Israelis feel scared and abandoned — mostly by their own state
With a brutal war ongoing in Gaza, grim news on surviving hostages and increased regional hostilities, Israelis are feeling it from all angles
A woman shouts at a protest at HaKirya base, which serves as IDF headquarters, to demand the return of the hostages held by Hamas, Feb. 20, 2024 in Tel Aviv, Israel. Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images
A deep feeling of fear has settled over Israel — not the fear of rockets from Hamas but a profound fear of the unknown. More than six months into its battle with Hamas in Gaza, Israel is facing a profound sense of existential ennui unlike anything it has experienced in its short history.
Families are canceling plans to travel abroad for the upcoming Passover break — worried that war from the north will prevent them from returning home to loved ones. Residents nationwide are stocking safe rooms and bomb shelters as that Hezbollah threat seemingly increases by the hour.
But as I learned during a recent weeklong visit, Israelis of every class and age and location increasingly feel abandoned most by their government. In a sense, how could they not? Just this week — while hostages remain missing and missiles rain down from Lebanon — the Knesset embarks on its annual monthlong vacation, stoking frustration with lawmakers as round after round of negotiations with Hamas lead nowhere.
The weekend protests against the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have returned with gusto — albeit dominated by a sense of despair that comes from battling a government most Israelis feel has failed them. The largest demonstration yet took place this past Saturday in Tel Aviv, estimated at 100,000 strong and marred by a speeding driver who plowed into the crowd, injuring five in a sign of unprecedented internal turmoil.
In cities large and small, the reminders of war are inescapable — uniformed soldiers and armed civilians, empty hotels and taxis desperate for tourists who will almost certainly not arrive. Posters hang everywhere of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas both dead and alive, each of whom is someone’s son or daughter, mother or father, in a nation far too tiny to even consider abandoning just one.
However, despite Netanyahu’s insistence on “complete victory” against Hamas, insisting that an iron fist is the only way to get the hostages home, Hamas revealed on Monday that it cannot account for 40 hostages in the first category to be released — women and men who are elderly, sick or injured.
Their inability to identify living hostages in this category is a devastating blow for hostage families, and raises the unfathomable spectacle that little more may come of this war than widespread death and even wider-spread global isolation. Many hostage families have felt abandoned twice by their government: once on Oct. 7 as their kibbutzim were overrun, and again as Netanyahu’s coalition fails to bring their loved ones home.
Israel does feel abandoned these days. The White House, under pressure from the left, has put the Netanyahu government on notice and appears unwilling to abide continued suffering. Defiant as ever, Netanyahu declared Monday evening that there is a date for the Rafah invasion to begin — despite his own defense minister, Yoav Gallant, immediately telling his U.S. counterpart that no such date has been set.
Former president Donald Trump, too, has implored Israel to wrap things up, less out of compassion for civilians and more from the perspective of optics; Israel is “losing the PR war,” he said in an interview last week, just days before the Israel Defense Forces pulled most of their brigades from the Gaza Strip. The Israeli military’s move was more likely in response to Biden’s pressure rather than Trump, but with America’s last president quite possibly becoming its next, Trump’s words — muddled as they so often emerge — cannot be ignored.
The world has also abandoned Israel. Radical officials in Nicaragua sued the German government this week in the International Court of Justice for supplying weapons to Jerusalem. Canadian Foreign Minister Melania Joly compared Israel to the Islamic terror groups working so hard for its destruction. In addition to international governments losing patience with Israel’s war, protests across the globe have raged for the last six months with record crowds excoriating Israel’s military response.
For most Israelis, only Netanyahu’s removal can begin the process of national reconciliation and rehabilitation. Recent polls put his popularity at historically dismal levels, with 71% of Israelis believing he should either resign now or as soon as the war finishes. The latter data point explains why so many Israelis — and not just leftists — told me they believe Netanyahu is actually extending the war’s lifespan in order to remain in power. As one friend whispered to me on an unseasonably sultry night last week in Tel Aviv, “Every day I wake up hoping to hear of Netanyahu’s death.”
But even an Israel without Netanyahu will still exist in fear. The prime minister may make for an obvious target, but he’s part of Israel’s problems — not the problem. That, of course, would be Hamas — along with its extremist ideological siblings, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Islamic Jihad. These fundamentalists simply want Israel gone. In its place, as reported by Haaretz last week, would rise a Hamas-led theocracy from the river to the sea, in which all Israeli soldiers would be killed and the nation’s intelligentsia would be spared and forced to apply their know-how to building a Palestinian state.
Despite such extreme internal discord, this is a scenario that would leave even the most disaffected Israeli ready to rally behind their leader, even as they pray for a change in leadership. Still, flush with cash from decades of economic expansion, Israelis are quietly snapping up second homes abroad in case things go from horrific to even worse (Cyprus, Greece, Portugal and Thailand appear to be the most popular destinations).
Few have actually said they’re giving up on their nation, but many are clearly considering it. In their place, Israelis — perhaps over-optimistically — spoke to me about of hundreds of thousands of diaspora Jews arriving once the fighting is over, fleeing from global antisemitism and spurred by a tide of renewed Zionism. Already, at least 6,500 have immigrated, with aliyah applications from France up by 300% and the U.S. by 100% since last October, according to Israel’s Aliyah Ministry.
But first the fighting has to end. In the meantime, Israel remains a nation both entirely changed and utterly the same — where war has become normalized even as its bars and beaches remain as full as ever. And for a country that has always known war, but never really lived with war for this duration, this is quite possibly the scariest outcome of all.
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