One year after the bloodiest day in its history, Israel is at war on multiple fronts. The country’s military has diminished Hamas in Gaza, but in the process killed almost 42,000 people in Gaza, including more than 10,000 children, and reduced much of the territory to rubble. Responding to Hezbollah’s provocations on its northern border, Israel has assassinated most of the group’s leadership, launched an invasion of Southern Lebanon, and continues to barrage Beirut and its suburbs with bombs, killing at least 2,000 people there. And it has escalated tensions with Iran, its ultimate regional enemy and the driving force behind Hezbollah. Now, the world waits to see how Israel will respond to Iran’s recent missile attacks on its cities and towns.
Israel garnered much of the globe’s sympathy after Hamas murdered roughly 1200 people on October 7, but its harsh response has severely damaged its reputation internationally. Yet the Israeli public sees things differently. To get a sense of how average citizens are thinking about the continuing war in Gaza and possible fronts in a regional war, I spoke with author and political scientist Dahlia Scheindlin, a political scientist and writer who is an expert on Israeli public opinion.
Based on what you know and hear, do you feel there’s more support among Israelis for the invasion of Lebanon, and strikes against Hezbollah and Iran, than there is for the war in Gaza? Is it seen as a little less morally complicated?
There’s a lot less ambiguity around this. There’s a very widespread consensus that the war in Gaza is justified, but there’s been a lot more social and public debate for decades over the wisdom of Israel’s policy with the Palestinians, and of course Netanyahu’s management of the war in Gaza — whether it’s coming at the expense of the hostages, the fact that it has no clear end point, and that it serves Netanyahu’s political interests, so he’s making decisions for that reason.
I think most of those things are not present in the Israeli public’s mind with regard to the regional escalations. And there’s a good reason for that. Hezbollah decided to attack Israel in sovereign territory. They say they were aiming at military targets, but they made Israeli sovereign territory uninhabitable for civilians from October 8, before anybody knew how severe it was going to be in Gaza. There was no actual justification for Hezbollah deciding to undertake this initiative; from an Israeli perspective, they just are attacking Israel for the sake of attacking Israel. It has nothing to do with any of the other divisive political issues with relation to the Palestinians.
Not that this worked out very well for Hezbollah.
I’ve argued that from Hezbollah’s perspective, this has been a total failure: The attacks didn’t cause Israel to stop the war in Gaza. But leaving that aside, from the Israeli public perspective, it’s a matter of militia groups that oppose Israel’s existence anywhere. And if you read the groups’ communiques and their speeches, frankly, the Israelis are right. They don’t believe in the Zionist entity. They barely use the word Israel. They call everybody settlers. That has been the nature of the Hezbollah attack and all the other militias that are backed by Iran, whether it was Houthi attacks or the occasional attacks or rockets or UAVs from Iraqi militias, Shia militias backed by Iran.
So from the Israeli perspective, there’s a consensus that there’s no way to appease the Iranian proxy network. There’s no political demand that can be met. It’s simply opposition to the existence of Israel, unrelated to anything to do with the toxic and divisive issue going on for decades between Israel and the Palestinians. In a social norms sense, I think there is much less complication or ambiguity about the fact that Israel must respond.
Beyond that, over the course of the year, the fight between Israel and Hezbollah played out in the rule-governed paradigm that had been in place since 2006. They’d developed a set of unspoken rules: No hitting civilian targets, no high-level assassinations, no ground incursions. And in fact, there hadn’t been very many escalations since 2006. It really was a pretty quiet border. Even after Hezbollah began striking Israel on October 8, at one in the morning, the exchange of fire was still somewhat restrained. But the fact is that both sides were undertaking more and more escalatory action. Israel had undertaken its assassinations. Hezbollah was increasing the number of rockets it was firing into Israel month after month.
Yes, you could argue that it’s Israel who escalated from this norm of back and forth low-level attacks, because they did start carrying out those assassination.
Well, absolutely. Israel began the assassinations. The only thing is that this tends to obscure the fact that it was Hezbollah’s initiative to join the struggle, to join the attacks of Hamas. And that didn’t have to be the case. It was their decision. You can’t just jump into a violent military conflict and attack sovereign territory and expect everybody to stay within the rules.
The invasion and the strikes have killed over 2,000 people in Lebanon. I’m sure that troubles people, but it’s seen as justified?
I’m setting aside my personal take on this stuff, but for most Israelis, yes. Having said that, opinions are divided about the best way for Israel to undertake this action. Every survey asks in slightly different ways, which makes it hard to compare over time. But overall, we’ve seen something like 55, 60, 65 percent support for Israel to conduct a major strike on Hezbollah from the early stages of the war. And there were times in the first couple of months where it was even higher among the........