‘Israelis are frustrated, but do they want to stop the war? Not exactly’

Dana Mills

August 30, 2024

Rallying around the flag, low trust in government, rebounding support for Netanyahu: Dahlia Scheindlin unpacks Israel’s peculiar public opinion trends.

 

Demonstrators protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, and for the release of Israelis held hostage in the Gaza Strip, outside the Kirya army base in Tel Aviv, July 27, 2024. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)

Nearly a year on from the deadliest attack in Israel’s history, the Israeli army continues to wage a devastating war in the Gaza Strip with no apparent end in sight. There is now abundant evidence that senior political and security figures failed to heed warnings in the lead-up to the Hamas-led October 7 attack, and the army has acknowledged that it was too slow to respond. Investigations have confirmed that senior commanders employed the infamous “Hannibal directive,” permitting Israeli forces to endanger the lives of hostages in order to prevent them from being kidnapped alive.

Since then, more hostages have returned in body bags than have been freed by the military operation in Gaza, and a soldier has been killed in the fighting at a rate of more than one per day since the start of the ground invasion. Tens of thousands of Israelis are still displaced from communities near the Lebanon border and in the “Gaza Envelope.” Israel stands accused of genocide and war crimes — with the possibility of arrest warrants for its leaders — in The Hague, and the country’s credit rating has been downgraded by two major U.S. agencies.

And yet, polls show that Israelis still overwhelmingly support the war, albeit with caveats — and are even coming back around to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

To try to make sense of the war’s popularity in Israel and understand the mood among the public, +972 Magazine sat down with one of its founders, Dahlia Scheindlin — a political consultant, public opinion analyst, and author of “The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel.” The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start broad: what are the main trends in Israeli public opinion since October 7?

The basic trends that I’m following concern Israeli politics, various aspects of the war, and the bigger issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I’m using longitudinal data [tracking the same subjects over an extended period of time] and comparisons to other countries.

What we would expect to see in wartime is the “rally around the flag” effect, and among Israeli Jews we did see just that: very high and sweeping support for the war. Palestinian citizens of Israel, it should be noted, have consistently displayed much lower levels of support for the army’s offensive.

We’ve also seen the popularization among Israeli Jews of some very extreme positions regarding the war, including opposing humanitarian aid and complete justification of almost all military actions. Commonly held opinions also include the argument that Israel should strike Hezbollah and Lebanon hard, and that Israel should occupy Gaza and rebuild Jewish settlements there.

Meanwhile, backing for a two-state solution fell to an all-time low. Overall support for it dropped to around 40 percent, and among Israeli Jews only it fell even lower — to around 30-35 percent.

Whereas in other countries with a “rally around the flag” effect you tend to see strong support for the leadership, in Israel we saw the opposite. Support for the leadership among Israeli Jews plunged to its lowest levels ever, which is very unusual in the first months during wartime. This trend has been very consistent.

Netanyahu and his Likud party had terrible ratings, losing about 50 percent of their support. The government [as a whole] lost a third of its support, and generic questions about public trust in government fell below 20 percent, in juxtaposition to faith in the strength of Israeli society itself.

But now Netanyahu’s support is starting to bounce back, right?

Yes, we’re seeing trust in the government recover pretty consistently across all surveys — starting in April [when Israel assassinated an Iranian Quds Force commander in Damascus, and Iran responded with a missile attack]. A series of polls in recent weeks have shown that Likud would win the most votes if elections were held today, and Netanyahu himself is once again coming out on top in head-to-head surveys against opposition leader Benny Gantz. He’s not in a stellar position, but he is more or less where he was before the war.

This recovery is linked to the new threats from Iran and Hezbollah following Israel’s assassinations in Beirut and Tehran. This has strengthened the sense among Israeli Jews that Israel is constantly surrounded by enemies.

As time has gone on, however, we’ve also seen attitudes toward the war become more skeptical. It’s not for lack of desire; we absolutely see consistent numbers of people who think the war is justified. But for questions that ask if Israel can achieve “total victory,” we see a decline in confidence, with around two-thirds rejecting Netanyahu’s claims that such an outcome is within reach.

Similarly, we see a stabilization and even a slight recovery for certain long-term questions that we test regarding peace agreements. That isn’t because people think peace is around the corner, but it’s a barometer: it reflects the fact that people were feeling in a very extreme mood in the first six months of the war, and are now landing back to something like their previous positions.

What do you make of the trends concerning support for a hostage deal? Are people willing to make concessions — such as a ceasefire — so that their fellow citizens can return home? And how does this relate to the proclaimed military goals of “total victory”?

There is always a majority or plurality that supports a deal for the return of hostages. Even when a complete ceasefire is proposed, you have a majority who prefer to pay the price. The fact is that there is no hostage deal without a permanent ceasefire, withdrawal of Israeli forces, Palestinians going back to northern Gaza, and the release of high-level Palestinian prisoners.

It’s hard to draw a clear trend, because each time the Israeli public is asked different questions. No one asks “Do you want the hostages released?” as the result would be 100 percent “Yes.” Equally, I have not seen a question that asks “Do you support or oppose the war?” or “Do you think the number of Palestinian casualties is justified as a means to pressuring Hamas?” It’s only ever asked in terms of compromises: “What price would you be willing to pay for a hostage deal?”

Have you seen changes in the attitudes of Israeli Jews toward Palestinian citizens of Israel, and vice versa?

There was some polling about this at the beginning of the war, [gauging] whether there would be internal riots, but so far there haven’t been any. I can’t recall many polls since then. There has been suspicion of Israeli Jews among Palestinian citizens after October 7, and a lot of fear, and perhaps discomfort with what Hamas did. And there is despair among Palestinian citizens about the future: how will they go on living in this situation?

What trends do you see among Israeli Jews regarding enlisting in the military campaign versus refusing or deserting?

There’s very high responsiveness and volunteerism [for the army]. At the same time, I have heard about a great deal of hardship — very intense stories about people whose livelihoods are collapsing, who are in post-trauma after being sent for one or two rounds of military service.

I heard that the military prisons are full because there are Israelis trying to get out of doing service — not because they’re peaceniks or lefties against the war, but because they can’t handle it. I think there’s a very severe problem with morale, even though I know that [active support for the war effort] seems to have been high so far. But there are issues with stress and financial hardship because reserve duty is so long.

How do you explain the low level of civil disobedience among Israelis — especially when considering the large demonstrations against the judicial coup in 2023, the mass dissent against the Lebanon war, and even opposition to previous Gaza operations? It feels like on every level — whether protests on the streets, or public figures willing to speak out — there’s been silence and complicity from the Jewish-Israeli population.

October 7 was a watershed moment that startled Israeli Jews and has been manipulated and fetishized for political gain since it occurred. I don’t see much opposition to the brutal elements of the war among the Jewish-Israeli public because there’s no real change in sympathy for it. Perhaps there are more moderate percentages who oppose humanitarian aid, but that’s about it. As I said, the only thing that has changed is the public’s confidence in Israel’s ability to achieve its war aims.

At the same time, there have been large demonstrations against the government, or for the hostages, that I cannot recall ever seeing in wartime. Among Palestinian citizens of Israel, there is less inclination to protest than among Jews due to fear of persecution.

The polls show considerable frustration: the Jewish-Israeli public doesn’t believe that the government is prosecuting the war for the right reasons. Pretty much all Israeli Jews want to “destroy Hamas,” but more than half of Israelis believe Netanyahu is prolonging the military campaign to keep himself in power. Does that mean they actually want to stop the war? Not exactly.

 

“We told Israel, ‘Look, if you guys have to go, we’re behind you all the way’”

Alastair Crooke

“The successful thwarting of Hizbullah’s attack on Sunday, symbolized Israel’s intelligence and operational edge”: According to the IDF spokesman, the Hezbollah attack was thwarted for the most part – thanks to 100 Israel aircraft carrying out around the clock – pre-emptive strikes that destroyed “thousands of missile launchers”.

“The group [Hizbullah], did manage to fire hundreds of rockets at northern Israel, but the damage they caused was quite limited”, the Israeli spokespersons disdainfully suggested (amidst a complete blackout on publication, under full censorship, in Israel of any reporting on damage caused to strategic Israeli infrastructure or to military sites).

In effect, it was ‘theatre’ mounted by both sides: By limiting their 20 minute strike to within 5 kms of the border – and by Hizbullah staying within the ‘equations’ of war – both sides signalled plainly to each other they were not looking for all-out war.

The ‘winner narrative’ from Israel was to be expected in today’s psy-war atmosphere. Yet it comes at a cost: Amos Harel in Haaretz suggests that “there’s a tendency in Israel [as a result] to view the success in foiling Sunday’s attack as renewed evidence of the consolidation of regional deterrence and [of western] strategic supremacy. But such an assessment” he concedes, “appears to be far from accurate”.

Indeed it is (far from accurate). The Sunday theatre concluded with no change to the strategic situation in the north of Israel: Daily attrition continues from across the frontier of Lebanon, down to the new 40 km border defining the extent of Israel’s loss of territory to the Hizbullah no-go zone.

The strategic point is not that this narrative of a successful thwarting of Hizbullah’s capabilities is highly misleading. Rather, it sets up expectations of available military success from which wrong conclusions will be drawn. We have been here before. It didn’t go well …

Seymour Hersh, doyen of U.S. investigative journalism, this week re-posted a piece that he wrote in August 2006 about U.S. thinking in the context of an Israeli war on Hizbullah – and on its intended role as a pathfinder-project for a subsequent U.S. strike on Iran.

What Hersh wrote then represents a striking déjà vu of today’s situation. It remains to the point because U.S. neocon thinking rarely evolves, but remains constant.

“The big question for our [U.S.] Air Force”, Hersh noted in 2006, “was how to hit a series of hard targets in Iran successfully”, the former senior intelligence official said. “Who is the closest ally of the U.S. Air Force in its planning? It’s not Congo—it’s Israel”. The official continued:

“Everybody knows that Iranian engineers have been advising Hezbollah on tunnels and underground missile emplacements. And so the USAF went to the Israelis with some new tactics and said to them: ‘Let’s concentrate on the bombing and share what we have on Iran – and what you have on Lebanon.’”.

“The Israelis told us [that Hesballah] would be a cheap war with many benefits,” a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said: “Why oppose it? We’ll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels, and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran”.

“I was told by the consultant that the Israelis repeatedly pointed to the war in Kosovo as an example of what Israel would try to achieve. “The NATO forces … methodically bombed and strafed not only military targets but tunnels, bridges, and roads, in Kosovo and elsewhere in Serbia, for seventy-eight days …“Israel studied the Kosovo war as its role model … The Israelis told Condi Rice: You did it in about seventy days, but we need half of that—thirty-five days’ [to finish off Hizbullah]””.

“The Bush White House”, a Pentagon consultant said, “has been agitating for some time to find a reason for a preëmptive blow against Hizbullah”; adding, “It was our intent to have Hezbollah diminished, and now we have someone else doing it … According to a Middle East expert, with knowledge of the current thinking of both the Israeli and the U.S. governments: Israel had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah—and shared it with Bush Administration officials—well before the July 12th [2006] kidnappings: “It’s not that the Israelis had a trap that Hezbollah walked into,” he said, “but there was a strong feeling in the White House that sooner or later the Israelis were going to do it”, Hersh wrote.

“The White House was more focussed on stripping Hezbollah of its missiles, because – if there were to be a military option against Iran’s nuclear facilities – it had to get rid of the weapons that Hezbollah could use in a potential retaliation at Israel. Bush wanted both”, Hersh was told”.

“The Bush Administration was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced … that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations – some of which are also buried deep underground”. (Emphasis added.)

A former intelligence officer said, “We told Israel, ‘Look, if you guys have to go, we’re behind you all the way”.

“Nonetheless, some officers serving with the Joint Chiefs of Staff were deeply concerned that the Administration will have a far more positive assessment of the air campaign than they should – the former senior intelligence official said. “There is no way that Rumsfeld and Cheney will draw the right conclusion about this,” he said. “When the smoke clears, they’ll say it was a success, and they’ll draw reinforcement for their plan to attack Iran”.

(This is where we are today: When the smoke clears from Sunday’s ‘exemplary pre-emptive attack in Lebanon’, Netanyahu will be using it with Washington to draw reinforcement for his aspiration to engage the U.S. for a strike on Iran.)

“Strategic bombing has been a failed military concept for ninety years, and yet air forces all over the world keep on doing it,” John Arquilla, a defense analyst at the Naval Postgraduate School, told [Hersh] … Rumsfeld [too, shared this expert’s jaded view]: “Air power and the use of a few Special Forces had worked in Afghanistan, and he [Rumsfeld] had tried to do it again in Iraq. It was the same idea, but it didn’t work. He thought that Hezbollah was too dug in – and the Israeli attack plan would not work, and the last thing he wanted was another war on his shift that would put the American forces in Iraq in greater jeopardy”.

“The 2006 Israeli plan, according to the former senior intelligence official, was “the mirror image of what the United States had been planning for Iran””. (The initial U.S. Air Force proposals for an air attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity, which included the option of intense bombing of civilian infrastructure targets inside Iran) were being resisted by the top leadership of the Army, the Navy, and the Marine Corps – according to current and former officials. They argued that the Air Force plan will not work and will inevitably lead, as in the Israeli war with Hezbollah, to the insertion of troops on the ground.

David Siegel, the then Israeli spokesman, said that his country’s leadership believed, as of early August 2006, that the air war had been successful, and had destroyed more than seventy per cent of Hizbullah’s medium-and long-range-missile launching capacity.

Israel however had not destroyed 70% of Hizbullah’s missile inventory in 2006. It was deceived by Hizbullah’s intelligence decoy operation. The Israelis bombed empty sites.

Today, we hear the same exultatory narrative coming from IDF Spokesman Rear Admiral Hagari – parading how successful Israel’s strikes on Sunday had been.

Likely some in Israel and U.S. again will be deeply concerned that the Biden team may fall for a far more positive assessment of the Israeli air campaign than they should.

Many commentators across the West are making the same mistake. As Haaretz’ military correspondent noted in respect to this Sunday’s air strikes: “there’s a tendency in Israel to view the success in foiling Sunday’s attack as renewed evidence for the consolidation of regional deterrence – and strategic supremacy”.

Or, in other words, Iran has been deterred from carrying out its ‘commitment’ to retaliate for Ismail Haniyah’s assassination in Tehran by the amassing of fire-power by the U.S. in the waters of the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf and the fear of overwhelming U.S. firepower.

Anyone seeing the video glimpses of Iran’s automated and deep ‘missile cities’ deployed throughout the depth of Iran (and which it has allowed to be exposed to momentary view), should understand that carpet bombing Iranian civilian structure will not prevent the Iranian ability to respond lethally. Iran could unleash Regional Armageddon, nothing less.

So, for clarity’s sake: Who exactly is it that is deterred and backing down? Is it Iran or Washington?

Yet, “If it’s true that the Israeli campaign is based on the American approach in Kosovo, then it missed the point”, General Wesley Clark, the U.S. commander told Hersh. Killing civilians was not the objective: “In my experience, air campaigns have to be backed, ultimately, by the will and capability to finish the job on the ground”.

And that – simply – for the U.S. to contemplate for Iran is impossible.

“We face a dilemma”, an Israeli official told Hersh in 2006. Effectively, to decide whether to go for a local response (which is ineffective), or go for a comprehensive response—to really take on Hezbollah [and Iran] once and for all”.

Plus ça change: The dilemma may not have changed, but Israel has altered radically. A majority in Israel today is messianic in its support for Jabotinsky’s followers to do what they had always wanted and promised to do: To expel the Palestinians from the Land of Israel.

It is understood by many in Washington that the Revisionist Zionists (who represent maybe about 2 million Israelis) intend cynically to impose their will on the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, by plunging the U.S. into a wide regional war, should the White House try to undercut their neo-Nakba project of Palestinian forcible expulsion.

Benjamin Netanyahu has provoked Iran once (with the assassination in the Damascus Consulate of a top IRGC general); twice with killing of Haniyeh in Tehran; and a possible third would be were Israel to launch a so-called ‘pre-emptive’ strike against Iran, believing that the U.S. would be trapped and politically unable to stand aloof as Iran retaliated against Israel.

However, should the U.S. veto a strike on Iran before the U.S. elections (and Iran not retaliate for the death of Haniyeh before then), the Naqba ‘project’ can be moved forward via extending the existing Gaza military offensive to the West Bank, or through a grave provocation on the Haram al-Sharif/The Temple Mount (such as a fire at the al-Aqsa Mosque).

The Revisionist Zionists have been clear over recent years that some crisis or the confusion of war would be required to implement their neo-Naqba project fully.

America particularly is trapped by its ‘ironclad’, unqualified military support for Israel – which offers Netanyahu ample room for manoeuvre.

Manoeuvre, that is, towards the conflict that is Netanyahu’s only escape hatch ‘upwards’ as the ‘walls of attrition’ close-in on Israel. Iran and Hizbullah seem to have chosen too, for now, to preserve their escalatory dominance through a return to imposed calibrated attrition on Israel.

The U.S. will not be able to keep such a huge deployment of naval vessels in the region for long; but equally, Netanyahu will not be able to politically prevaricate at home for long, either.