One year after the Hamas’s October 7 terror attacks, and with most of Gaza literally destroyed and the conflict in the Middle East growing, one may wonder what the mood is inside Israel. Israel’s populace has supported the war in Gaza, opposes the two-state solution, but now also seems to offer enthusiastic support for the attacks in Lebanon and even a strike on Iran. In fact, Netanyahu’s popularity has been boosted following the Hezbollah attacks and his Likud party is back at the top of national surveys.
What has happened to Israel? What has happened to the Israeli peace movement? Why is the country on an increasingly illiberal, violent, and destructive path? In the interview that follows, Idan Landau sheds light into the current political and social environment inside Israel. Landau is full professor of linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University and writes a political blog (in Hebrew) on Israeli affairs.
C. J. Polychroniou: The October 7 attacks by Hamas’ military wing—the al-Qassam Brigades—and several other Palestinian armed groups shook Israel to its core, and the nature and scope of the operation, called Al-Aqsa Flood, which resulted in the deaths of nearly 1200 people while some 250 were taken as hostages to Gaza prompted the extreme far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu to embark on a maniacal campaign against Gaza which has led so far to a Palestinian death toll that has risen to over 41,000 although the true death toll is undoubtedly much higher. Indeed, the utter destruction of Gaza was a stated objective as Israel’s war cabinet had vowed to wipe Hamas off the earth. Now, it’s been said that the attacks created a strong sense of solidarity among Israelis, with the overwhelming majority supporting the military response against Hamas, including limiting humanitarian aid to Gaza, but that old divisions have returned and that Israeli society is divided about the lessons of October 7. Can you give us a sense of the mood in Israel today, especially since Israel is pressing forward now on two fronts?
Idan Landau: Probably the single most divisive issue in Israel concerns the fate of the hostages. By now it is clear that the military “pressure” (a euphemism for rampant killing of Gazans) not only fails to facilitate the release of the hostages but directly contributes to their death. So the terms of the dilemma have grown more brutal: Are you or aren’t you willing to sacrifice the lives of the Israeli hostages for Netanyahu’s promise of “absolute victory”? Note how the human aspect has been removed; their lives are no longer considered the ultimate end, to which different means may be deployed. Their lives are one more strategic means, along with others, like holding on to the Philadelphi road, or using 2,000 pound bombs, etc. This reflects the increasing dehumanization that affects not just Israel’s victims but Israelis themselves.
Now, the constant demonstrations for the hostages, which attracted hundreds of thousands of Israelis, were a real nuisance to this government. It did and still does everything it can to demonize the demonstrators; they directly target family members of hostages—miserable fathers and mothers and siblings, who have gone through many sleepless nights of anxiety and sorrow—so that police forces and random mobs beat them up on the streets. In this context the new Lebanese/Iranian front really serves Netanyahu perfectly; it silences the protest, quite literally, as the emergency regulations simply prohibit people to gather outside. Even mainstream analysts agree that among Netanyahu’s motives for escalating this never-ending war with ever more new fronts is the forceful pacification of the internal divisions that threaten his coalition.
Israelis are traumatized, exhausted, and feel defenseless more than ever under this state of endless war. That’s exactly when societies cling together and refrain from challenging their most fundamental assumptions.
Regrettably, on the major questions of Israel’s policies there are no serious debates. Was it moral or wise to bomb Lebanese towns, kill around 2,000 Lebanese citizens since Oct. 7, and invade the villages in southern Lebanon? There’s increasing talk now about “a security zone”—the same false idol that persisted between 1982-2000 and which Israel eventually abandoned (tail between legs), and one that will surely be established in the Gaza Strip. There’s absolutely no promise of security in pushing your enemy a few kilometers away from the border if you constantly fuel its hatred. Thus, the most important lesson has not been learned: Military force cannot solve everything. And coming back to your question: Israelis are traumatized, exhausted, and feel defenseless more than ever under this state of endless war. That’s exactly when societies cling together and refrain from challenging their most fundamental assumptions.
C. J. Polychroniou: The situation in the West Bank has deteriorated significantly since the start of the war in Gaza. Settler attacks against Palestinians have increased dramatically and Israel is seizing a record amount of Palestinian land in the West Bank, which is in total violation of international law. Does mainstream Israeli society support what’s happening in the West Bank? Is there any resistance to the settlements in Palestinian territory?
Idan Landau: Here I can say that most Israeli media simply lost interest in these developments; an average Western observer probably knows more about them than an average Israeli. Only if you read Ha’aretz (around 5% exposure) are you exposed to the magnitude of land theft and state-sponsored terror in the West Bank. The media is totally complicit in these crimes, either by ignoring or by normalizing them. Importantly, since Oct. 7, the far right is working very hard to obliterate any distinction between Gaza and the West Bank, between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, and erase any imaginable indication that Palestinians are as diverse as any other people. They’re all faceless terrorists, in Rafah or in Tulkarem, no difference. That’s the prevalent outlook. So daily incidents of forced evictions of herder communities or live shootings at unarmed demonstrators simply fall outside of that outlook; Israelis literally can’t see them, they are conceptually unequipped and often informationally deprived of any means to even consider what they think about such matters, let alone come to oppose them. It is really hard to convey how insulated the Israeli mind is, especially during the last year, from any hard evidence that we commit unjustified, unprovoked crimes on a massive scale. I don’t mean to exempt the common Israeli from responsibility. This ignorance is often willed, it is not a passive state, and it requires constant repression of unpleasant facts........