Israel has once again put aside its social and political divisions to unite in support of. In a country in which armed conflicts are separated between “avoidable” and “inevitable”, the week of bombings with the United States to overthrow the Iranian regime is clearly perceived among the latter, according to public statements (it is supported by all the Jewish parties in Parliament without exception), two opinion polls and the atmosphere in the streets. The display of military superiority and intelligence that the killing on February 28 entailed has also left a certain feeling of euphoria. A survey released this Wednesday by the Israel Institute for Democracy analysis center places support among the Jewish majority for the new war campaign at 93%. Another, from the Institute of National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, at 91%.
The phenomenon is not new. Beyond the famous “flag effect”, the Israeli population has been notably supporting Netanyahu’s war decisions in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria since the Hamas attack in October 2023, whether they vote for him or not. Also in this case, in which the operation does not respond to a previous attack.
A series of national consensuses transcend ideologies. The main one is that Tehran is the definitive enemy to defeat, a kind of incarnation of evil and existential threat. And the head of the octopus that finances and arms its tentacles: loyal militias in the region that fight Israel, in a common simile here.
Another consensus is that Israel could not miss the train of having a president in the White House, Donald Trump, willing to embark on such a task, and the Iranian regime, with few precedents since the Islamic revolution of 1979.
It has a lot to do with the strategic, but also psychological, transformation produced in Israel by the 1,200 deaths from the Hamas attack, which the military and political establishment considered “deterred” and more concerned with preserving power in Gaza than with planning a massive coup.
Israel—with the most powerful army in the Middle East and one of the few in the world with nuclear weapons—no longer looks at other people’s intentions, but at their capabilities, to eliminate them, in a kind of endless race. For this reason, it occupies more territory every day (its troops), destroyed the Syrian army, taking advantage of the fall of the dictator Bashar al Assad and considers Iran’s ballistic missile program a threat, even though Israel also has one and did not generate concern in the international community about its nuclear program.
These are again days of omnipresent flags on social networks and public spaces. At the entrance to Tel Aviv, a sign encourages “flying the national flag.” Another shows a lion roaring next to the flags of Israel and the United States and the most repeated slogan during the invasion of Gaza: “Together we will win.” It alludes to The Lion’s Roar, the name in Israel of the operation that the United States calls Epic Fury.
While the United States, the other architect of the war adventure, debates the legality of the attack, Israel has become a social and political group. Television debates have been filled with the word “historical” and interviews with generals. They focus on the technical aspects, the victims themselves or the possible scenarios, without addressing the need for war, because the answer is taken for granted, in a kind of echo chamber with hardly any discordant voices.
There aren’t many either. Two weeks before the attack against Iran, when the information revolved around whether the United States would launch it alone or with Israel, television channel 12 measured its social support. 59% (including 58% who voted for opposition parties in the last elections) wanted Israel to participate from the beginning. 29% were opposed and 12% were undecided.
The start of the operation – with up to 50 fighters dropping their ammunition on Khamenei’s location, without reporting a single casualty of their own – has significantly raised those percentages. In the survey by the Israel Democracy Institute after the start of the war campaign, 74% of the Israeli Jews surveyed chose the answer: “I strongly support it.” Only 1% chose the opposite option: firm rejection. In a typical contrast, support is scarce (26%) among Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, a fifth of the country’s population.
This is the line of opinions gathered these days in the three main cities, which have different population profiles: Jerusalem (the one that prays, according to a popular division in the country), Tel Aviv (the one that enjoys) and Haifa, the one that works.
In the first, Yosef hoped that the Israeli pilots would destroy the Iranian regime just as King Saul exterminated Amalek, the enemy nation of the Israelites in the biblical story. “Honestly, I don’t care what I went through in Iran,” he noted.
In Tel Aviv, Dalia, 56, sometimes disagrees with Netanyahu’s policies, but sees this war as vital, because it “goes beyond” the rivalry between Israel and Iran to be part of a broader battle “between the enlightened and democratic world and the world of murderous Islamic fundamentalism.”
In Haifa, at 80 years old, Danny placed himself “in the 1%” (“don’t forget,” he said when saying goodbye) of Israelis who oppose this war. Because he sees Netanyahu’s electoral interests behind him and because, he explained, he has fought in four (the first, the Six-Day War of 1967) and is very clear that “no one wins in a war.” “Even if you win, they also hurt you. Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah… They cannot be completely defeated because they are religious fanatics. Just like our Jewish religious fanatics. He is from Shlomi, a town very close to Lebanon, and since there is no public transportation due to the situation, he lives during the week in the Haifa hotel to which he was evacuated before the first Hezbollah projectiles, in October 2023.
The entire political spectrum
Support within the Jewish majority does not vary substantially between those who define themselves as left-wing (76%), center-based (93%) or right-wing (97%). 57% consider that it should continue, however long it lasts, until the regime is overthrown. All agree on the direction of the ship, but not so much on who should take the helm: only 40% of Jewish respondents trust that Netanyahu will direct the operation well.
This was pointed out last Wednesday by Sima Kadmon, political commentator of Yediot Aharonot: “I don’t know if this war benefits us and if the change we all long for might never come. I don’t know if it could have ended any other way. [Pero] There is something I do know: I do not trust them, in our Government. “A country can enlist, fight and pay the price if it is clear that whoever leads it does not make personal calculations, is not aware of the political calendar or calculates his own survival.”
There is no alternative political voice, whatever its ideology, among the Jewish parties that hold 110 of the 120 seats in the Knesset. Yair Lapid, the opposition leader and former prime minister who describes himself as Netanyahu’s “fiercest political rival,” has said that he does not remember “such a consensus” on an issue. “There is no coalition or opposition until the threat is eliminated, only one people and the Israel Defense Forces, with all of us supporting them,” he declared as the bombing began. “I have never felt more proud to be Israeli,” said former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Netanyahu’s main competitor, the next day. He left a meeting with the leader “knowing that Israel is doing the right thing for the future of our children.”
Even the voice considered the most progressive in the Jewish political arc (Yair Golan, a general who leads the union between the historic Labor party and a party to its left, Meretz) has limited himself to showing his “full support” for the army, which “operates with firmness and professionalism,” and asking that the war “conclude with a clear strategic decision: eliminate the Iranian threat in a way that strengthens Israel’s security in the long term.”
The same week that the police watched from afar as hundreds of people celebrated together in costumes the Jewish holiday of Purim, the agents dispersed an anti-war protest of about 20 people in Tel Aviv. They exceeded the maximum of 10 set by the army.
Victoria total
maybe even in summer. And Netanyahu’s objective is to arrive having rewritten October 7, 2023: from a political and military blunder for which to be held accountable at the beginning of a redemptive war against the Iranian axis, demolishing pieces (Hamas, Hezbollah…) until reaching the big game (Iran) and changing the Middle East forever.
It would also be the closest thing to the “total triumph” that he promised, and did not achieve, in Gaza, where he has left 72,000 dead, an unprecedented devastation and his country accused of genocide before international justice, but the Hamas Government remains in control of almost half of the Strip. In reality, Israelis now crave the same thing that sold them just eight months earlier. After the previous war with Iran, he spoke of a “historic victory” for generations that has “removed the sword” that hung over their heads.
Until now, the war had been benefiting him electorally. In 2024, his party, the Likud, regained (16 months later) first place in the polls after Israel killed Iranians in Damascus; to the leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniye, in the middle of Tehran; and Hezbollah’s number two, Fuad Shukr, in Beirut.
But the polls have continued without predicting a repeat of his coalition with ultra-nationalists and ultra-Orthodox, the most right-wing in the history of the country. In fact, the opposition has been obtaining more vote expectations, although without the ability to govern without Arab support. Days before the attack on Iran, a newspaper poll Maariv He even gave the opposition up to 60 deputies, one of the majority in the Knesset. The parties in the ruling coalition fell from 63 to 50.
The attack on Iran, on this occasion, does not seem to have turned any corner. The survey published this Friday by the newspaper Maariv He only gives his party one more deputy. The opposition continues to be close to the majority, with 59. Another from the newspaper Zman Israel continues to give more seats to the opposition (57) than to the coalition (53).
Netanyahu’s figure still suffers from several blows, accused in three legal cases (for which Trump) and needing to approve the Budgets with partners more focused on the elections than on the stability of the coalition. There is also the growing demand that he assume political responsibility for the fiasco of the Hamas attack, the deadliest day for the country. He generated a scandal by trying to remove the word “massacre” from a law that commemorated it.
