How Widening Israel’s War Saved Benjamin Netanyahu

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.

So, let me distinguish, because when it comes to Gaza I have to say that not only did I never have any doubt that the fundamentalist ministers in the Israeli government were serious about trying to conquer Gaza—I believed they would do it very early on. What you were referring to was that I was a little skeptical when I heard people saying, “Oh, Israel’s going to become a big expansionist imperial empire that wants to conquer parts of the Middle East.” I thought that was a little overboard. Then, when the ground operation began in Lebanon, I had a lot of journalists calling me and saying, “How long is this going to go on?” The government was trying hard to convince people it was going to be very limited.

I said to myself, and I said to others, too, “Call me in two weeks. If they’re not out, who knows when this will ever end, and if they’re out, fine, I’ll believe it when I see it.” And they’re still not out. There’s a ceasefire, but there’s been fire traded every day of the ceasefire, and we now have reports that the I.D.F. is preparing to maintain a presence there, and the war might start again in Lebanon.

Then Syria collapses. Israel is delirious. Netanyahu takes personal credit for it, and the I.D.F. rushes into the buffer zone for the first time since 1974. And then Netanyahu personally misses a day of court so that he can go visit. Israel already annexed sovereign Syrian territory in 1981, with the Golan Heights, and so it becomes harder to fend off the accusation that it has designs on more of it, when you see that Israel is a little bit tipsy on its successes in conducting operations in the heart of these countries.

There’s an expansionist tendency right now. You would think that this is the time that Israel could conclude that it would expand, it could occupy and it could annex with no serious international repercussions. All of this is strange because Israel is currently facing more international repercussions or threats of international repercussions than ever before in its history, and yet those repercussions haven’t materialized.

Right, at least from the United States, there’ve been threats but not many consequences. And with the incoming Trump Administration, I assume there’s not going to be threats or consequences.

I assume that, too.

What do you view as the politics of Israeli resettlement of certain areas of Gaza? Is this the type of thing, like in the West Bank, where we could look at survey data and say, “Oh, people are not in favor of it,” but because of the way the Israeli government functions and because public opinion is not always totally reflected in polls, it is still likely to happen?

Pretty much. In any government, no policy will be a hundred per cent reflective of public opinion. And it shouldn’t be, right? You shouldn’t drive policy based on polls alone. On the other hand, I think that the government is essentially exploiting and seizing on an opportunity when the public is so fixated on the hostage issue. And the government, as you point out, not only doesn’t care about the hostages but doesn’t care about the demonstrators. It’s ironic because it is the government that runs around talking about majority rule, by which they mean Jews, and yet it represents a minority of opinions. Now, if you want to talk about polls, I myself was pretty surprised after the start of this war to find out that somewhere between forty per cent and fifty per cent of the Jewish population supported settlements in Gaza.

We hadn’t even asked that question since the dismantling of Gaza settlements in 2005. The most authoritative survey indicated that fifty-two per cent of the Jewish population supported settlements in January. But that number has gone down to about forty-three per cent now in the Jewish population. The public is clearly responding. These are not fixed ideological positions, and I have a sense that in the first six months people were just so stunned and devastated, and shocked, and vengeful, that numbers were extreme then, and, in some ways, they’re just inching back.

Right, but there will have to be some sort of sustained political opposition to keep it from happening, regardless of whether the polls are at fifty-two per cent or forty-three per cent.

That’s absolutely right. When you ask how Israelis tolerate the fact that there hasn’t been a hostage deal and how they are going to tolerate reëstablishing settlements, it’s critical to remember that there is no legal mechanism for turning public expressions of discontent into either a change of government or, frankly, a change of policy. It has worked occasionally, like when Israelis managed to slow down the government’s original judicial assault, but it didn’t stop it. It didn’t stop the judicial overhaul. It didn’t stop what we call the regime coup.

No matter how big your public protests, there’s no institutional mechanism that makes that into elections. The government has to collapse for that to happen. Even if you have anti-settlement demonstrations, and even if they’re pretty big demonstrations, they’re never going to be as big as hostage demonstrations. They’re going to be branded as left-wing, and the government will not listen to them. If they’re not listening to the people out there demanding hostage release, they’re not going to listen to [those whom they’ll brand as] a few ragtag lefties protesting against settlements being established in Gaza. They’re laying the groundwork as we speak.

Is there a sense from people in the Israeli government or people at high levels of Israeli society that anything’s going to change with Trump coming into office? I assume there’s a better chance of a hostage deal just because why wouldn’t Netanyahu wait three weeks to give Trump the diplomatic victory, but beyond that?

I think that they’re probably anticipating slash angling but not totally depending on Trump doing exactly what Netanyahu wants. And Netanyahu clearly thinks that Trump will be good for Israel, but what does that mean? Trump may very well push for a deal to get the hostages released and end the war. Netanyahu himself already had to come out and deny a rumor that the Saudis were willing to consider a normalization deal under the terms of a vague pathway to Palestinian statehood, which is coming down a notch from demanding irreversible steps to Palestinian statehood—which we understood the Saudis were inclined to do after October 7th. Netanyahu put out some sort of a denial, saying, “Oh, we’re not discussing those things,” because his entire persona right now is staked on preventing a Palestinian state. But who knows what will happen when Trump arrives, if Trump really does decide to push for a hostage-release ceasefire deal. Some of those things might be brought back into the mix.

But the main thing Netanyahu really cares about with relation to Trump is Iran, and he has wanted for years for America to either approve of or take the lead in a military strike against Iran. He really cares about Iran more than anything else. He likes to be on the global stage. He sees the Palestinians as a nuisance, and that was why he thought he could just engineer their existence forever before the war. And so, if he can’t get to reconquering Gaza because the Trump Administration really pressures him on some sort of concessions, I wouldn’t be surprised if he cajoles or convinces or even doesn’t have to convince very hard the Trump Administration to take a hawkish perspective and action on Iran, and build policy together with Israel that’s much more aggressive toward Iran.

The Times had a story this week that five infants recently froze to death in Gaza. You haven’t talked about civilian Palestinian casualties as part of the Israeli domestic political conversation at all. Do you see any signs of that changing?

It pains me personally very greatly to say, no, it has not changed. There is no significant debate at the political levels if you’re talking about party leaders or coalition opposition, no. How Israel is fighting this war is not an issue. And even beyond that, when, for example, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the former defense minister, all it did was prompt a discussion about how anti-Israel and antisemitic that organization, and others like it, is. And this happens across the board; the opposition leaders also come out and rally against international institutions and courts on those issues.

At the margins, there are individual voices who are becoming much more outspoken, particularly about what Israel is doing in northern Gaza, because accusations about strategy and even about ethnic cleansing have become fairly common within Israel, as opposed to all the other accusations, which come from abroad. We’ve had some very prominent figures, including Moshe Ya’alon, Netanyahu’s former defense minister, and Moshe Lador, a former state prosecutor. Ya’alon said he was worried about ethnic cleansing.

That really did prompt discussion here, but it’s particularly focussed on this plan that was written up by some retired generals who were close to the government and backed by right-wing think tanks, about how it’s legitimate to call for the evacuation or expulsion of all civilians in the north. Whoever’s left is put under siege, bomb the hell out of them, and then just starve them out, basically. And that is essentially understood to be laying the groundwork for annexation and rebuilding settlements, and at the same time you have Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, calling for the establishment of a military government, which exists in some forms in the West Bank and was in full force in Israel in the early decades of the state.

All those things have raised questions among the Israeli public, but I don’t hear any political leaders actually saying that the damage Israel’s done to Gazan civilians has been too severe. There are accusations that the war aims have morphed into political aims. That’s a legitimate criticism, but God forbid it should ever be about sympathy for the Palestinians. ♦