Many media outlets highlight how Israel is increasingly isolated in the West regarding Gaza. According to a Pew Research Center survey, the number of pro-Western states—above all Australia, Indonesia, Japan, and Turkey, and in Europe, Spain, Sweden, Greece, Ireland, and the Netherlands—that hold a negative perception of Israel is growing. The Israeli government and army continue to present the current military intervention—Operation “Gideon’s Chariots,” launched last May—as a necessary response to the “existential threat” posed by Hamas, while a growing part of the international community can no longer perceive any danger in the starving masses of Palestinians wandering around food distribution centers in constant danger of being killed.
Surveys conducted among Israeli public opinion send conflicting messages: while 67 percent of Israelis are in favour of ending the war in Gaza (Panel4All survey, June 25, 2026), the popularity of Likud after the war with Iran is growing, confirming a certain stability of the governing coalition. The end of the war would therefore be desired more out of a certain “weariness” linked to the prolonging of the conflict and to achieve the freeing of the hostages, rather than as a sign of protest against the ongoing massacre.
Other surveys, conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), reveal that optimism is returning, especially following the “pre-emptive operation” against Iran and in anticipation of new negotiations with Hamas and the possible release of ten of the twenty living hostages in the coming days. Furthermore, confidence in the army and its chief of staff, General Eyal Zamir, remains high (68.5 percent). These and other data collected on Israeli society present an image that is difficult for some European public opinion to digest. How is it possible that Israelis show optimism at a time when at least three different war fronts remain open – despite various truces – without a lasting solution in sight (Gaza, Lebanon, Iran), and maintain confidence in an army responsible for a veritable massacre just a few kilometers from home?
The primary element of this collective justification is resentment: it is often said that Israeli Jews stopped at October 7, 2023, that their consciences were so shaken by the wanton killing of 1,200 people in their homes in a single day, that they now harbor only resentment toward the population of Gaza, deemed to be as responsible as Hamas. This animosity, in turn, has strengthened the most extremist options, with 82 percent of Israelis supporting the deportation of Gazans abroad, and 56 percent also adding the desire to transfer Arab-Israelis with citizenship, who are perceived as an “internal fifth column.” This maximalist position was previously supported only by Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party.
The second element is indifference toward the “Palestinian question.” Part of the European media and public opinion wonder how it’s possible that Israelis aren’t outraged by the fate of over 55,000 Palestinian victims, and generally, by the daily killings of civilians across the border. However, the answer is simple: the majority of Israelis don’t care about what happens in the Occupied Territories because, since the end of the Oslo Accords (1996) onwards, they are no longer accustomed to visiting them—access is forbidden to them—nor to meeting the 7 million Arabs who live beyond the high walls of division they’ve erected with the West Bank (since 2004) and with Gaza (2019).
The new generations, who grew up after the collapse of the Accords, have completely lost contact with their Arab peers and have shifted en masse to the right[1]. Young Israeli Jews have in fact been educated in a self-centered version of history where Arabs barely appear[2] and Palestinians lack a collective identity. Since 1996, they have been exposed to the propaganda of a revisionist and religious Right that has given Zionism an ethnic, messianic, and nationalist turn (defined in Hebrew as “hadata” or return to religion). According to this view, all the land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River belongs to the Jews, and Palestinians are merely hostile and troublesome guests[3].
In the last government, the “classic” revisionist Zionism of the Likud, whose primary objective was “merely” to annex all of the West Bank and achieve the “Greater Israel,” was joined by the religious Zionism of ministers Smotrich and Ben Gvir. These ministers consider it sacrilegious to relinquish even a single meter of land conquered by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and advocate for the resettlement of colonists in Gaza to avenge the unilateral disengagement of 2005.
Third, the entire media power structure works to reinforce this narrative and to censor images of Palestinian victims, especially children. The extremely popular private television channel, Channel 14, does not report any news on the number of civilians killed, but instead focuses its coverage on military operations and IDF losses, and on pity for the soldiers, who are perceived as innocent casualties in a conflict imposed upon them by the moral obligation to defend civilians.
Nevertheless, the media is only one cog in the war propaganda machine. Two other fundamental elements remain: the inability to question the morality of the military forces, considered a popular defense army representing all citizens, and the slow slide into an “intractable” conflict, where the stability of democracy is jeopardized by the endless perpetuation of a state of war.
It’s easy to understand why the IDF is considered a popular army: it has mobilized 295,000 reservists, in addition to 100,000 young people between 18 and 22 years old conscripted for 32 months of mandatory service. This means that approximately 2.5 million people in Israel are directly related by first-degree kinship to a soldier enlisted in the army, making support for the IDF also a private matter. Therefore, any criticism of the army, its defensive nature, and its morality is not only likely to undermine internal order (based on the myth of the sacrifice of “our sons,” as soldiers are often referred to in the national press), but also to compromise trust in the institution to which the life of a son, husband, or father is entrusted.
Added to this is the fact that, since the Second Intifada (2002), the army leadership, in the person of the then-chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, coined the slogan that the conflict with the Palestinians is “existential” and not “territorial.” The Hamas attack last October 7th, with the assault on the kibbutzim around the Strip—most of them belonging to the pacifist wing—would have solidified this interpretation, revealing Hamas’s intention to make no distinction between Israel and the occupied territories.
Finally, there’s the stress test that the prolongation of the war imposes on Israeli democracy. The war contributes to the indefinite postponement of any attribution of political responsibility within the establishment. For many, commissions of inquiry are no longer a priority, in line with Maslow’s sociological theories of the hierarchy of needs, which state that when a logic of survival is imposed, all other needs take a back seat. In societies characterized by a continuous state of war, what Ben Porath defines as “belligerent citizenship“[4] is established. This deviates from the liberal model to embrace an identity-based or ethno-national model imposed by the new context of prolonged and permanent war.
This is a model of citizenship that is an alternative to the liberal one, where all deliberative processes—including the promulgation of the law ending military exemption for the ultra-Orthodox—are postponed to a future peace. Meanwhile, the defense of individual rights diminishes in the name of collective interest and a supposed unity of the national body around a common cause. If the state of war is added to an already illiberal democratic model, like the Israeli one, rightly defined by sociologist Sammy Smooha as an “ethnic democracy”[5]—which identifies exclusively as serving the interests of the majority national group—it’s evident how the space for individual rights, especially those of minorities, progressively shrinks.
The continuous state of war, or “belligerent citizenship,” reduces the space for public debate. Even if a segment of the Israeli population remains vigilant about the deterioration of civil liberties, tolerance for dissent decreases. Two current political cases illustrate this spiral well: the parallel impeachment procedures, currently underway in the Knesset, of Hadash Arab Knesset member Ayman Odeh, accused of advocating terrorism, and of the Attorney General, Gali Baharav-Miara, accused of disloyalty to the government regarding the Shin Bet dossier. In the first case, an Arab Knesset member from Hadash is accused of demonstrating for an end to the war, and his expulsion from Parliament is demanded. In the second, the Attorney General is indicted for resisting government pressure in the name of upholding legal procedures.
In essence, unity around the flag excludes all those (including 22 percent of Arab citizens, and all other minorities) who do not fully identify with it. However, the most irreparable damage is inflicted upon democracy itself, which increasingly takes on the contours of an authoritarian regime that encourages self-censorship and incites lynching against the few dissenting voices (consider the failed campaign orchestrated against the newspaper Ha’aretz in November 2024).
The signs of this are manifold: from institutional threats, such as those exercised by the Israeli police—now controlled by the Ministry of National Security led by Ben Gvir—to deport all Arab citizens protesting in solidarity with Gaza, as denounced by the NGO Adalah, to the absence of large mobilizations for withdrawal from Gaza due to the indifference of the majority of citizens who neither consider the issue to be a priority nor democracy at risk. One comparison, among all, will highlight the regression of democratic space in Israel: if in 1982, in the face of the Sabra and Shatila massacre (3,500 dead), 400,000 Israelis out of the then 4 million took to the streets to demand an end to the war, today, in most cases, there are continuous but sporadic demonstrations gathering between 400 and 1,000 participants[6], with a very clear secular majority. No Jewish opposition party, including Yair Golan’s “Democrats,” has dared to break the taboo of criticizing the army, instead placing all the blame solely on the Netanyahu government.
It is too early to predict whether the current ceasefire being negotiated in Gaza will be successful, even if it does not lead to a definitive end to the war. However, it is already too late to note how Israel has embarked on an illiberal course that will hardly be reversed at the end of the conflict, especially if society fails to deeply question how its army, self-proclaimed “the most moral in the world,” could have allowed all this. If Israel loses the battle for democracy, it will no longer be able to refuse the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC) based on the argument that a functioning democracy with an independent judiciary is capable of conducting investigations into its own crimes.
Notes:
[1] 73 percent of young Israelis aged 15 to 24 identify as right-wing or far-right, compared to 46 percent of those over 65. (CNN, March 28, 2025, Extremist views are all that many young Israelis have ever known | CNN)
[2] Times of Israel, May 28, 2025, Education minister unveils ramped-up Jewish, Zionist studies, mandatory Bible class | The Times of Israel; Ruth Margalit, The New Yorker, August 23, 2019, How the Religious Right Transformed Israeli Education | The New Yorker.
[3] Alan Waring, Fair Observer, December 19, 2024, The “Greater Israel” Plan Has a Colossal Reach
[4] Citizenship under Fire: Democratic Education in Times of Conflict, Princeton University Press, 2015.
[5] Smooha, “Ethnic Democracy: Israel as an Archetype”, Israel Studies, 1997.
[6] 750,000 people gathered on September 2, 2024, solely to demand the release of the hostages.
Cover photo: Palestinian people stand in a queue with their pots to receive food as dislocated Palestinians face lack of food and water and the humanitarian crisis continues in Nuseirat Camp in Gaza Strip on June 23, 2025. (Photo by Moiz Salhi / Middle East Images via AFP)
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