By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Israel’s Emerging Occupation Consensus

As the Israeli government prepares for the military takeover of Gaza City and, many fear, lays the groundwork for full seizure and occupation of Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stirred anger at home and abroad. Overwhelming evidence that large numbers of Gazans are starving has left Israeli leaders facing worldwide condemnation, the threat of partial arms embargoes from allies, as well as growing charges of genocide.

In Israel itself, Netanyahu and his cabinet have been under intense criticism for months from former military and intelligence chiefs, opposition leaders, and intellectuals, as well as military reservists and tens of thousands of public protesters. At the heart of the rift between the Israeli people and their government are the 50 hostages still held by Hamas, of which around 20 are believed to be still alive. Yet on August 8, the Israeli cabinet decided to ramp up the war, and the new plans will de facto advance a full occupation of Gaza with the possible objective of long-term military rule of Gaza, as some cabinet members have advocated. The government insists that by expanding military operations, it will save the hostages. But Israelis are not convinced.

Following the announcement, a survey by Kan, the public broadcaster, found that only 28 percent support the new plan. The family members of hostages believe it will spell the death of their loved ones. In direct contrast to the government’s determination to prolong and expand operations, a consistent and growing majority—more than 70 percent in some recent surveys—supports a hostage deal and an end to the war as soon as possible. “Now!” and “There’s no time!” have been core slogans advocating such a deal ever since the initial weeks following Hamas’s October 7 attack. Since the new Gaza plan was announced, demonstrations have swelled, and the hostage families have called for a general strike.

All of which has contributed to the perception that the country has been hijacked by a fanatical religious far-right minority—one that has gained extraordinary leverage and influence by helping Netanyahu cling to power despite his legal predicaments.. Seemingly bearing out the image that the country has been captured by extremists, polls have consistently found that, if new elections were held today, Israelis would oust the current leadership. In other words, if only the government were more aligned with public opinion, the country would be taken in a decidedly different direction.

But the assumption that a post-Netanyahu Israel can chart a new course misses the extent to which Israelis concur with the government on many deeper, longer-term issues. Based on a range of surveys over the years and throughout the current war, both the anti-Netanyahu public and the main opposition parties differ little from the current leadership on the future status of Palestinians, the inevitability of ongoing Israeli occupation in general, and the acceptability of denying self-determination, or alternately, democracy and civil rights to Palestinians in the territories, among other issues. Like their current leaders, polls show that the large majority of Israeli Jews do not empathize with the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, which Israeli television and mainstream newspapers barely cover. Many believe civilian deaths and harms are the fault of Hamas and are exaggerated or even fabricated, as government and Israeli commentators constantly claim.

This underlying reality points to some hard truths. Removing Netanyahu from power might well help bring an end to the unfolding disaster in Gaza and could even cause the religious right to relinquish its grip on Israeli politics. But it is unlikely to fundamentally reorient Israeli policies toward the Palestinians or to present a true alternative to the decades-old policies of expanding Israeli control and suppressing Palestinian self-determination. These strategies, together with Palestinian spoilers, have fueled the broader conflict all these years and ruined Israel’s prospects for being a democracy, and they will drive future violent escalations for years to come. No matter how much politicians and commentators in the United States— or the Israeli opposition, for that matter—focus on Netanyahu, the fact is that when it comes to Israeli intransigence regarding Palestinians, Bibi alone is not the problem. The problem lies in Israeli society, politics, and culture as they have evolved over the decades.

 

Israel Against Its Leaders

For all his vaunted staying power, Netanyahu’s political future in Israel is uncertain. As of now, the prime minister could well lose the next elections, which are scheduled for late October 2026. Since July, when two ultra-Orthodox religious parties abandoned the ruling coalition, he has presided over a precarious minority government. If it collapses, elections would most likely be held in early 2026.

Opposition to the prime minister is deeply entrenched. Well before the October 7 attacks, the government came under extraordinary criticism for its judicial overhaul, which many saw as a move to consolidate Netanyahu’s grip on power, weaken his corruption indictments, and undermine Israeli democracy while empowering theocratic forces in society. Through much of the nine months preceding the attacks, hundreds of thousands of Israelis mounted weekly demonstrations against the government, and reservists threatened to refuse to show up for duty. According to the Israel Democracy Institute, in early 2023, when the government first announced the reforms, between 58 and 66 percent of Israelis rejected them, numbers that have held broadly steady ever since, though the pace and type of reforms have changed during the war. Despite these trends, the government has pushed ahead, politicizing judicial appointments and dismissing the attorney general.

Since October 7, 2023, public grievances have intensified. In contrast to most wartime governments, the poll ratings of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition did not rise but plunged to a low point, where they remained for the first six months of the war—numbers that would have given Netanyahu’s Likud Party and its coalition partners just 41 to 46 of the 120 seats in the Knesset, had elections been held then. Surveys have consistently shown that two-thirds or more of the public want Netanyahu to resign, either immediately or when the war ends. According to current polling, if the election were held now, the parties that constituted Netanyahu’s original coalition would still be unable to win a majority in the 120-member Knesset. (With the exception of polls that are affiliated with the far right, for more than a year, nearly all credible Israeli opinion surveys have shown the coalition parties winning at least ten seats fewer than the 64 they won in the 2022 elections.) Not even the heady 12-day war with Iran in June, which was widely supported by the Israeli public, managed to improve the coalition’s popularity.

The reasons for widespread disaffection with the government are clear. Above all is the government’s serial refusal to prioritize the hostages Hamas is holding by reaching a deal to bring the remaining hostages home. Many Israelis believed the government would have avoided the first such deal in November 2023 if not for public pressure, and since early 2024, a majority has regularly supported a deal to bring home those that remain. From the start of the two-month cease-fire in early 2025, over 70 percent supported the continuation of that cease-fire to allow further hostage returns, according to surveys by the Israel Democracy Institute. By June, more than three-quarters of Israelis said they supported releasing all remaining hostages in return for a full end of the war, according to a survey by Agam Labs, affiliated with Hebrew University.

Large majorities of Israelis are also incensed by the government’s evasion of responsibility for October 7. In a survey I conducted in late November 2024 for Zulat, a liberal think tank, 69 percent said that an independent state commission should be established to investigate the security failings surrounding the attack, with another 27 percent supporting a government-appointed commission to do so. These numbers have only grown: In March, a survey for Israel’s found that 75 percent of Israelis supported an independent commission. But after nearly two years of war, the government has not established any commission at all.

Yet another complaint against the government concerns ultra-Orthodox Jews’ exemption from Israel Defense Forces conscription. A sweeping majority of Jewish Israelis want to end this historic practice, yet instead of doing that, the government has mooted a law that would require limited and incremental draft targets for the ultra-Orthodox—which most Israelis view as a “draft-evasion law” designed to establish permanent and widespread exemption for most members of this group. In July, the Institute for National Security Studies found that 73 percent of Jewish Israelis believe that such a law would harm the security of the state. For the moment, the government has not enacted the law, though it has been under intense pressure to do so by the religious erstwhile coalition partners. The delay caused two ultra-Orthodox parties quit the coalition in July, and they could theoretically vote with the opposition if there is a motion to disband the Knesset in the coming months. As a result, the fate of the country is now in the hands of ultra-Orthodox parties who represent a mere 14 percent of the Israeli population, according to the Israel Democracy Institute.

For much of the public, the avoidance of a hostage deal with Hamas, the ultra-Orthodox exemption, and the lack of accountability for failing to prevent October 7 and the ongoing assault on the Israeli judiciary, are evidence of the coalition’s moral and political decay. Many also see these issues as a continuation of the illiberal, theocratic, and authoritarian or corrupt tendencies that drove the 2023 judicial overhaul, now supercharged by the wartime opportunity to advance a messianic agenda of permanent occupation, de facto annexation in the West Bank, and resettlement of Gaza. Given the level of public grievance, it is tempting to assume that a post-Netanyahu leadership would mark a repudiation of the right-wing fundamentalism that has prolonged the war in Gaza, killing tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza, creating an appalling starvation crisis, and doing untold harm to Israel’s global reputation. Yet such assumptions cling to an idealized view of Israeli democracy that misses a larger truth about the Israeli electorate.

 

Extreme Goes Mainstream

Notwithstanding their growing distaste for the Netanyahu government, mainstream Israelis do not significantly diverge from the prime minister and his far-right cabinet on many underlying and essential longer-term issues. This convergence is no accident: Netanyahu has long been adept at capturing underlying public sentiment, and very often molding and manipulating it. This is particularly the case on issues related to Israel’s self-image as a country under constant existential threats, whether from Palestinian terror, Iran, global anti-Semitism, or its own internal enemies such as the left wing or Arab citizens of Israel.

Consider the two-state solution. The prime minister is well aware that the majority of Israelis oppose this concept. In June, Tel Aviv University’s Peace Index Survey found that just one-third of all Israelis supported establishing a Palestinian state next to Israel. Among Jewish Israelis, the figure is even smaller, with less than one-quarter supporting the idea. Thus, when Netanyahu insists that he will resist international efforts to advance a Palestinian state, or any real form of Palestinian national self-determination, he is reflecting the attitudes of a firm majority of Jewish voters. Hardly any of Israel’s mainstream opposition leaders risk contradicting him. Israeli security hawks such as Benny Gantz, the Israeli general who was considered a moderate member of Netanyahu’s “war cabinet” during the first eight months of the war, are highly agnostic about Palestinian statehood; leaders of the secular right, such as Avigdor Lieberman, openly oppose it. Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who polls show as a front-runner among opposition candidates, has in the past been to the right of Netanyahu and has always opposed a two-state solution.

Israel’s centrist parties are little different. Even Israel’s consolidated Zionist left-wing party, the Democrats, led by Yair Golan, a major-general and a former IDF deputy chief of staff, mostly avoid discussing a Palestinian state or the two-state solution. Yair Lapid, the official head of Israel’s opposition and leader of the centrist Yesh Atid party, has similarly mostly avoided the issue since the war started, although he was the last Israeli prime minister to support a two-state solution publicly during his own brief term in late 2022. Only the leaders of Arab parties speak freely in support of Palestinian statehood. One such leader, Ayman Odeh, has already announced he will not run again—but the Knesset still sought to impeach him recently over what right-wingers insisted was a distasteful social media post in which he expressed sympathy for Palestinian prisoners alongside Israeli hostages, which they suggested drew a moral equivalency. Six opposition members voted together with the government, though the impeachment failed to garner enough votes.

In part, the growing Israeli dismissal of a two-state solution reflects the hard-line belligerence toward Palestinians that has emerged since October 7. But this has built on preexisting mutually hostile, negative attitudes, as demonstrated by joint Israeli-Palestinian surveys I conducted with Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki well before the war. Undeniably, the war has unleashed even more extreme sentiments. Israeli ministers have regularly called for besieging, starving, flattening, and possibly dropping nuclear bombs on Gaza, and Israeli mainstream media have rarely shown or discussed the vast human suffering unfolding there, allowing Israelis to opt out of such images if they choose—although this information is readily available through critical Israeli media, international networks, and social media.

In the Peace Index survey of January 2024, by which point more than 25,000 Palestinians in Gaza had been killed, 88 percent of Jewish Israelis said that the Palestinian casualties (without specifying civilians or combatants) were justified to achieve Israel’s war aims. By July 2025, the number killed had risen to 60,000, including many thousands of young children, yet the same Peace Index series found that 72 percent, still a strong majority of Israeli Jews, think the casualties are justified. In the July survey, nearly the same portion, 74 percent of Jewish Israelis, say they would support “voluntary emigration” of Gazans, and a majority of Jewish respondents support “forced evacuation.” (Arab citizens of Israel show such minuscule support for these policies that the total Israeli average is lower but misleading.)

Even some of the government’s harshest proposals for Palestinians in Gaza have drawn significant public support. In May, for example, Penn State researcher Tamir Sorek published a poll showing that 82 percent of Israeli Jews would support the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. Although some questioned the poll’s methodology or findings, shortly afterward, the Israel Democracy Institute found in its monthly survey that 77 percent of Israeli Jews thought Israel should not concern itself with Palestinian civilian suffering in Gaza, and 63 percent opposed humanitarian aid there. Moreover, in the institute’s July survey, 79 percent said they were not personally troubled by “reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza.” A survey commissioned at the end of July by Maariv newspaper found that 47 percent of Israeli Jews believe starvation in Gaza is a Hamas lie. In the July Peace Index, over 60 percent of the Jewish population supported Defense Minister Israel Katz’s plan to build a camp to concentrate Palestinians near Rafah, where they would be allowed to leave only for another country.

Israeli attitudes toward the government’s latest plan for a full military occupation of Gaza have not crystallized yet. Polls have generally shown that a substantial minority—but not a majority—of Jewish Israelis now support full annexation of “the occupied territories.” According to the Peace Index survey in July, 40 percent of Israeli Jews support annexation. The same survey also found that 46 percent of Israeli Jews now supported building Jewish settlements in Gaza.

An Israeli flag, as seen from the Israeli side of the border between Israel and Gaza, August 2025

 

The Autocratic Future

The hardening of views about Palestinians also reflects longer-term trends in Israeli society. As a matter of political orientation, a full 60 percent of Jewish Israelis now identify as right wing, compared with 12 percent who consider themselves left, and just over one-quarter who say they are in the center, according to a June survey by the Israel Democracy Institute. But these trends did not begin with October 7. Already in the run-up to the 2022 election, hardly anyone—candidates or most of the Jewish Israeli public—would talk about the Palestinians, or about Israel’s nearly six-decade occupation regime. This included Israel’s control of Gaza’s borders, airspace, territorial waters, and (along with Egypt) all traffic in and out of the territory—what the International Committee of the Red Cross classified as an ongoing occupation even before October 7.

Paradoxically, public acceptance of long-term military rule over a large portion of the Palestinian population has coincided with growing concern about Israeli democracy. Thus, for the huge masses of Israelis who shouted “Democracy!” on Saturday nights throughout 2023 to protest Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul, the gravest threat to Israeli democracy—the military rule over a huge disenfranchised Palestinian population—was ignored. At the peak of the protests, in the summer of 2023, a survey I conducted for an umbrella organization of peace groups, the Alliance for Middle East Peace, funded by the U.S. Institute of Peace, found that among Jewish Israelis between the ages of 15 and 21, 88 percent believed Israel “can be a democratic state even though it controls the West Bank and Gaza (de facto), where Palestinians cannot vote in Israeli elections.” In other words, the rising generation of young Jewish Israelis—and this was before October 7—overwhelmingly took it for granted that millions of Palestinians could be deprived of basic rights indefinitely without compromising Israel’s democratic foundations.

During the 2023 protests, Israelis also failed to connect the judicial overhaul with the government’s annexationist aims. Even as the protests were unfolding, extremist, Jewish supremacist political leaders such as Israel’s current minister of national security, Itamar Ben Gvir, were transforming the police and security forces to tolerate or even condone settler violence as a means of expanding Jewish control over occupied territory. The government has also sought to weaken the supreme court or attorney general, which pose potential obstacles to laws designed to facilitate land grabs and seizure of Palestinian property. In August, the Netanyahu government made the unprecedented decision to fire the attorney general, a move that the Israeli Supreme Court has temporarily blocked, leaving the country in a crisis of governing authority.

By ignoring the larger reality of Israel’s occupation, the main opposition parties have abetted the further erosion of the country’s democratic institutions. Consider the multiparty government that was briefly in power between 2021 and late 2022, without Netanyahu or the current coalition parties. It sought to make tiny adjustments designed to ease quality-of-life strains among Palestinians yet made no substantive move toward Palestinian self-determination, save for a prominent speech in September 2022 at the United Nations by Lapid, then prime minister, supporting a two-state solution, just ahead of fresh elections. Golan prefers to advocate for what he refers to as “separation”—meaning some sort of partition between Israelis and Palestinians—but he barely discusses the issue unless asked.

Since October 7, a growing political consensus has emerged in Israel around the view that military might is the exclusive basis for Israel’s survival. There were no dissenting voices during Israel’s war with Iran in June, only blanket support. Opposition leaders rarely if ever speak against the IDF’s ongoing presence and strikes in Lebanon, or its bombing campaign against the new regime in Syria, either; at best offering slogans about the need for a “diplomatic” component to complement Israel’s significant military achievements against regional enemies such as Iran and Hizbollah. And the latest political figure to excite Israelis opposed to Netanyahu is yet another former IDF chief of staff, Gadi Eisenkot. To the extent that opposition politicians or military experts criticize the government over its Gaza policy, they argue that the government lacks a clear strategy or has failed to cultivate an alternative governing force to Hamas—but not in the context of any long-ranging political solution to the conflict.

If Netanyahu loses the next elections, his downfall would bring a wave of relief among many Israelis at home and abroad for removing the uncouth populists and religious fundamentalists who openly broadcast their intentions to destroy and starve the population of Gaza and annex the territory. But a new government is unlikely to make much more progress than its predecessor on a durable, just, or feasible peace with Palestinians—or to address the underlying dynamics of occupation that have led to so much conflict in the first place. Instead, the situation will continue to fuel expansionist dreams in Israel and probably regular, worsening military escalations. If neither the Israeli public nor the world demand a change, the opposition parties seem unlikely to offer either the vision or leadership to put Israel on a path towards peace, democracy, or even fundamental, long-term security.

 

 

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