The political scientist Dahlia Scheindlin is a longtime expert on Israeli public opinion and analyst of the country’s domestic political scene. With the new year upon us—and with the fall of the Assad regime, in Syria; a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel, in Lebanon; and continued hostilities in Gaza, where more than forty thousand Palestinians have been killed since the Hamas-led attacks of October 7th, 2023—I wanted to get a handle on exactly what has and has not changed in Israel in the past few months. I spoke by phone with Scheindlin, who is also a policy fellow at the Century Foundation, a columnist for Haaretz, and the author of “The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how her understanding of Israel’s aims for the region has shifted lately; why the popularity of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, has ticked back up after falling in the immediate aftermath of October 7th; and why the immense number of Palestinian civilian casualties is still barely registering within Israel.
In terms of domestic politics, does it feel like Israel is finally in what we could call a post-October 7th period?
The post-October 7th period is very easily defined in survey research. It’s unusual for survey researchers to have such clear trends in the data that are so unambiguous. For the first six months after October 7th, the government’s ratings plunged on every indicator, and there was a common wisdom that Netanyahu could not survive. And then, around April, 2024, there was a very clear beginning of a turning point, and his polls began a slow and incremental recovery on all the same indicators.
The same is true of the popularity of his party and his original coalition—they recovered to roughly where they were before the war. For Netanyahu, that’s around forty per cent. He is leading polls against his opponents in terms of who people think should be the Prime Minister. This is not as good as where they were in the November, 2022, elections, in which Netanyahu and his coalition partners won sixty-four out of a hundred and twenty seats in the Knesset. So they’re not doing that well, but we are definitely in a post-October 7th period.
You mentioned April as a turning point. That was when the war against Hamas broadened regionally—
It exactly lines up with April. I think we shouldn’t take the responsibility off of Hezbollah for its fateful decision, in the early morning hours of October 8th, to attack Israel—which basically internationalized or regionalized the conflict. But what happened in April? Israel assassinated a top commander of Iran’s Quds Force, in Damascus, and that set off a whole chain of events which led to the first ever Iranian strike on Israel and then Israel’s response. All of that was in April, and that’s when we saw Netanyahu’s polls beginning to rise. Then, over the summer, the war escalated with Hezbollah. Another big turning point was in September, when Israel set off the pager bombs and, shortly afterward, assassinated Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
But, even before that, in July, Israel killed Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, which was a huge sign to Israelis that the old Israel was back and could do anything anywhere. That gave Israelis a sense that the country was recovering. It’s all because of the regional front. I have come to the conclusion that Gaza is essentially a losing issue for Netanyahu. He can’t get out of Gaza because he has prioritized his coalition partners. I also don’t see him as a victim or trapped by his coalition partners. He put them there. But it’s not a good issue for him. The Israeli public feels more confident with the regional escalations and Israel’s perceived victories on those fronts, and that’s contributed to his rise.
You said that Gaza is a “losing issue” for Netanyahu. Do you mean that the public doesn’t seem to agree with him on Gaza? At least from a distance, it certainly seems like the country is willing to put up with the war there continuing and the incredibly awful humanitarian consequences, the hostages not returning, and so on.
After October 7th, people were shocked and stunned and paralyzed and afraid of rockets and trying to figure out where their dead bodies were and whether their kids were dead or captive. It was really very powerful, kind of a paralysis phase. There was a turning point, and it came pretty quickly, around the hostages. When people realized that the government was not prioritizing hostage release, even in November, 2023, they were already going out to the streets. They organized a huge march and rallied these civil-society networks that had been built up during the judicial-reform protests earlier that year. The sense of being stunned and afraid and traumatized gave way pretty quickly to social mobilization, partly because, by a tremendous coincidence, so much of that social mobilization had already been in place.
But, after a while, it became clear to Israelis that the government was not really going to prioritize the hostages or was always finding a way somehow not to get that deal. And the temptation is strong to blame Hamas, but ultimately Israelis started to get the impression—through lots of leaks, reporting, and analysis that would come out each time the negotiations collapsed—that Netanyahu’s not doing this. He’s not prioritizing this because he doesn’t want to stop the war, and he doesn’t want to stop the war because he doesn’t want to lose his coalition. Many people think it’s because he’s on trial for corruption. [The charges center on accusations of bribery and fraud.] I think that’s a little bit of a leap. He just wants to stay in power.
I get a lot of questions from America about why Israelis are putting up with it. You have to realize that every single week there are thousands of people in the street on Saturday nights.
I don’t want to say that no one’s pushing for the release of hostages, but we just talked about Netanyahu’s approval ratings rising. And it’s pretty obvious, just following from a distance, that Netanyahu doesn’t care about the hostages. It’s a little surprising to me in a country that once traded how many people for a single captured soldier?
One thousand twenty-seven. [This was a prisoner swap with Hamas in 2011.] Yeah. Not just the country; Netanyahu did it.
So it’s a little surprising to me that a Prime Minister who not only is not prioritizing the hostages but evidently cares more about staying in power than he does about them is not being hurt more politically.
Yeah. There are contradictions in the way people express themselves. Despite the recovery of his ratings, he still does not have majority support. That is partly because he’s so out of step with where the clear majority of the public is with relation to the hostages. Every time we ask the public, in different kinds of surveys, with different kinds of questions, there is always a majority or a strong plurality who support a hostage release no matter the price. At this point, most of the surveys are showing roughly seventy per cent of Israelis would prefer a hostage deal to whatever the alternative is, like destroying Hamas by any means.
People who are supporting the government, especially that core base who stayed with Netanyahu even for the first six months of the war, when his over-all support cratered—they may emotionally care about the hostages, but it’s a “thoughts and prayers” kind of emotion. They do not want to release Palestinian prisoners. They may truly believe that Israel needs to destroy more of Hamas in Gaza. There’s a common theme among people with that opinion, which is that if we stop the war now the soldiers who died will have died in vain, and so a deal prioritizes the lives of hostages over the lives of soldiers. These are the kinds of arguments you hear.
There are also people who want to keep the war going until they conquer Gaza. I would say that about a third of the population supports the most ultra-nationalist, fundamentalist, Jewish-supremacist part of the government.
In a recent piece, you wrote, to paraphrase, that people were saying at the beginning of the war that Israel wanted to resettle Gaza, the way it has done in parts of the West Bank. You wrote that you had been a little skeptical of that, but, given some of what we’ve seen in the past few months, it’s hard to argue about where things might be headed in Gaza, and maybe in parts of Syria and Lebanon.
