At one of the recent mass demonstrations in Tel Aviv calling for a hostage deal and for early elections to replace the Israeli government, one protester held up a sign reading: “Who are we without them?” referring to the hostages. Another placard read: “Give me one reason to raise kids here.”
The messages encapsulate questions many Israelis are asking themselves, a year into the longest war in the country’s history: What is the value of a Jewish homeland if it doesn’t prioritize — or it gives up on — saving the lives of its civilians, kidnapped from their homes? Will I ever feel safe again? And what kind of future do I have here if the only vision our leaders are offering is endless war?
A year since the murderous Oct. 7 Hamas attack set off the war in Gaza, Israel is sinking deeper into an existential crisis. It is a shrunken country, with tens of thousands of Israelis displaced from northern towns and kibbutzim, as well as southern border villages, as it fights a multifront war that is only intensifying and expanding. And, in addition to having to cope throughout the year with loss, shock, rocket fire and overwhelming fear for their safety from Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran itself, that anxiety is compounded by turmoil from within.
Thousands of Israelis with the means to do so have chosen to leave Israel since Oct. 7; others are considering or planning emigrating. Many thousands more have also taken to the streets week after week, engaging in acts of civil disobedience, which began before the Oct. 7 attacks with protests against the Netanyahu government’s proposed judicial overhaul and, after a brief pause, resumed with a new focus on the hostage crisis and demand for early elections. In September, images of the former Israeli army chief of staff Dan Halutz being forcibly removed by the police from the street at a sit-in in front of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s private residence, and of relatives of hostages being roughed up by law enforcement officers, were a further manifestation of the internal crisis.
The way many Israelis protesting across the country see it — a group largely identified as the secular liberal elite — this is not just about saving the hostages; it is a battle over the state’s character and identity. This, then, is the state’s existential inflection point: between a democracy and authoritarianism, between having an independent court system and one beholden to the executive office, between a country with the freedom to protest and hold leaders accountable, and one where open speech is squelched and leaders run roughshod over the populace.
And yet, somehow, this battle is completely detached from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and from Palestinians themselves, as if they do not breathe the same air we breathe, in Israel, the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza. The outrage in the streets is largely confined to the Israeli government’s failure to save the Israeli hostages. There is almost no outrage over the indiscriminate destruction of Gaza and the killing of over 40,000 people, many of them civilians, over the past year. Few are protesting Israel’s excessive use of force. It simply does not register that even if Israelis are in an existential crisis, Palestinians are in a battle for their very existence. Israeli disregard for Palestinian suffering, whether conscious or not, has been one of the most palpable and disturbing features of life in Israel since Oct. 7. Of course it existed well before then, but it is all the more stark and consequential now.
It is precisely this apathy that has enabled the far right — which is not at all apathetic in its approach toward the Palestinians — to dominate Israeli politics, unchallenged. The unifying principle in Israel today, as articulated by the right-wing parties in power, is Jewish control and domination, living by the sword. As Mr. Netanyahu said (quoting the Book of Samuel) at a recent cabinet meeting, “There are those who ask, ‘Shall the sword devour forever?’” His answer, he said, was, “In the Middle East, without the sword, there is no ‘forever.’” (Mr. Netanyahu failed to include the second line of that biblical quote: “Don’t you realize this will end in bitterness.”) According to his reading, the only way to defend Jews is through force. That means crushing the enemy, even if it means sacrificing Israeli lives — as well as the country’s international reputation, sense of national safety and moral compass — in the process.
As Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister and de facto governor of the West Bank, recently stated, “It is my life mission to build the Land of Israel and prevent a Palestinian state.” This isn’t just rhetoric. Over the past year, Israel has expropriated occupied land and built settlements at a record pace and effectively reoccupied Gaza, and it is now embroiled once again in a conflict in Lebanon. An Israel run by people like Mr. Smotrich, his fellow hard-line cabinet minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Mr. Netanyahu himself, is one that has moved from a policy of separation from the Palestinians, once purportedly meant to lead to the creation of a Palestinian state under the Oslo process, to a policy of destruction, which seeks to overpower, kill or expel Palestinians from the lands they were promised, and the lands upon which they currently live.
The problem for Israelis who are indifferent to the lives of Palestinians is that simultaneously, within this paradigm, some Israelis are starting to recognize and experience what is essentially an internal, irreconcilable contradiction. If this is a country that champions Jewish rights and control, how can it also undermine and cheapen Jewish life by effectively abandoning the hostages and condemning the country to an open-ended war? What does it then mean to live in a country whose leaders have made the well-being of its citizens secondary to their leaders’ political survival, exertion and consolidation of political power and excessive military force? How are Israelis to interpret the selective enforcement of the law — for example, by the police largely declining to arrest Israeli settlers who assault Palestinians, but who regularly arrest unarmed, law-abiding citizens shouting in the streets for a hostage deal and the return of their friends and neighbors?
In some ways, of course, this is not new. I have often wondered how Israelis can expect to continue to ignore the systematic violence wielded against Palestinians, through settlement and military rule, and now the mass-scale death and destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, and think it will not affect the state’s character, let alone the way it treats its citizens. This cognitive dissonance, held by many Israelis for decades, has been working overtime over the last year. It has been made possible, in part, by the cultivation and slick branding of Israel’s security apparatus, despite the blanket devastation wrought on Gaza, as sophisticated, precise, high tech and righteous in its mission to defend the Jewish people — as exemplified by targeted assassinations, surveillance technology and the recent pager attacks in Lebanon, images of destroyed city blocks not withstanding.
It has also been made possible by a political opposition that offers no vision of its own for lasting peace. Still, that opposition — which includes many former army generals — together with much of the security establishment, has gotten firmly behind calls for a hostage deal and a ceasefire in Gaza. These groups at least offer an alternative to the current path, which would see a pause in fighting to allow Israelis to heal the open wound of the hostages and give families whose relatives are serving in reserves a break. In that sense they at minimum see the need to prioritize the basic well-being of Israelis and to try to keep Israel in the good graces of the Western world. But their vision nevertheless lacks a sense of how Israelis can have long-term stability outside of coercive military force. This is most evident in the military and civilian consensus over the current escalation in Lebanon and the fact that no Jewish party in Israel today, including the Democratic Party (an amalgamation of the historically left-wing Labor and Meretz), advocates an end to the occupation or a two-state solution.
For many Israelis, the realization that the current government is not going to save the hostages is a break point. Suddenly, many of my compatriots are faced with the understanding that being Jewish in Israel doesn’t mean you will get saved or treated fairly, even in war. That your life, and the life of your sons and daughters, is expendable. This has radicalized and politicized large numbers of Israelis who are protesting for the first time in their lives and questioning whether they can continue living here.
The lawlessness and state violence directed at Palestinians for so long has started to seep into Jewish Israeli society. Mr. Netanyahu’s refusal to assume responsibility for the security failures of Oct. 7, his grip on power despite corruption trials, his emboldening of some of the most radical and messianic elements in Israel, are a testament to that. The nearly carte blanche support Israel has received from the Biden administration throughout much of this war has further empowered the most hard-line elements of the nation’s politics. And yet, many Israelis are still not making the connection between their inability to get the government to prioritize Israeli life and how expendable that government treats Palestinian life.
Without this realization, it is hard to see how Israelis can pave a different path forward that does not rely on the same dehumanization and lawlessness. This, for me, has made what is already a dire, desperate reality seemingly irredeemable. For Israelis to start carving a way out of this mess, they will have to feel outraged not only by what is being done to them, but also what is being done to others in their name, and demand that it stop. Without that, I’m not sure that I, like other Israelis with the privilege to consider it, see a future here.
Mairav Zonszein is the senior Israel analyst with the International Crisis Group. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
