Israel’s October 7 Attack Fails to Unite Voters as Netanyahu Faces a
Divisive Election
As Israelis prepare to vote for the first time since the Hamas-led
assault, they remain divided over whether to hold Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu responsible for negligence or fault the “treason” of his generals.
·
Israel’s
October 27 election will be the first since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack,
which killed about 1,200 people and led to a devastating Israeli military
campaign in Gaza.
·
Israeli
voters remain deeply divided over responsibility for the security failures:
critics blame Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his policies, while his
supporters accuse military and intelligence chiefs of negligence or betrayal.
·
Communities
near Gaza reflect this political divide, with liberal Nahal Oz residents
largely opposing Netanyahu, while many residents of right-wing Sderot continue
to support him.
·
Netanyahu’s
government faces criticism over weakening democratic institutions, judicial
reforms, religious conservatism and Israel’s growing diplomatic isolation.
·
Despite
widespread security concerns and unfinished regional conflicts, the attack has
reinforced existing political loyalties rather than triggered a major political
transformation.
·
Opinion
polls suggest a closely contested election between Netanyahu and centrist rival
Gadi Eisenkot, with neither assured of forming the next government.
[ABS News Service/13.10.2026]
For one day last week, much
of Israel united to commemorate the anniversary of the deadliest attack in the
country’s history.
But when Israelis head to
the ballot box this month, they will be carrying sharply disparate versions of
who is to blame for failing to prevent the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led assault. Though the attack traumatized Israel, it did not
produce the kind of rage that would create a political transformation, leaving
the country more polarized than ever.
The political divide is
nowhere clearer than among the Israelis living closest to the Gaza border,
where thousands of gunmen overran communities, army bases and a music festival.
In Nahal Oz, a pastoral
kibbutz half a mile from the border, the gardens are blooming again with the
return of residents evacuated during the war. Many in this liberal bastion are
likely to vote against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his hawkish
policies, holding him responsible for failures leading to Oct. 7, said Daniel
Rahamim, 72, a spokesman for the community, who survived the assault along with
his family.
“We don’t have the
privilege of giving up on peace,” he said.
Barely eight miles away in
the working-class town of Sderot, the scene of a fierce firefight during the
Hamas-led attack, Mr. Netanyahu remains a hero. In the view of many residents,
he was let down — or even betrayed — by his security chiefs in the run-up to
Oct. 7 and on the day of the assault.
“If the left wins, we’re
done for, it will be the end of Israel,” said Shlomi Aragon, 55, referring to
anybody critical of Mr. Netanyahu.
The election, set for Oct.
27, will be the first since Hamas militants and their allies surged across the
border from Gaza, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, according to
the Israeli authorities, and taking 251 hostages.
Israel’s devastating war in
response reduced much of the Palestinian enclave to rubble and left more than
74,000 people dead, including thousands of children, according to Gaza health
officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Many Israelis view this
month’s vote as the most momentous since their country’s establishment nearly
eight decades ago, and for reasons that are not limited to Oct. 7. Mr.
Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition, Israel’s most hard-line and religiously
conservative, has undermined the country’s democratic foundations, critics say,
and left it diplomatically isolated.
Hanging over the election
most intensely are questions about the missteps in the prelude to Oct. 7 — for
the policies aimed at fostering quiet in Hamas-run Gaza in the years before the
attack and for military and intelligence lapses that left Israel vulnerable.
These failures have profoundly shaken people’s confidence in the state’s
ability to protect them.
The wars that spread from
Gaza to Lebanon and Iran in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack remain
unfinished. Three years on, Israel’s enemies are battered but not out, defying
Mr. Netanyahu’s promises of total victory.
Yet all this upheaval has
not produced the radical shift that would upend Israel’s politics.
“Like everyone, after Oct.
7, I thought there would be an earthquake,” said Tamar Hermann, a professor of
political science and expert in public opinion at the Israel Democracy
Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Jerusalem.
Instead, she said, it has
reinforced people’s previously held positions as they retreated to their
political “comfort zones.”
Like past elections, this
one, too, revolves largely around the question of “Yes Bibi or no Bibi,” Ms.
Hermann said, using Mr. Netanyahu’s nickname, and the choice between a “more
Jewish or more democratic” Israel.
The Netanyahu camp, for its
part, says Israel’s security services failed to respond to the grave threat
posed by Hamas, not the prime minister or the policies of his ruling Likud
party.
There is little argument
among most Israelis over the government’s new willingness to carry out
sustained attacks beyond the country’s borders and occupy territory in Gaza,
Syria and Lebanon. A majority of Israelis fear a repeat of Oct. 7, according to
a recent survey by the Institute for National Security Studies at
Tel Aviv University.
But that view does not
extend to confidence in Mr. Netanyahu’s leadership. Surveys indicate a split
electorate and a typically tight race with a high likelihood that neither Mr.
Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving prime minister, nor his chief rival, Gadi
Eisenkot, a centrist and former military chief, will secure an easy path toward
forming the next government.
On the Israeli side of the
Gaza border, the air of renewal masks sharp disagreements over the lessons of
Oct. 7.
During the attack, 15
people in Nahal Oz were killed, and eight residents were kidnapped, including
one who died in captivity. Most of the residents have since returned to the
kibbutz. At night, the lights of Israeli army positions visible along a ridge inside
the Gaza Strip provide some sense of security.
Mr. Rahamim,
the Nahal Oz spokesman, has a fresh tattoo on his arm bearing the date of the
attack and the words, “On the path of hope.” The image of a sunflower climbing
his forearm symbolizes a local crop — and hope, Mr. Rahamim
said, “because it always faces the sun.”
In the last national
election, held in 2022, 83 percent of the voters in Nahal Oz supported centrist
and left-leaning parties. In the upcoming election, Mr. Rahamim
said he and many neighbors will likely vote against Mr. Netanyahu again.
Mr. Netanyahu’s handling of
Gaza is not the only reason. Mr. Rahamim also pointed
to the government’s efforts at curbing the powers of the judiciary and at the
influence Mr. Netanyahu’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish allies have over him, leading
Mr. Rahamim to ask, “Will Israel be a liberal
democratic state or gradually turn into a religious or fascist state?”
Some attitudes have
hardened here, too, since the Oct. 7 attack. “If there is a consensus here in
community, it is that Hamas has to be destroyed,” Mr. Rahamim
said.
Unlike many in Mr.
Netanyahu’s camp, Mr. Rahamim also said he believes
that Israel must eventually negotiate an accommodation with moderate
Palestinian leaders. “We have an obligation to our grandchildren,” he said.
In Sderot, forests of
construction cranes rise from new neighborhoods. A serene memorial park has
replaced the police station where a deadly battle raged. More than 50 people
were killed in the city, including civilians, police officers, firefighters and
soldiers.
Sderot has historically
been a stronghold of Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party, and in the last election, 79
percent voted for the right-wing and strictly Orthodox parties that made up his
governing coalition.
Here, residents espouse
conspiracy theories spread by Mr. Netanyahu’s camp that treasonous generals and
security chiefs kept the prime minister in the dark about the start of the
Hamas attack.
Mr. Netanyahu has asserted
that Israeli security officials had chosen not to awaken him in the early
hours of Oct. 7, despite worrying signs from Gaza.. He has blocked the
establishment of an independent inquiry into what went wrong, despite a strong
public demand for one.
Mr. Aragon, who owns a
shawarma restaurant, said he narrowly escaped death on Oct. 7 when gunmen drove
behind him and started shooting. About 20 years ago, he said, his house was hit
by a rocket from Gaza that severely injured his wife.
He described Mr. Netanyahu
as “the war leader of a generation” and suggested that the Israeli air force,
if activated, could have halted the Hamas invasion within an hour. “There was a
betrayal. It’ll come out,” he said.
Living opposite the site of
the destroyed police station, Evelyn Sayada, 60, whose son-in-law survived the
assault on the music festival, said she felt constant anxiety because Hamas had
not been disarmed. But she said she would almost certainly vote for Mr.
Netanyahu, as her family has always done.
“I don’t think he failed,”
she said. “There was treason.”
One of the worst-hit Israeli border villages was Kfar
Aza, home to Yonatan Shamriz, 36. His brother, Alon, was taken hostage and
later killed accidentally by Israeli soldiers in Gaza who had
mistaken him and two other captives for militants.
Mr. Shamriz emerged from a
life of relative obscurity and founded a grass-roots movement to cultivate new
leadership and change called “Kumu!” — Hebrew for “awaken!” or “rise up!”
Faced with what they call
government efforts to blur and forget, he and Kumu organized Israel’s main Oct.
7 memorial ceremony for the last three years, embracing families of victims
from across Israeli society — left and right-wingers, religious and secular,
Jews and Arabs. Tens of thousands attended this year’s memorial, and Israel’s
leading television channels aired it live.
Mr. Shamriz now lives far
from the Gaza border, in a trailer with his wife and three young children in a
kibbutz on the coast north of Tel Aviv. He said he believes another attack like
the one on Oct. 7 is a matter of time. “If not next year, then in 10 years,” he
said.
Last year, Mr. Shamriz
announced that he was entering politics, aiming to create a new, unifying force
with a vision based on the lessons of Oct. 7. “Something young and fresh,” he
said.
In September, he quit,
concluding that Israelis weren’t ready to leave their old politics behind.
“For now, people are afraid
of change,” he said. “Everyone wants to vote for an experienced politician or
general — someone they know.”