, Israelis have anxiously awaited a retaliatory attack by Iran and its regional allies. Despite some indications from Iran that it’s not seeking an all-out war, fears of a larger regional escalation continue to reverberate around the globe. Neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor any other Israeli leader has publicly addressed citizens’ concerns or outlined how Israel will react, beyond saying that the country is prepared and will exact a heavy price from its enemies.

A version of daily life continues even as Israeli society is on edge. After 10 months, most people have become accustomed to it. They go to their jobs or the beach; kids head to summer camp. Yet some have started hoarding food and generators. Most flights to and from Israel have been canceled, preventing people from leaving and leaving many Israelis stranded abroad. Israeli media has been rife with speculation and scenarios for all-out war from almost every direction: Hezbollah in the north, Iran in the east, the Houthis to the southeast, and Hamas in the south.

Even before this escalation, many Israelis, especially those in the north, were demanding the government invade Lebanon, as if there is a magic button they can press to get rid of the threat from Hezbollah. A recent poll shows a majority of Israelis want the country to take more aggressive military action against Hezbollah, even as they are disenchanted with the leadership. Many of the mayors and municipal leaders who have been demanding the army turn its focus to Lebanon have also condemned the Netanyahu government for its intelligence and security failures, and for failing to devise a plan to restore security to Israel’s north.

In my life in Israel and in my work researching and analyzing its politics and security, I have observed a society gripped by despair but at a loss for how to carve a way out. The Israeli public is in a constant state of contradiction. Earlier this summer, polls showed that 72 percent of Israelis wanted Netanyahu to resign. They hold him responsible not only for the failure to protect Israelis on October 7, but also for delaying, undermining, and even rejecting a hostage deal, which a majority — 56 percent — want, even if it means ending the war in Gaza. A larger 62 percent asserted that getting the hostages back is more important than defeating Hamas.

While a small minority oppose the war on Gaza on moral grounds, among other reasons, most Israelis continue to be apathetic to the suffering of Palestinians, with reports of starvation, disease, and infections due to dire conditions in Gaza scarcely a news item. After Netanyahu’s speech in Congress last month, Israelis polled said Netanyahu is considered more fit to be prime minister than any of his political rivals. And after the twin assassinations the following week, Netanyahu’s Likud party led polls for the first time since October 7. This may less reflect Netanyahu regaining popularity than the dysfunctional paralysis that has gripped Israeli politics for the past several election cycles.

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Despite these contradictory feelings, it appears clear now to most Israelis that Netanyahu is not and was never committed to getting a hostage deal. Top security officials have said it out loud. President Joe Biden reportedly chided him for it in a telephone call. As former deputy head of Israel’s national security Eran Etzion has pointed out, Netanyahu has a “clear strategy with a singular overarching objective — to survive in power, at any cost.” That means prolonging and even escalating the Gaza war for his own political survival — because reaching a ceasefire could lead to the collapse of his governing bloc.

The far-right ministers in Netanyahu’s coalition have consistently rejected a ceasefire/hostage deal, instead openly seeking to implement their messianic vision for Jewish supremacy over the entire territory between the river and the sea, even at the expense of — or in order to — ignite a regional war. Seeing the impressive intelligence and operational precision that the Israeli security apparatus displayed in Beirut and most likely in Tehran, you hear people wonder how it is that Israel, with all these capabilities, cannot defeat Hamas or at least bring the hostages home.

On the issue of the hostages, protesting Israelis, especially families of those held captive, have articulated a clear message that without doing everything to bring them back alive — what some invoke as a Jewish obligation — there can be no victory. For its part, the security establishment sees securing the release of the hostages through a ceasefire as a strategic national interest. It would, as an Israeli intelligence official told me months ago, retain and restore public trust in the military. It would also deescalate the situation in the north (Hezbollah has said it would stop firing the moment there is a ceasefire in Gaza), allow the military to rest and regroup, and at this point avoid regional war. But however many Israelis may now agree with this, they are not able to push the government out — or onto an alternative path.

There are several reasons for this. For decades, Israel has defied international opinion — and now, according to the International Court of Justice, also law — in the occupied territories, creating a culture of lawlessness and impunity. The settlement project, and with it, settler violence, tells a story of normalized violence, the dehumanization of Palestinians, and a certain arrogance of power, which played an important role in the leadership’s blindness to the signs leading up to October 7. Within Israel, right-wing mobs recently broke into a detention facility and army base to protest the arrest of soldiers accused of torturing a Palestinian detainee. The Israeli right’s 20-year campaign, led by Netanyahu, to dominate the media, undermine state institutions like the Supreme Court, and demonize Palestinians and Israelis who don’t toe the line has created a vacuum in both politics and civil society. The latter finds itself incapable of prioritizing the saving of lives as a policy goal, an indifference that appears to extend from Palestinian lives to Israeli ones.

Perhaps the most critical reason for Israeli society’s inability to force political change is that it holds the army sacrosanct and relies heavily on the military’s use of force to maintain a semblance of control and stability. It is a society that has over decades of constant conflict with Palestinians become convinced that any compromise or diplomacy makes Israel appear weak and can only lead to defeat, a sentiment that has grown manifold since October 7. Today, not a single Jewish opposition leader in Israel talks about a two-state solution and not a single Jewish Israeli party voted against a recent Knesset resolution opposing Palestinian statehood — showing that even those who vehemently oppose Netanyahu also reject Palestinian self-determination.

Israel’s rise to the status of a regional superpower was the result of a quick and decisive war in 1967, when it defeated surrounding Arab armies and commenced the long-term occupation of territories home to millions of Palestinians. But ever since the next war in 1973, Israel has primarily fought nonstate armed groups and has yet to adapt its military and strategic approach accordingly. As a former senior military official told me recently, “A military that has not fought a war in 30 years no longer knows how to plan for war. … It’s a novel thing that we now engage in operations that are supposed to achieve deterrence without ever marking a decisive win.”

The effort to keep things at a low boil by “mowing the grass” in Gaza and maintaining a level of mutual deterrence with Hezbollah is no longer working, as the past 10 months have shown. As some Israeli military experts have told me, this means that more force is needed at a time of Israel’s choosing, that a larger war is inevitable, that the enemies are “only interested in destroying us,” and that Israel needs to strike a decisive blow, instead of kicking the can down the road time and again.

Yet if one thing is clear, it’s that Israel is not well placed to prevail over the threats it faces only through hard power, unconditional military support from the U.S. notwithstanding. It cannot create a secure place for itself without also embracing non-military channels of diplomacy, negotiations, and compromise, as it did when it signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan decades ago. Even as Israel has leveled Gaza to the ground and killed top Hamas leaders and Hezbollah commanders, it isn’t any closer to prevailing in either confrontation. On the contrary, it now faces the threat of a regional war. 

Israel is arguably at its most precarious moment in national security since its founding, with the public’s confidence in both political and military leaders at an all-time low. The question is whether Israelis will start to openly challenge the working assumptions on which their security has been based for decades. If they fail, or are unable, to do so, they can only pray that the other key actors — the U.S. and Iran — find it sufficiently in their interests to pull us all back from the abyss.

In recent days, Iran has indicated it may do by weighing its response under heavy international pressure and stating that a ceasefire in Gaza would delay and possibly deter retaliation. Even Moshe Ya’alon, a former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff who worked under Netanyahu, expressed trust that Iran and Hezbollah are not interested in an escalation but said he cannot say the same for Israeli leadership. For everyday Israelis, continuing to place their hopes in the army’s ability to just “finish the job,” as Netanyahu keeps promising, sadly offers little but the prospect of more of the chaos and uncertainty to which they have reluctantly become accustomed.