Before Gal Navon’s coffin was wheeled in, two family members shrieked in anguish and nearly fainted. His cousin marshalled the most eloquent adjectives in the Hebrew language to describe him, but added that: “All possible words can only detract from the truth of who you really were.” Through the sobs of mourners, a tense, two-toned “brring-brring” sound could be heard, as phone after phone alerted people of incoming rockets. Distant booms followed.
Navon, 30 years old, was mown down on Saturday at a party in southern Israel, along with 260 others, in a bloodbath terror attack by the Palestinian militant group Hamas. The carnage has claimed 1,300 lives in Israel so far, but the final tally will be higher, as charred and butchered bodies are discovered in communities in the south and the full scale of the rampage is exposed. More than 3,000 Israelis have been wounded, and Hamas has captured an estimated 150 civilian hostages.
Faced with the worst terror attack in the history of the country – the US president, Joe Biden, called it the deadliest attack on Jews since the second world war – Israelis are rallying, as they always do in a crisis. Last Saturday, the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, declared a full-scale war, and by Wednesday he had established a national emergency government, bringing in a major opposition party, led by former military chief of staff Benny Gantz, to help run the war effort. Other parties might follow.
Among the Israeli people, everyone’s voice has dropped one register and no one smiles. But around the country, people have mobilised a sweeping volunteer effort to get donations of clothes, toys, blankets, food and toiletries to people driven from their homes in the south, or to army reservists hastily summoned and inadequately supplied. Shopping malls and homes have been taken over for the task; volunteer drivers wait at the roadside to transport the boxes south or north – the current and potential fronts of the war.
Israel’s new wounds will never heal. It’s too soon to know all the political ramifications. But based on experience, the unity of crisis is only a pause from the profound divisions in Israeli society.
On Wednesday, a clutch of demonstrators turned out at the Tel Aviv defence compound with Israeli flags to demand the demise of the government. It was nothing compared with the recent, massive pro-democracy protests in Israel, but still a few pro-Netanyahu Israelis stopped to harangue them. Despite the paltry numbers, the interaction symbolised the same pro- or anti-Netanyahu breakdown that had caused Israel’s political paralysis for four election cycles in a row – until a fifth poll finally yielded a fanatical, theocratic, proto-authoritarian government led by Netanyahu, despite his indictments on three counts of corruption.
In one scenario, this very same divide remains in force, with each side more existentially furious at the other. The pro-Netanyahu camp is already insisting that the far right must be even more extreme, while the anti-Netanyahu camp finds it inconceivable that Netanyahu should remain in power after the catastrophe that has occurred on his watch. “What else needs to happen to prove that this man is incapable,” pleaded Bracha Shalita, 79, as she left the demonstration with her husband, Dudu. “How much must we suffer?”
But it’s hard to imagine anything staying as it was, and another scenario is just as plausible: that Israel’s political ideology could lurch far, far to the right.
All over Tel Aviv, ominous graffiti declares: “Wipe out Gaza”; someone spray-painted this on my own tiny residential street, in a reliably centre-left voting district, just a few houses down. Within hours of the attack, Israel began a massive air war against Gaza, causing 1,500 deaths by Thursday, cutting electricity in a zone whose 2 million civilians have been under severe blockade since 2007, and killing approximately 500 children. More than 400,000 people have been displaced by shelling. By Wednesday, Gaza’s main power plant had run out of fuel and been forced to shut down, while on Friday Israel ominously ordered the complete evacuation of Palestinians from the northern part of the Gaza Strip, apparently in preparation for a ground war. Soon, the very idea of being rightwing in Israel will mean being extreme, brutal, cruel and vengeful.
The past offers strong lessons as to the Israeli mindset after major attacks. The Palestinian uprising of September 2000, known as the second intifada, prompted a rise in the proportion of Israeli Jews who self-identified as rightwing, according to my survey research over the years; this was accelerated by Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, followed by Hamas’s takeover in 2007. This process quickened following Netanyahu’s return to power in 2009, and correlated with a dark cycle of violent escalations with Hamas in Gaza every few years until this current war.
It’s hard to imagine Israel being any more rightwing than it is now. Netanyahu’s government has 64 seats out of 120 in parliament, with the most extreme politicians in its history. Rightwing ideology in Israeli terms extends to well over 70 members of parliament – hardline, nationalist, militant and probably annexationist regarding the Palestinians. But it’s all too likely that today’s centrists will rush to the right following the atrocities of the Hamas assault.
There wasn’t much of a left wing to start with. But what exists is already fraying in the wake of Saturday’s horror. It is intolerable to some leftwingers that others would invoke Israel’s occupation and siege over Gaza, brutal as they are, to explain Hamas’s actions and hint of justifications (of which there can be none). Some are incapable of hearing about the apocalyptic destruction in Gaza at this moment, which seems emotionally incompatible with the hell Israelis are experiencing now. Even hardcore leftwingers I know are fighting feelings of rage and revenge. Some will slide towards the right.
Netanyahu’s legacy is ruined for good. But it hardly matters; Hamas might have just pushed Israelis into a far darker place than Netanyahu himself ever dreamed of.
Dahlia Scheindlin is a Tel Aviv-based political analyst and pollster
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