Middle Israel: Entering the post-war political era - opinion

It’s over. No, Gaza’s animosity isn’t over, nor is Arab hostility or Islamist wrath, but the war that ended militarily with last year’s ceasefire has now ended symbolically as well.

Politically, however, the war has hardly begun.

NO PERIOD in Israel’s 78 years has been as politically explosive as the past three years. What began with an attempted judicial coup and then proceeded to the longest of Israel’s multiple wars has spawned social upheaval that will come to a head in the general election currently scheduled for October.

Previous wars’ electoral impact has been clear. The big military victories of 1948, 1956, and 1967 handed Labor (under different names) electoral landslides, the 1973 trauma resulted in the Likud’s defeat of Labor, the First Intifada resulted in Labor’s defeat of the Likud, and the Second Intifada dealt Labor an electoral blow from which it has not recovered to this day.

Is this what now awaits today’s Likud? Polls since October 7 suggest consistently that the ruling coalition has lost about one fifth of its following, mostly to assorted center-right parties. This writer is unimpressed.

Polls have repeatedly proven unreliable, from the Truman-Dewey contest of 1948, through the 2016 Brexit referendum to Hillary Clinton’s defeat by Donald Trump. Israeli polls are even more unreliable, as many refuse to cooperate with the pollsters, and some deliberately mislead them.

Moreover, the approaching election may be decided by candidates who are currently unknown, parties that do not yet exist, and events that no one can predict.

Even so, the social undercurrents that will dominate this election can be mapped already now, and they involve three different parts of Israeli society: Arabs, reservists, and religious Zionists.

Whether or not this will now change remains to be seen, but the conditions for change are there. Anyone who follows what is happening in Israel’s Arab towns knows the crime crisis they face has generated a combination of fear, anger, and frustration that is ready to spark political combustion.

The number of intra-Arab murders, which in 2024 harvested a record 230 fatalities, last year climbed further, to 252, and in this year’s first four weeks already stands at 24. The causes and culprits of this scourge are not the point, in terms of our subject. The point is that the crisis is igniting a new civic energy.

An estimated 50,000 Israeli Arabs flocked to a mass rally in Sakhnin last week, where they demanded greater government involvement in street safety. As they see things, they have been loyal throughout the war, while the government has ignored their plight.

This sense of abandonment can spike Israeli Arab voters’ turnout, which in the last election stood at 53%, as opposed to the overall turnout of 70%. Increased Arab turnout can rearrange the Knesset and redesign Israeli politics.

Millions of Jews will arrive at the polls equally bitter and livid, albeit for entirely different reasons.

THE MOST potent segment of the electorate will be the reservists.

Numbering more than 360,000 men and women who served an average 136 days, this is a massive population that experienced the war firsthand and sacrificed for it, whether physically, mentally, or financially. They include Israel’s best and brightest, thinking patriots whose voting will be affected by what they witnessed and endured. So will the voting of millions surrounding them – spouses, children, parents, colleagues, neighbors, and friends.

And then there are the religious Zionists.

Their share among the war’s casualties was particularly high, and they emerge from it religiously vindicated and socially fuming.

Religiously, the sector’s members have proven that observance does not contradict service. Socially, the war made them loathe ultra-Orthodoxy’s historic alliance with the Likud.

Zionist rabbis used to avoid confrontation with ultra-Orthodoxy’s sages, whether out of respect or fear. Now they feel they face self-serving hypocrites. Fear has made way for rebuke, respect for scorn.

Modern Orthodox women now ask publicly and loudly why they had to spend endless months fearing for husbands and children at the front and looking after businesses and kids at home while for ultra-Orthodoxy the war was someone else’s affair.

Religious Zionists’ fury has thus become a potent energy waiting to be harnessed by a new political hegemon, one that will demand civil service from any coalition member’s flock.

The most crucial element in the Likud’s rise to power in 1977 was religious Zionism, the only sector that had actually shifted from Left to Right, having previously been a pillar of Labor’s hegemony.

The reservists and religious Zionists often overlap but are by no means identical. Most reservists are secular, and many are not Jewish. Arab voters are an entirely separate part of the electorate. Even so, the three groups emerge from Israel’s most costly war imbued with the kind of wrath, humiliation, and resolve that make decadent establishments fall, and their successors rise.