Five ways Israel is changing after six months of war in Gaza

When the Brothers in Arms organization announced at a Tel Aviv rally last month that it was returning to anti-government protests, ending a post-Oct. 7 hiatus, it was taken by some Israelis as a hopeful sign.

Maybe Israel was starting to recover and find some semblance of normalcy after that terrible October Saturday when Hamas fighters crossed from Gaza, killed mostly unarmed civilians, took hostages, and forced Israelis, for the first time in their history, to abandon large swaths of national territory.

Brothers in Arms, a reservist group, had surged onto the national scene in early 2023 as part of huge pro-democracy protests against government plans to overhaul the judiciary.

But after Oct. 7 it became known for transforming overnight into something of a shadow civilian service corps, providing food, shelter, and even counseling services to those most affected by the attack, filling in for what many evacuees felt was an absent state.

Now it was resuming demonstrations.

“The only way to get things done here is through protest,” Omri Ronen, a captain in the army reserves, announced at the rally. “This may be our last opportunity, and we must not lose it.”

Whether the protests constitute a sign of recovery is open to debate. What seems clearer, experts and social observers say, is how the civil society response to Oct. 7 is planting the seeds of a new political class.

That development is just one of the changes – some heart-wrenching and worrisome, some hopeful – these experts are sensing six months after what is widely viewed here as the worst day in Israel’s history.

Politically, Israeli society has shifted right, most say, as the country finds itself bogged down in Gaza in its longest war and engaged in a lethal sparring match with Hezbollah, Iran’s powerful regional ally, to its north.

Israel’s war with Hamas has devastated much of Gaza and left tens of thousands of Palestinians dead. The United Nations has declared famine there no longer just a threat but a reality.

Rising militarism has silenced efforts at forging peaceful coexistence with Palestinians. Soldiers are the romantic heroes of the moment, with young women on dating apps seeking out reservists posting photos of themselves in Gaza. Surging gun ownership underscores a loss of faith in the state’s ability to protect citizens.

Also discernible are hints of other profound shifts that could have lasting impact on Israel domestically – and on its relationship with friends and foes outside, even if some say it’s too early to draw firm conclusions.

“Israelis are still coming to terms with the stunning realization that for the first time in our independence, a part of Israel was occupied by brutal terrorists,” says Nimrod Novik, former senior foreign policy adviser to Shimon Peres, the late Labor party prime minister.

“We are living what I would call a time of national schizophrenia,” he adds, “when to some degree we have returned to the ‘regularly scheduled program’ of life as it was on Oct. 6, but at the same time we are still dealing with dark fears that have us stuck.”

Still others say it’s too soon to expect progress.

“Six months can be a long time, but in this case it’s not,” says David Enoch, a philosopher and past professor of ethics and law at Hebrew University who is now on the law faculty at Oxford. “The healing has not yet begun.”

Yet these same observers say they see a number of significant ways Israel has changed. Five stand out:

1. A lingering – and blinding – trauma

“The fact that so many Israelis have been traumatized by that day and are still suffering that trauma has left them unable to have a serious moral conversation even with our [foreign] friends,” says Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. “That is contributing to this downward spiral” in Israel’s relations with the world, he says.

A significant piece of what some describe as a nonstop nightmare is the fact that Hamas still holds more than 130 hostages in Gaza – although their condition and how many are alive are unknown.

Dr. Enoch says this trauma has rendered Israelis unable to see beyond Oct. 7 – a day intended to destabilize Israel’s very existence – to the human tragedy Israel has inflicted on Gaza.

“I hear from thinkers on the left, like me, things like, ‘I have no place in my heart for the children of Gaza,’” he says, “and I realize we are nowhere near the point of coming to terms with this.”

If anything encourages Mr. Halevi, however, it is a growing sense that Israelis want to move beyond the trauma.

“Israeli opinion has definitely hardened in the last months,” he says. “But at the same time, there is a desire for healing – so that gives me hope.”

2. Feelings of abandonment: by the government, and a world that has forgotten Oct. 7

“People realized very quickly that what we already knew was a mediocre government at best was actually worse; it was absent,” says Einat Wilf, a former Labor member of the Knesset and co-author of “The War of Return” on Israeli-Palestinian peace.

“But now added to that despair is another deep sense of despair at seeing so many in the world forget what happened here,” she adds, “and buckle under the weight of lies and accept anything being said about Israel.”

That growing sense of abandonment by the world, Mr. Halevi says, has left Israelis defensive and uninterested in hearing legitimate critiques of Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza.

“There is a great gap between saying Israel is fighting a just war in an unjust way, and saying Israel is committing a genocidal war,” he adds. “I worry that Israelis are increasingly unable to distinguish between the legitimate moral questions of our friends and the outrageous criticisms from our enemies.”

Israel was already accustomed to a sense of aloneness, Ms. Wilf says. But the abandonment is felt most acutely concerning shifting perceptions of Israel in the United States, and the impact that has on U.S. support for the war on Hamas.

“The despair we already felt only goes deeper as we realize the United States wants to shut down the war,” she says, “and leave us in a situation where Hamas is left standing.”

3. The post-Oct. 7 urge to “go it alone” that threatens the Zionist dream of Israel’s acceptance

Just days before the Oct. 7 attack, a hot topic of conversation in Israel was the prospect of normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia – and what that would mean for Israel’s long march to international acceptance.

Today many Israelis, backed by official rhetoric from Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-right government, talk more about a new willingness for Israel and indeed the Jewish people to “go it alone.”

And that has some deeply worried about what they see as a “downward spiral” in Jews’ global status after decades of progress since World War II and Israel’s founding in 1948.    

“The promise of Israel being founded after the Holocaust was that the exile was over, and that Jews could now live free from that terrible sense of aloneness,” says Mr. Halevi. “The central purpose and promise of Zionism for the Jewish people was not only our ability to defend ourselves,” he adds, “but a new relationship between ourselves and the rest of the world.”

And Israel has experienced growing acceptance, he says – especially in the Middle East.

“What worries me six months after Oct. 7 is that the historic achievement of Zionism is being undone, [that] we are going to see the psychological impacts on Israelis and Jews around the world of the revival of this sense of aloneness.”

What many Israelis see is a world where the movement to criminalize Israel is “going mainstream,” Mr. Halevi says, and where the “progressive world” is moving “perilously close to becoming the biggest source of antisemitism.” But the more Israel is treated as a “pariah state,” he says, the more justified the right wing in power feels in “shaping policies that further turn the world against Israel.”

The troubling result, he says, is “they [the right] are making the Jewish people’s growing aloneness a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

4. Resurgence of the Palestinian question and the two-state solution

Behind the recent uptick in normalized relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors – of which normalized Saudi ties were to be part – was the idea that Palestinian national aspirations could be shunted to the side and treated separately.

For some Israelis, largely among the Israeli Arab minority, Oct. 7 was a wake-up call that peace and regional progress won’t come without the Palestinians.

“I’m very sorry we had to have this terrible disaster to remind people of something so basic as the untenable aspect of having [millions of] Palestinians living under military control and repression,” says Rula Hardal, a political scientist at the Shalom Hartman Institute who is a Palestinian citizen of Israel.

“If we can say that anything positive has come out of this,” she adds, “maybe it is that the Palestinian issue is again on the global agenda and people are remembering that we cannot create regional peace without addressing the question of Palestinian national sovereignty.”

Dr. Hardal, an executive director of A Land for All, an organization that advocates for an Israeli-Palestinian confederation, says she is encouraged by increased discussion internationally of the need for a two-state solution: a state of Palestine alongside Israel.

On the other hand, she is not convinced there is much of substance behind the Biden administration’s rhetorical support for two states. “They are talking about it more, but when I hear what the Biden administration is saying it seems they don’t mean anything serious.”

Moreover, she notes that if anything, Israeli opposition to a Palestinian state is stronger than before Oct. 7.

Longtime Israeli advocates of a Palestinian state say it simply isn’t useful to make that case now.

“Even those of us who have not lost sight of the two-state solution despite the current context are careful to adjust our advocacy to the national mood,” says Mr. Novik, senior Israel fellow with Israel Policy Forum, a Washington-based think tank. “Any talk of [it] right now is so detached from most Israelis’ reality that it is just not constructive.”

While Dr. Hardal concurs that the moment isn’t ripe for progress, she also rejects any notion that circumstances render understandable one nation’s rejection of another’s right to sovereignty.    

“Personally I accept and support that every group of people has the right to claim their nationhood, and that includes the Jewish people,” she says. “What I cannot accept is that the Jewish people would deny Palestinians their right to sovereignty. And unfortunately,” she adds, “what we see in recent months is this rejection getting stronger.”

5. The seeds of a new political class planted

Perhaps the most promising post-Oct. 7 development is a new class of Israeli political leaders and a revaluation of public service and the role it plays in strengthening society.

The civilian infrastructure that evolved with the pro-democracy protests of 2022-23 was jolted into action by the Hamas attack.

What underlay both the protest movement and then the civilian response to Oct. 7, some say, was a sense that maintaining comfortable private lives was no longer an option.

“What we had with the protest movement was people who had very fulfilling lives and who would not have considered touching Israeli politics – a world they saw as dirty and corrupt – suddenly moving into the public realm with a sense of urgency,” says Mr. Novik. “Now we hear people who would have never considered entering politics talking about joining parties or forming new ones.”

Ms. Wilf agrees, saying Israelis had been lulled by a period of good times, generally living well and prospering, and “forgot about those other elements that made Israel strong.”

Then on Oct. 7 “so many Israelis felt viscerally what it means not to have a state,” she adds, “and now what we see is a real sense of returning to the basics of how we rebuild our society.”

More cautious is Dr. Enoch, who says nothing he’s seen in recent months ensures a political renaissance.

“A lot of the heroics and individual actions since Oct. 7 have been unbelievable movie stuff,” he says. “But if you go to any of the frequent demonstrations there’s still zero discussion of the death and suffering Israel is inflicting in Gaza,” he adds, “so that tells me the Israeli psyche remains in a horrible place that isn’t yet ready for positive change.”

If Mr. Novik finds anything hopeful six months after Oct. 7, it’s the glimmers of a new willingness to take part in public life – including politics.

“The evidence is out there of people who now see staying away from public involvement as a luxury they cannot afford if they want their children to grow up in a normal society,” he says. “If they do take the next step to play some role and change our politics,” he adds, “it will be one positive outcome from the trauma we’ve experienced.”