Since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, at the end of February, more than three thousand Iranians have died, and the global economy is now at risk of heading into a recession. But unlike in the United States, where the war has hurt President Trump’s political standing, the war remains popular in Israel. (Israel, following rocket fire from Hezbollah, has also invaded southern Lebanon; eighteen-hundred Lebanese have been killed.)

To better understand the state of public opinion in Israel, I recently spoke by phone with Dahlia Scheindlin. A polling expert, Scheindlin is a policy fellow at the Century Foundation, a columnist for Haaretz, and the author of “The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel.” During our conversation, which was edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Jewish Israelis are opposed to a ceasefire despite thinking the war is not going well, the complicated political calculations facing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and why so much of the Israeli public thinks military force is the only way to solve international problems.

How would you describe the way Israelis feel about the war with Iran?

There is great disappointment in the ceasefire. I think of myself as somebody who’s pretty in touch with Israeli public opinion, but even I was surprised to find out that only about a third of Israelis support the ceasefire. And that support is primarily driven by the Arab population, because the Jewish population is particularly against it. And this combines insights from a number of surveys. The reason that was really surprising to me is that everybody was living through what felt like a nightmare for almost six weeks of war. And it’s pretty much all anybody could think about. You can’t live under the constant threat of incoming ballistic-missile fire anywhere, at any time. You have to change everything: where you go, where you don’t go, schools closed, shops closed, theatres closed, no traffic on the roads because people don’t really go out. Some people’s homes were damaged, and some people lost their lives.

But what I think we saw in the surveys was a very strong conviction that the war had not succeeded in its aims, which frankly it doesn’t take a political analyst or expert to know, because Prime Minister Netanyahu had quite clearly stated the aims of the war, and they quite clearly were not achieved.

What aims are you referring to?

The Prime Minister was conveying rather clearly, even if not always explicitly, that he wanted the Iranian regime to collapse. And the aim of Israel’s military actions against Iran has always been to destroy its nuclear-weapons program, which the Prime Minister takes for granted, and to destroy its ballistic-missile capabilities. And there was often the goal of incapacitating Iran’s “axis of resistance”—what we often call its proxy network. He didn’t talk about the last one as much this time, but it’s sort of implicit in a lot of people’s minds because he had talked about it so much in the past, and because Hezbollah joined the war very quickly, probably at Iran’s request, which gave Israel the excuse it needed to unleash a much more severe assault against Hezbollah. None of these aims have been achieved.

Looking at a recent U.S. public opinion poll, I noticed that the ceasefire was popular while the war is not. I imagine many Americans would like the war to stop because they think it is failing. You seem to be saying that Israel has also not achieved its aims but that people want the war to continue at a similar or greater intensity. Is that accurate?

It’s as accurate as I can say. I haven’t had time to do focus groups and really find out what’s behind this. It’s a completely new situation. But the way I see it is that it is a bind for Netanyahu because we already saw that, after one month of the war, support for it was falling in Israel. It was still very high. Remember, the war started with practically a consensus among the Jewish population. The average level of support from the Israeli population over all was over eighty per cent because the Arab population supported it at much lower rates. But the Jewish population had a sweeping consensus of over ninety per cent support in the first two weeks.

But, by the end of a month, that support was declining. Even among Israeli Jews, it was below eighty per cent. And the over-all weighted average was only about two-thirds.

When you say weighted average, you mean the whole population, Jewish and Muslim and everyone else?

Yeah, I use those technical terms only because the Jewish and the Palestinian citizens of Israel are so different on this issue. If there were minor variations, I would just say “Israelis.”

So you’re saying that the popularity of the war is falling, perhaps as a reflection of the war not being successful, but at the same time, support is still pretty high and most people don’t want a ceasefire?

Exactly. That’s what I’m calling Netanyahu’s bind, because, on the one hand, he was losing support for the war, and it also was not reflecting well on him. Personally, he got no political boost—not him, not his party, not his government. There was a very, very slight lift for his party in the beginning, but not for his coalition. And then, by the fourth week, he wasn’t doing well.

Their solution was to at least continue the war because maybe it would achieve its goals. It is almost as if Israelis don’t think or know about any other option besides war for how to achieve political or strategic security aims, because there has been a complete delegitimation and undermining of diplomacy to the point where most Israelis don’t even think that it exists.

So, if you are Netanyahu, you are in a bind. If you’re just some other Israeli politician and you want to be a leader, you could try to transform that attitude by relegitimating diplomacy or some other vision, whatever it may be. But that would take leadership, that would take courage, that would take bold vision, that would take somebody who is willing to take political criticism for the sake of standing by his or her convictions. And, so far, we don’t have any political leaders who have suggested anything like an alternative path on Iran.

How is Netanyahu’s coalition polling in the upcoming election, and who are his main opponents likely to be?

The election is probably going to be in October. Ever since October 7th, there were expectations that it would be held early, that the government couldn’t survive, but the government did survive, and it basically lasted its term. It passed a budget a few weeks ago, and with the war in Iran, it was able to pause the one lingering toxic issue that might have collapsed the government, which had to do with drafting the ultra-Orthodox, who have a long-term exemption from Army service.

But what we have seen is that this government, by contrast to most elected governments, did not have a grace period. Within a few weeks of this particular coalition being formed in December, 2022, by mid-January, they had lost their majority in polls and never regained it. And, unlike most other countries in wartime that have been attacked, there was no rallying effect for the government after October 7th. In fact, there was an anti-rally. Support for the government plunged, as did support for Netanyahu and support for his party. But that started to change about six months later. And so, by mid-2024, the government was polling at the strength that it had before October 7th. So not great, not a majority, but it recovered the major hit that it took after October 7th, and that’s where it has stayed. And what’s remarkable is that almost nothing has happened to actually show any real upward trajectory for the government to get what it would need in terms of parliamentary seats in the next election.

I think the conventional wisdom, at least in the American press, is that the reason Netanyahu recovered a little bit of support in 2024 is that he had political success attacking regional adversaries, which actually may have made him think that attacking Iran would be popular. Is that your sense?

That is pretty much what I wrote at the time. And that’s what cemented his return. I think Israelis appreciate when they have a government that seems to take back the initiative on military and security-related things, and show the Middle East that it’s a strong country. There is a very widespread and extremely crude portrait of the Middle East as a place that only understands force. And, to survive in this metaphoric jungle, you have to show your strength. That’s the only way to live and survive, and to prove that you can’t be defeated, because Israelis will still tell you that they are surrounded by enemies who want to wipe them off the face of the earth. And, while Iran has given them plenty of reasons, both material and symbolic, to think that way, there are many other countries in the Middle East that have given them every reason not to think that way, but the attitude still holds that you have to show your military strength. Israel taking the initiative, taking matters into its own hands, and not waiting to be responsive is considered the best possible approach.

Who is he likely to run against?

His main competitors are various people from what Israelis view as the moderate right or center right. I just call it the anti-Netanyahu right, because it’s a right wing that includes people who, to Israelis, are more centrist and came out of the security establishment, like Gadi Eisenkot, the former chief of the general staff. He only formed his party recently, but he’s on the rise in the Israeli political system. He’s coming close in the polls to Naftali Bennett, a former Prime Minister, who started out to the right of Netanyahu. He was Prime Minister for about a year from mid-2021 to mid-2022. And, even though he comes from the far right and he himself represented religious-Jewish Israelis, now he’s seen as part of that anti-Netanyahu right, because of his criticism of the Prime Minister. But you can’t really call him center right because he represents much firmer right-wing positions. Then there are the leaders of medium-sized parties like Avigdor Lieberman, who’s also a stalwart secular right-winger, actually a Netanyahu protégé, who’s been the head of his own party since 1999.

But all of these people are in the same political camp. None of these figures have a clearly formed world view about how they would manage Israel’s geostrategic relations or the fact that Palestinians have been fighting for self-determination, and they don’t have any particular clear-eyed, fully developed world view or policy of what they would do on those issues, including with Iran. Everybody agrees that Iran is a terrible threat to Israel which backs nonstate militias that have attacked Israel militarily. And that Iran itself is a dangerous actor that destabilizes the Middle East and talks about threatening Israel and is definitely developing nuclear power beyond civilian use at some level and has a very advanced ballistic-missile program. And so all they say is that yes, of course, they support the war.

No Jewish politician is going to go against that public opinion, so they’re basically criticizing Netanyahu for not doing it better or for going into it without knowing how to achieve the goals. The most critical or somewhat oppositional viewpoint you can get is from Yair Golan, who’s the head of a party that Israelis view as left wing, which is called the Democrats. And he has said, Well, he should have translated the military and battlefield successes into diplomatic successes. But what those diplomatic successes might look like is unknown because he isn’t saying. It never gets to the stage of a properly developed world view that actually opposes what Netanyahu’s calling for.

We saw Trump intervene in the Hungarian election, trying to get his guy over the top. I imagine Trump is going to want Netanyahu to win later this year. To what degree is Netanyahu going to rely on Trump to win reëlection? And to what degree is Trump still popular in Israel?

We’re really still seeing the answer to that question evolve as we speak. Trump enjoyed absolutely dizzying levels of popularity with Israeli Jews going back to his first term, where he moved the Embassy to Jerusalem and recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights and came up with a peace plan that was very generous to Israel and not really much of a peace plan with relation to the Palestinians. So people loved him then. And they were wild about Trump when he essentially pressured Netanyahu into a ceasefire with Gaza that led to the release of more hostages in January, 2025.

So Trump was incredibly popular, wildly popular. And Netanyahu has depended on him since long before any of this. There were billboards towering over the highways in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv showing Netanyahu shaking Trump’s hand and saying that Netanyahu is in a different league on foreign relations than anybody else. He also had billboards made up with him and Narendra Modi, and him and Vladimir Putin, by the way. But he clearly depended on that wonderful adulation for Trump, but I don’t know where it’s going now.

And the reason I say that is because of what I consider to be pretty extraordinary levels of disappointment with the current ceasefire, which everybody knows was Trump’s initiative and essentially forced to some extent on Netanyahu. And I don’t know how that’s going to reverberate for Trump. I’ve been having inquiries from very shrewd longtime observers of Israeli politics asking me if Trump is going to eventually be a liability for Netanyahu. I think at this point that might be going too far, because, again, the starting point of Israeli support for Trump was so high but I can’t say with full confidence that Trump is going to be the trump card, so to speak, for Netanyahu to take the next election, especially because Netanyahu’s ratings are so stubbornly stuck where I mentioned before.

It certainly seems like Netanyahu has had mediocre polls before, and he has still managed to win election after election. How has he done so?

The polls were only really wrong in 2015. But remember that Israel has a very, very fragmented political system, a coalition-building system. No party has ever got a majority, and you generally have between four and eight parties in any given coalition to make that majority of sixty-one seats or more out of a hundred and twenty parliamentary seats. And Netanyahu is the most experienced and the savviest of all Israeli politicians at engineering different constellations of parties to help him get a majority, whether or not the parties of this original coalition can make sixty-one in the elections themselves.

And he does that through two mechanisms. One is that he sometimes manages to help reëngineer party constellations before the elections, by knowing which parties will maximize right-wing votes if they merge or break up. So there’s that possibility, of trying to reëngineer those parties or cajole the leaders into doing what he thinks is the right thing before the elections. And the other thing he’s very good at is getting parties to change their coalition options and loyalties after the elections. So he has three routes to winning. One is an outright win for the current coalition, which seems pretty unlikely right now, based on all credible polling for almost two years. But the other two options are certainly possible scenarios. Are they likely? Hard to say, but he has three different paths for him to win and an opposition that is very heavily fragmented, and doesn’t really like each other.

And a number of those opposition parties, including the ones we talked about before, have openly promised the Israeli public that they would never go into a coalition with parties representing Palestinian citizens of Israel. They’re really locking themselves into, frankly, a likely possibility that they won’t be able to form a coalition even if all the opposition parties together have sixty-five or seventy seats. If they’re not going to go into a coalition with Arab parties, it’s going to be much harder because very few polls give the Zionist opposition parties a majority of sixty-one out of a hundred and twenty.

When you think about the state of public opinion in Israel right now, does it seem like the country has been consistently moving to the right for the past twenty-five years? Or does it feel like October 7th was a real break that pushed things further right?

It is the first. People have been moving to the right in various ways and by various definitions since the collapse of the negotiations at Camp David and the second intifada. That was a major shift to the right, but then there is the much more significant shift to the right, and especially the populist right, by which I mean the political style we know about in the form of Trump being the most extreme version. Netanyahu is a very significant version of this, and was from 2009, when he came back into power. And that’s when you start to see, O.K., there was one sort of final last gasp at negotiations with the Palestinians, but we all knew that he didn’t ever want that to come to fruition.

And from that time on, the percentage of the Israeli population that defined themselves as right-wing started to accelerate. It was already moving to the right. But now it was also the populist right, in terms of attacks on democratic institutions in Israel and the rule of law, legitimating corruption, advancing legislation to undermine civil liberties and human rights, demonizing Palestinian citizens and left-wingers, demonizing the press and civil society—all those things fundamentally accelerated. And then, of course, the series of wars with Hamas and Gaza, where every war led Israelis to show less trust in the idea of negotiations, until there was practically nothing left to talk about because there were no negotiations. And support for the two-state solution, of course, was collapsing throughout this time.

There’s no question, just by the numbers alone, that October 7th meant the continuation of processes long under way. And the changes that we saw after October 7th were a matter of really very small degrees, and a continuation of that process. There was no U-turn at all on the part of Israeli society. This was absolutely consistent. Having said that, certain qualitative indicators became worse. We never heard about people talking about rebuilding settlements in Gaza or annexing Gaza until after October 7th. So the positions that “right wing” came to stand for became much more extreme. And there were times after October 7th when you had over fifty per cent of Israeli Jews who supported resettlement in Gaza, for example. But in terms of the general direction, it is absolutely continuity.♦