Four in five Israelis tell pollsters that the suffering of Gaza civilians shouldn’t change how Israel fights the war? Really?
This is a segment from The “Opinions, Opinions, Opinions!” Edition.
And now it’s time for our third poll’ish discussion about what we think about us and about them.
It’s telling, I think, that there are no Poles in Israel that I’ve heard of measuring support for the war.
Maybe this is because Polesters assume that most everyone obviously supports the war, or at the very least, that not too many people would admit to a Polester that they don’t.
But the Poles must go on turning up all sorts of interesting things as they do, like the intriguing finding that these days, 75% of ultra-Orthodox or Haredi Jews report that they feel “part of the Israeli story” and 32% favor increasing Haredi participation in broader Israeli society, and 29% now favor drafting Haredi men into the army, which is amazing because before this war, I bet that that number would have been one-tenth as big.
A different poll shows that 81% of reservists say that their morale is high or very high.
Still another poll shows that as a result of this war, most Israelis feel that the role of women in combat units should be further expanded.
Still another poll reports that 36% of Israeli Jews reported feeling closer to religion because of the war, while 10% reported moving away from religion, which raises, for me anyway, all sorts of questions.
It’s all fascinating, and there’s lots more where that came from, but I want to focus on two findings in two recent Israel Democracy Institute War in Gaza surveys, Survey No.
6 and Survey No.
7, for those of you who are following the podcast at home with the Box Score.
Each of these findings surprised and confused me.
The first is that 81% of Israeli Jews do not think that we need, quote, “to consider the suffering of civilian Palestinian population in Gaza when planning the continuation of the fighting there.
” At least we don’t need to consider it very much.
40% say that we don’t need to consider it at all.
41% say we don’t need to consider it very much.
This is compared with just 10% of Arab Israelis who hold those same feelings.
What does this mean and what explains it?
The second finding that confuses me is that a month and a half into the war, which is kind of the end of November, Israelis’ optimism about the future of national security had gone up by more than 10 points from just before the war, increasing from 39% to 48.
5%.
At the same time, our optimism about the future of democratic rule in Israel increased over that same period with the war, in the first month and a half of the war, by 13%, from 36% to 49%.
And this surprised me because we’re so down in the dumps, seemingly, now, and yet these are kind of optimistic findings.
So, Alison, let’s start with the first of these two findings.
What does it say about us Israeli Jews and our state of mind that 81% of us think that the generals leaning over the maps don’t need to pay all that much attention to the safety of civilians in Gaza, many thousands of whom have already died and more than a million of whom have been forced to flee their homes, which may or may not be there when they can finally return?
Listen, I think it’s horrible and terrible and wrong and also completely understandable because in the really tragic tit for tat going on, it’s clear that the people in Gaza, or at least their leaders, and then if you read our previous poll, leaders who are heavily supported by their people in Gaza, committed horrible, horrible acts against Israeli Jews and clearly not only don’t regret it, but support it.
I’m asked all the time to do these commentaries on foreign stations, “Don’t Israelis care?
Why don’t they care?
” The humanitarian, and I say, “Israelis hear the word humanitarian and they think of their hostages, and they think of these people that they don’t know how they’re living and being pawns in a cruel game, and it is very hard for them to work up any kind of empathy, human feeling, suffering about another side that they feel like has committed and is continuing to commit non-humanitarian atrocities against them.
” So I know it’s all very basic and brutal and barbaric and tribal, but for me, that’s the root cause of the lack of humanitarian feeling towards the suffering civilians in Gaza.
Yeah, I would say that the empathy function in our hearts and our minds has been turned off.
My sister-in-law, my brother went to visit Kfar Azza this week, she’s the daughter of Holocaust survivors.
She said, “It’s another Shoah.
” The Palestinians murdered Hamas and murdered Jews in a way that makes us feel violated, and I think all Israelis feel violated and all Israelis have feelings of helplessness.
I mean, the stories, despite the stories of heroism, of self-sacrifice, so many of the victims were slaughtered when they were utterly helpless to resist, despite our having an army which is supposed to be prepared and ready to counter these things, which didn’t come through in this case for so many, many hours.
I think that sense of helplessness and powerlessness, of feeling violated, that combines with an experience that nobody outside of Israel is having right now, which is, and my friend Yossi Klein-Alevi, I think, explained it very, very succinctly.
He said, “We are reliving October 7th every single day.
We are seeing more videos on the news every single day about somebody who was killed or somebody who sacrificed their life to save people or committed some act of amazing heroism and who survived, and added to that now are the stories every day of soldiers who have been killed.
” And so we see more pain, more suffering, more families in their misery.
So for us, every single person, every hostage has a face and a name plastered all over the country and all over the world, and every soldier has a face and a name.
The Palestinian victims are faceless.
We’re not seeing the footage that’s being shown in the rest of the world of dead Palestinians or dead Palestinian children.
We’re seeing rubble, by and large.
And because the media has mostly covered, the global media is covering the humanitarian disaster on the Palestinian side, they’re not covering the war.
They’re covering the war very minimally, maybe because they don’t have any footage.
They can’t get footage of Hamas popping out of tunnels and either getting shot or disappearing back into the tunnel again.
So they can’t show anything.
So they just keep showing the same images over and over again, which should be heart-rending.
But for us, we’re just very, very wrapped up in our own loss, which is, for us, is massive.
Yeah, so again, I have the same question about this, of whether it’s measuring something or about what people really feel in some deep way that is going to be consistent, that’s going to remain over time, or whether it’s really just telling us something about this moment in the war.
And I don’t know the answer to that.
I think both.
Isn’t it both?
It’s not just of this moment in the war, but there are going to be implications for how people feel moving forward.
And it explains what we talked about in the last segment, about why Palestinians somehow seem to be supporting what Hamas did, especially on the West Bank, but also in Gaza.
The people are wrapped up in their own pain, their own loss.
And we are also, most Israelis are buying in to the army’s claim and the government’s claim that we’re going to destroy Hamas, that at the end of this, it will all prove to have been worth it.
At the end of this, there won’t be a Hamas anymore.
And ultimately the world will thank us and say, “Oh, that was a terrible price that you paid or the Palestinians paid, but we’re all going to be better off for this.
” See, you are exactly right about that without question, but it doesn’t really explain why you would tell someone that we don’t need to take into account the little kids and the adults who are getting killed.
Because you don’t want to put the restraints on the soldiers.
You don’t want to put them more at risk.
Because our messaging is that Hamas is standing behind these women and children.
Do we need to get through these women and children in order to destroy Hamas?
We’re being told this every single day by our government.
And so people answer the yes.
They think it is worth it to go through, quote unquote, the women and children and uninvolved civilians in order to achieve the goal of, quote unquote, destroying Hamas.
And had this not been such a horrific act on October 7th, had it not been of the scale and barbarity that it was, and were there not still 130, give or take, hostages that we’re all worrying about every day, had none of those things been the case, had this been just a more routine Hamas attack, I think there would be much more empathy on our side in saying, “No, we can’t justify killing these numbers of people for what they did to us or for shooting rockets at us,” which very rarely actually kills anybody on our side.
But this is unprecedented.
And we’re still very, very much living every day.
Yeah.
You can say this has to be done.
You can say in the long run, even the Palestinians will be better off because of it.
I mean, I don’t know that the IDF is going to succeed in rooting out Hamas.
I don’t know who is going to be better off, if anyone, as a result of this.
But you can believe that without saying that the deaths of civilians in Gaza are something that we can ignore at this moment.
This feels very different to me than, I don’t know if we would have seen this— Ignore or justify.
Ignore or justify.
It says that they do not need to take into consideration the, I think, “L’yotruchim liitrachev” in the Hebrew, these civilian attacks.
And I think in the past, part of our self-image was always that we do take into account— And we are now, by the way.
We actually are doing a lot of things to prevent civilian deaths, even though maybe we could have done a lot more things to prevent more civilian deaths.
But if we wanted to kill as many people as possible, there’d be a lot more dead people there.
And if we just were thoughtless about it, again, a lot more civilians would have been killed.
But, yes, I think people are—it’s responding to the messaging from the right and the extreme right over the past decade, which is, you know, we’re putting soldiers at risk by requiring them to adhere to humanitarian standards and open fire regulations.
Of course, we just had this horrific, horrific tragedy of killing three hostages because they weren’t following our own regulations.
So there’s a price to be paid for all these things.
So if what the pollster—if I was approached by the pollster, and if what the pollster was essentially telling me as a subtext is, “How many extra degrees of danger are you willing to have your particular son suffer or experience in order to save civilian lives?
” I guess then I can see how— Then the answer would be zero.
Right.
It used to be a little bit.
I think the answer now is none.
I guess that might be true even for me.
And yet we’re optimistic about our democracy and our security all of a sudden.
So what do you make of that?
OK.
I make of that absolutely the ramifications of the whole judicial reform overhaul coup thing, you know, dissolving into the ether on October 7th.
And total divisiveness transformed into relative unity on the subject of having to fight this war.
And so therefore, that’s like one of the findings that makes some logical sense to me, that people are no longer feeling divided over the judicial overhaul.
They’re feeling united over the cause of the war and therefore feeling more optimistic that there will be democracy.
And also, you know, the practical implications that, you know, after this has happened and after he is so much weaker, there is no way that Netanyahu—I shouldn’t say no way, I should knock on wood—can continue to go full force for this kind of overhaul and transformation in Israeli democracy or lack thereof that he was pursuing before.
Right.
And that’s been replaced by a sense of solidarity, which had been so lacking for the year before.
We felt like the society was being ripped apart, and now we’ve really all come together.
And to support your other point, you know, I’ve been looking at polls for seven weeks already, and it’s very consistent.
Seventy to seventy-five percent of Israelis think Netanyahu has to resign immediately after the war.
Seventy to seventy-five percent of Israelis want to go to new elections right after the war.
So some of the people—and again, it’s only up to fifty percent, it’s not a majority of Israelis who are saying they’re more confident about their democracy, it just jumped from thirty-something to forty-nine percent, I think, in the poll.
But some of those people are people who are waiting for that day already, who are thinking about the next government that’s going to come in afterwards.
I’m sure not all Israelis are thinking about that, but certainly some of them, when they answer that question, I think have that in mind.
One of the things that considering these findings led me to realize with a start that I believed is that I truly believe that the country is in better shape now, is going to be a better country going forward than it was leading up to October 7th, including in some profound ways that there is this shift that we have seen that is for the better.
And then as soon as I find myself thinking something like that, then, you know, overwhelmed with a sense of tragic guilt that I’m thinking, “Oh, you know, this—” In the history books, this may end up being like a turning point for the better.
It may end up seeming like people may, in twenty-five years, learn in eighth grade that this was a good thing.
And I immediately think of Inbar Hayman and all the people who were killed and feel like, how can you think that?
But I’m not entirely sure it’s not true.
Well, it’s like the kind of conversations that we have now about World War II, right?
Certain battles or certain turning points being quote-unquote a good thing, and aren’t we glad that happened and didn’t that really turn the tide?
And if you were there, you know, in the time and place and knew the people whose lives were lost, then there’s no way you could see it as a good thing.
And nobody would have wanted this to be the way to bring us back together.
But the fact that we did come back together and immediately came back together is reassuring.
