How the expansion of the Israeli war saved Benjamin Netanyahu

Political scientist Dalia Sheindlin is a long-time expert on Israeli public opinion and an analyst of the country’s domestic political scene. With the advent of the new year, and with the fall of the Assad regime in Syria; Ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel in Lebanon; And the continuing hostilities in Gaza, where more than forty thousand Palestinians have been killed since the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023 – I wanted to understand exactly what has and has not changed in Israel in the past few months. I spoke by phone with Sheindlin, who is also a policy fellow at the Century Foundation and a columnist for Haaretzand authorThe crooked wood of democracy in IsraelDuring our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how her understanding of Israel’s goals in the region has changed recently; why the popularity of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has risen again after falling in the immediate aftermath of the events of October 7; and why the overwhelming number of Palestinian civilian casualties are barely recorded inside Israel.

Regarding internal politics, does it seem that Israel has finally entered what we might call the post-October 7 period?

The period after October 7th is very easily determined in survey research. It is unusual for survey researchers to have such clear trends in unambiguous data. During the first six months after October 7, the government’s popularity declined by all indicators, and there was a common wisdom that Netanyahu could not survive. Then, around April 2024, there was a very clear beginning of a turning point, and his polls began a slow and gradual recovery on all the same indicators.

The same applies to the popularity of his party and his original coalition, which has almost recovered to what it was before the war. For Netanyahu, this percentage is about forty percent. He leads the polls against his opponents in terms of who people think should be prime minister. This is not as good as in the November 2022 elections, in which Netanyahu and his coalition partners won sixty-four of the one hundred and twenty seats in the Knesset. So they don’t Which Okay, but we’re definitely post-October 7th.

You mentioned April as a turning point. That was when the war against Hamas expanded at the regional level.

It matches the month of April exactly. I believe that we should not hold Hezbollah responsible for its fateful decision, in the early morning hours of October 8, to attack Israel, a decision that essentially led to the internationalization or regionalization of the conflict. But what happened in April? Israel assassinated a senior commander of Iran’s Quds Force in Damascus, setting off a whole chain of events that led to the first-ever Iranian strike on Israel and then the Israeli response. It was all in April, and that’s when we saw that the polls for Netanyahu started to rise. Then, over the summer, the war with Hezbollah escalated. Another major turning point came in September, when Israel detonated Nida bombs and, shortly thereafter, assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

But even before that, in July, Israel killed Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, a big signal to Israelis that the old Israel was back and could do anything anywhere. This gave Israelis a feeling that the country was recovering. All because of the regional front. I have come to the conclusion that Gaza is essentially a lost cause for Netanyahu. He cannot leave Gaza because he prioritized his coalition partners. Nor do I see him as a victim or besieged by his coalition partners. He put them there. But it is not a good case for him. The Israeli public feels more confident about regional escalation and perceived Israeli victories on those fronts, which has contributed to its rise.

You said that Gaza is a “lost cause” for Netanyahu. Do you mean that the public does not seem to agree with him on Gaza? At least from a distance, it certainly appears that the country is prepared to endure a continuation of the war there and the incredibly terrible humanitarian consequences, the non-return of the hostages, and so on.

After October 7, people were shocked, stunned, paralyzed and afraid of the missiles and were trying to find out where their bodies were and whether their children were dead or prisoners. It was really a very strong, kind of paralyzing phase. There was a turning point, and it came very quickly, around the hostages. When people realized that the government was not prioritizing the release of hostages, even in November 2023, they were already out on the streets. They organized a massive march and mobilized civil society networks built during protests for judicial reform earlier that year. The feeling of astonishment, fear, and shock gave way very quickly to social mobilization, in part because, by sheer coincidence, much of this social mobilization already existed.

But after a while, it became clear to the Israelis that the government never really intended to prioritize the hostages or that it was always looking for a way to somehow not reach this deal. There is a strong temptation to blame Hamas, but eventually the Israelis began to get the impression – through the many leaks, reports and analyzes that would emerge every time the negotiations collapsed – that Netanyahu was not doing so. He doesn’t prioritize 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 believe it is because he was tried for corruption. [The charges center on accusations of bribery and fraud.] I think that’s a small jump. He just wants to stay in power.

I get a lot of questions from America about why the Israelis put up with it. You have to realize that every week there are thousands of people on the street on Saturday nights.

I don’t want to say that no one is pushing for the hostages to be released, but we just talked about Netanyahu’s approval ratings rising. It is very clear, observing from a distance, that Netanyahu does not care about the hostages. It’s a bit surprising to me in a country that once traded how many people for one captured soldier?

One thousand and twenty-seven. [This was a prisoner swap with Hamas in 2011.] Yes. Not just the country; Netanyahu did it.

So it is a bit surprising to me that a Prime Minister who not only prioritizes the hostages, but clearly cares more about staying in power than about them, is not more politically damaged.

Yes. There are contradictions in the way people express themselves. Although his popularity has rebounded, he still does not enjoy majority support. This is partly because it does not align with the position of the clear majority of the public regarding hostages. Every time we ask the public, in different types of polls, different types of questions, there is always a plurality or strong plurality in favor of releasing the hostages regardless of the price. At this point, most polls show that nearly seventy percent of Israelis prefer the hostage deal to any other alternative, such as destroying Hamas by any means.

People who support the government — especially that core base that stayed with Netanyahu even during the first six months of the war, when his overall support waned — may care emotionally about the hostages, but it is the “thoughts and prayers” kind of emotion. They do not want to release Palestinian prisoners. Perhaps they really believe that Israel needs to destroy more Hamas in Gaza. A common theme among those holding this view is that if we stop the war now, the soldiers who died will have died in vain, so the deal prioritizes the lives of the hostages over the lives of the soldiers. These are the types of arguments you hear.

There are also people who want the war to continue until Gaza is occupied. I would say that about a third of the population supports the more nationalist, fundamentalist and Jewish part of the government.

In a The last pieceYou wrote, to paraphrase, that people were saying at the beginning of the war that Israel wanted to resettle Gaza, as it had done in parts of the West Bank. You wrote that you were a bit skeptical about that, but given some of what we’ve seen in the past few months, it’s hard to argue about the direction things could be heading in Gaza, and perhaps in parts of Syria and Lebanon.