The October 27 election in Israel will be among the most consequential in its 78-year history. It will be the first general election after the terrorist massacre of October 7 [2023] and the retaliatory destruction of Gaza, and it could end up determining the course of the war in Iran, with fundamental consequences for the Middle Eastern region. At stake is not only the political future of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving leader, but also, many believe, the future of Israeli democracy and Israel’s place in a world in which it is more isolated today than ever before.
As Israel heads into this pivotal election, I think back on my years there from 2018 to 2021 and wonder: did the country change, or did the conversation about it? The tech hub and thriving intellectual community I knew now seems to have been overwhelmed by divisions and a loss of faith in the very institutions I took the most pride in talking about. Data analysis by researchers at my alma mater, Tel Aviv University, shows almost 270,000 Israelis left the country in the last three years. Emigration—including by many highly skilled and high income-earning individuals—is now higher than immigration into Israel, a trend that is attributed to insecurity after October 7 and the Gaza war, and concern over the weakening international support for the country.
When I went to Israel in 2018, the country’s institutions were widely trusted. The courts and legal gatekeepers were seen as legitimate arbiters whose rulings were widely accepted, the intelligence community was respected and admired, and the nation’s politics seemed largely stable.
Cracks in the coalition government led by Netanyahu—who had been Prime Minister since 2009—appeared in November 2018, when Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman resigned in protest against an Egyptian-mediated ceasefire agreement with Hamas in Gaza.
The withdrawal of Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party reduced Netanyahu’s Likud coalition to a one-seat majority in the 120-member Knesset, and ultimately led to the first of four back-to-back elections between April 2019 and March 2021. With each of these elections, the political instability deepened, and conspiracy theories about the police, law enforcement, and the courts spread further.
Netanyahu managed to hang on to power until June 2021, when the right-wing Yamina government led by Naftali Bennett took office. After this government collapsed within a year, Yair Lapid became prime minister in July 2022, and a fifth election in four years followed that November.
On December 29, 2022, Netanyahu returned to lead what was widely described as the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, with far-right extremist political figures Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich as national security minister and finance minister with additional authority over civil affairs in the West Bank respectively.
On January 4, 2023, Justice Minister Yariv Levin unveiled the government’s plan to overhaul the judiciary to curb the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review and rebalance authority towards the legislative and executive branches of government. It was argued that an unelected court had accumulated too much power and needed to be answerable to voters, but critics saw in the proposed reform an attempt by the prime minister, in the middle of a criminal trial for alleged bribery and fraud, to reshape the courts.
On January 7, 2023, 20,000 people marched in Tel Aviv to oppose the government’s agenda, including the attempt to weaken the courts. In February, as the judicial reform bills advanced through the Knesset, the protests snowballed into one of the biggest in Israel’s history, with days of national disruption. Reservists, including air force pilots and cyber and intelligence personnel, said they would stop volunteering for duty, and business leaders and former security chiefs warned against the plan.
On July 24, 2023, the coalition passed a bill removing the Supreme Court’s power to declare government decisions “unreasonable”, and the protests surged again. The street demonstrations largely stalled after the Hamas attack of October 7 and, on January 1, 2024, a narrow majority in the Supreme Court struck down the law saying it would severely damage Israeli democracy.
Much of Israeli and Jewish historiography will likely treat October 7 as the watershed moment that shattered the belief in Israel’s ability to ensure the safety and security of its citizens. Failures of the state, including failures of intelligence, military doctrine, and the political leadership, will be debated. Despite several reports of advance warnings, Netanyahu has repeatedly refused to accept personal or political responsibility for the intelligence and security failures that led to the massacre.
Most Arab and Palestinian historians will probably place the day within a longer arc: the Nakba, or Catastrophe, in which at least 750,000 Palestinian Arabs were ethnically cleansed between 1947 and 1949, the violence and aggressive settler activity in the West Bank, and the blockade and occupation of the Gaza Strip. They will also give weight to what came after October 7—including the scale of destruction in Gaza, the debate over whether it amounted to genocide, and the perceived silence of other countries in the region and most of the wider world.
Many other scholars of West Asia and international relations and strategic affairs will likely focus on how the attack reshaped Arab-Israeli ‘normalization’ after the Abraham Accords of late 2020, and on the spillover effects as the war widened to include Iran and Lebanon. Many will also document rising anti-semitism and the shifts in public opinion on Israel around the world, including in the United States.
But historians will also need to write about the ways in which October 7 tested the social fabric of Israel. The Hamas raid into southern Israel had been preceded by months of street protests against the government, so a full account will need to cover both the surge of solidarity that followed the attack and the divisions that returned. The annual Israeli Democracy Index (IDI) published by the Jerusalem-based Israel Democracy Institute that tracks the perception of the public with regard to Israeli democracy, social cohesion, and trust in the state, offers some valuable insights.
The 2023 Index, published in March 2024 and based on a survey conducted in June 2023, before the attack by Hamas, recorded deep scepticism towards the government and the Knesset, and high trust in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and local municipalities.
By December 2023, two months after the attacks, the share of respondents saying democratic rule was in grave danger had fallen from 58.5% to 51%, which is consistent with a wartime rally. But the 2024 Index, published in December 2024, recorded a fall in trust in the police to 37%, and the president of the Israel Democracy Institute described the sharp decline in public trust in government agencies and democratic institutions as a powerful warning signal.
National cohesion peaked after October 7 and then declined, while the Right-Left divide deepened social tension. Among Arab citizens, the share of those who felt part of the State of Israel and its problems fell from 66% to 59%, and about two-thirds of both Jewish and Arab respondents said civil society organizations served Israeli society better than state institutions.
The 2025 Index, published in December 2025, largely mirrored the mood of the previous edition: assessments of the country’s overall situation were somewhat more positive, but the ratings of Israeli democracy stayed low, and the persistent Right-Left divide was seen as the sharpest indicator of social tensions.
The data tell the recent story of Israel’s institutions. The founding institutions of the state—the Knesset, courts, police, civil service, and above all the IDF—had long carried a double burden: they were meant to protect a country that saw itself as permanently under threat, as well as to hold a diverse, often divided, society together. October 7 struck at the institution that commanded the most confidence, and the failures of intelligence, readiness, and response raised hard questions about the security establishment as well as the political leadership.
The later findings suggest the repercussions travelled well beyond the security sphere. The finding that two-thirds of both Jewish and Arab respondents believed civil society served the public better than the state is telling: volunteer groups and local networks were widely reported to have stepped in where the state was slow. Historians and analysts of the future will assess whether that was a temporary improvisation or a lasting change in the relationship between the Israeli state and its citizens.
Those analyses will draw on the answers to several questions that are currently open: who bears responsibility for October 7, what kind of official inquiry should examine the failures, and whether the erosion of trust reflects a short-term shock or a deeper crisis that predates the attack and was accelerated by it. It is significant that finding the answers to many of these questions constitutes the principal campaign plank of Gadi Eisenkot, the former chief of the IDF and the leading candidate against Netanyahu in the October 27 general election.
Three years after October 7, the attacks and their aftermath have only deepened the existing divisions between Right and Left, Jewish and Arab, and citizen and state in Israel. Whoever forms the new government will inherit a deeply divided society, and whether the next government can answer the open questions about October 7, close the gaps in the record, and begin to repair trust among Israelis may matter as much to the final verdict as anything that happened on the day.
So, to return to my opening question, I think both things are true: the country has changed, and so has the way Israelis talk about it—and the second change may be the harder one to reverse.
