How Oct. 7 Changed Israel
Time · LC · trust 40/100
The world changed when Hamas attacked Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023 , catalyzing devastating conflict throughout the region . But within Israel, political sentiments have changed surprisingly little.
To some, the attack fulfilled long-term right-wing warnings that Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza would yield disaster; and the attack was incontrovertible proof that Palestinians will never live in peace with Israel.
Israeli left-wingers, for their part, have long held that a festering military rule over Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and failure to reach peace, would inevitably lead to violent conflagration. For them, Oct. 7 only proved that they had been right all along.
The standoff raises crucial questions. In three years since Oct. 7, how has the attack changed Israeli society? And how will the answer affect upcoming elections in Israel?
To be sure, there have been cataclysmic changes in Israel, and the Middle East at large, since Oct. 7. The war in Gaza that began that day has become Israel’s longest war. A relatively stable ceasefire with Lebanon from 2006 to 2023 ended when Hezbollah, a Shi’a militia group, fired on Israel the day after Hamas’ attack; after multiple escalations since then, the current ceasefire is precarious. Israel and the U.S. have waged two full-blown wars with Iran, and the Middle East is still threatened by spin-off conflicts.
The losses Israelis suffered on Oct. 7 and since then have affected the country collectively and profoundly. For two years, many Israelis went from demonstration to demonstration demanding that their government prioritize a deal with Hamas to release Israeli hostages. Hundreds of thousands have spent the last three years in and out of active reserve duty.
Since 2023, Israel has seen record levels of emigration and growing international isolation. Sixty-one percent of Israelis told pollsters for the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) that the national mood is poor .
Moreover, the destruction of Palestinian life and society , still ongoing , will one day force a terrible reckoning within Israel.
What’s less visible, and more surprising, is what has stayed the same. Israelis’ attitudes towards Palestinians, occupation, and conflict have become more extreme. But I would argue that Israeli public opinion today says much more about how Israel had changed prior to Oct. 7. The change in national attitudes since that fateful day has been moderate and consistent with what came before.
In December 2022, almost a year before Oct. 7, support for peace through a two-state solution hit a historic low. In the joint Palestinian-Israeli survey I conduct together with colleagues at Tel Aviv University and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, support stood at 39% of Israelis that year—the lowest since the 1990s. Among Jewish respondents, just 34% supported a two-state solution, and 37% believed Israel should permanently annex the West Bank while Palestinians would have limited rights.
When we conducted the study again in mid-2024, Jews were twice as likely to support a single, Israeli-dominated unequal state as they were to support two states.
Palestinian attitudes in 2022 were similar. Just one-third supported two states. Both sides showed a mirror-image majority who distrusted the other. In surveys by the IDI from that same time, 59% of Jewish Israelis defined themselves as right-wing; just 12% said they were left-wing.
What changed after Oct. 7? This July, the Tel Aviv University Peace Index survey found that support for two states stood at 31%, an eight-point decline in the four years since 2022. Now, IDI surveys find that just over 60% of Israeli Jews describe themselves as right-wing, just a few points higher than late 2022.
Israel has changed, but this change began years before Oct. 7 2023. In 2010 , no fewer than 71% of Israelis supported a two-state solution in the joint surveys. The years that followed were plagued by stagnation and dissipation of any peace process, regular wars with Hamas, and a heavily nationalist government in Israel. It stands to reason that these phenomena pushed Israeli society further to the right. Support for the two-state solution eroded slowly, then rapidly by the end of the decade.
That shift was self-reinforcing: the more right-wing Israelis became (primarily the Jewish population), the more elected leaders took ever-more radical positions such as supporting settlement expansion and de facto annexation in the West Bank. In 2019, Prime Minister Netanyahu began referring to extending sovereignty over parts of the West Bank, or de jure annexation . The current government accelerated those processes drastically.
Study after study shows that Arab citizens of Israel have remained the strongest supporters of peace, before and after the current wars. But with Jewish Israeli and Palestinian attitudes so dismal in the years before Oct. 7, the chances of resurgent violence almost seemed inevitable.
In other words, most Israelis did not radically transform their worldview after Oct. 7. In fact, hardline political trends were among the many factors contributing to the terrible escalation to begin with.
Another thing that hasn’t changed in Israel during the last three years of war: hopes for peace. The number of Israeli Jews who self-describe as left-wing has barely shifted. In a May survey for the Institute for National Security Studies, about 20% of the total population, Jews and Arabs, define themselves as left-wing, and a similar share typically say they are centrist. These groups embrace a commitment to democracy, liberal values, separation of religion and state, and reject the religious fundamentalism of the current government.
The left remains committed to peace via diplomacy and Palestinian self-determination. In a mid-2025 survey I conducted for a peace organization called A Land for All, where I am also an active member, the large majority of self-defined left-wing Israelis, and nearly…
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