What Israelis actually think about starvation in Gaza

How do Israelis feel about the increasingly horrifying crimes their government is committing in Gaza?

This is one of the key questions going forward. Israel is a (teetering) democracy with elections scheduled for next year. The public’s attitudes could — by putting pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition — play a major role in determining if, and when, we get a durable ceasefire. And yet, polling presents a somewhat confusing picture of their view on the war.

Surveys have consistently found 1) a majority of Israelis want a ceasefire to end the war, and 2) a majority of the Israeli population feels little concern about suffering among Gazan civilians. While Israelis have mostly shrugged off international condemnation of its conduct, the past week has seen a surge in antiwar activism, largely prompted by mass opposition to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to occupy Gaza City.

To make sense of this, I called up Dahlia Scheindlin, one of Israel’s leading pollsters and author of an excellent recent book on Israeli democracy.

Scheindlin told me that Israeli opposition to the war is rooted in self-interest: a belief that continued fighting in Gaza is unnecessarily risking the lives of hostages (about 20 of whom are believed to be alive) and Israeli soldiers. Thus, opposition to the war is deepening while Israelis remain — on the whole — indifferent to the suffering of Gazans.

Beyond describing those beliefs, Scheindlin explained where they come from in Israeli society. She got into the deep roots of dehumanization on both sides of the conflict, the conspiracy theory shaping ordinary Israelis’ views of starvation in Gaza, and why her time working in post-war Serbia made her more somewhat more optimistic about the chances that there could one day be real peace.

A transcript of our conversation follows, edited for length and clarity.

I want to start with a poll result that I found horrifying: 79 percent of Israeli Jews did not feel personally troubled by reports of starvation in Gaza. Do those results seem right to you, based on your broader read of the data? And what does this kind of poll say about the Israeli mindset?

Yeah, it absolutely strikes me as correct. There’s a general trend [in polls] of a very strong majority of Israeli Jews expressing not only lack of empathy but belligerence and hostility towards Gazans, including civilians.

I do think we need to put it in the context of everybody else here. There are parallel trends of deep, deep hostility that we had seen already in joint Israeli-Palestinian survey research done before the war. Very hostile attitudes between the two populations definitely predate October 7.

The reason I asked specifically about Israeli Jews — though parallel trends of hostility is obviously hugely important in understanding the situation — is that their views are especially urgent amid the overwhelming evidence that the Israeli government’s policy has created a starvation crisis. It is, I think, very difficult for people outside Israel to understand why that doesn’t break through in its politics.

How is it that, when it seems like your government is committing such a crime, people aren’t horrified? Is just dehumanization all the way down — that they think Palestinians deserve it? Or is there denial of what’s clearly happening? Is there lack of coverage or censorship in the Israeli media?

It’s all of those things.

Israeli media, as you pointed out, is barely covering civilian suffering in Gaza — which is not much of an excuse to be honest, because all of the information is available.

Polls have tested whether Israelis believe the starvation was happening. A recent survey found that 47 percent of all Israelis felt that it was probably lies and made up. Now, if it’s 47 percent of the average, it’s in the mid-to-upper 50 percent range among Jews — as presumably very few Palestinian citizens of Israel feel that way.

So 47 percent said it’s not true; it’s Hamas’s lies. And another 18 percent said, “Even if it’s true, I’m not bothered by it.”

Israelis are completely consumed with the hostages. It is front and center; it’s everywhere. The country is flooded with hostage symbols: signs, slogans, pins. Everyone wears a pin, including the prime minister.

The second thing they’re consumed with is the fate of their sons, brothers, husbands, fathers who are serving in Gaza.

Basically, the Israeli Jewish public thinks the war needs to stop — but because it’s hurting them and not because it’s hurting Palestinians.

There is a small portion of people who are increasingly troubled by the situation in Gaza — primarily the left, which represents about 20 percent of Israelis. Among the Jewish population, it’s about 12 percent to 14 percent. So, it’s a minority, but those people are troubled enough that some of them have begun making that a much more central part of their public activity.

I’m a little bit skeptical of making it seem like there’s sweeping growing trends [toward public outcry about Gazan suffering]. There are demonstrations of people holding posters of children who’ve been killed in Gaza and also of people going to Air Force bases in Israel to hold those posters and say, “Don’t go.” There were two people who burst into a reality TV show — you know, primetime television — a couple days ago and screamed, “Stop the war.” Is it growing? I don’t know. But it’s certainly becoming more urgent, and they’re making the claim more publicly, and I think they feel that there’s some space to make that claim more publicly.

I think what you hear among a lot of mainstream Israelis — which includes people from the center and even the moderate right — is that, of course, the war is bad for everybody — get our hostages back, our sons back — and it’s also bad for Gazans. But [the Gazans] certainly are not a priority.

Many Israelis simply say, “I cannot be sad for the civilians of Gaza,” after what they saw on October 7 and during hostage releases. They were often released with these really grotesque ceremonies and forced to cheer and [surrounded by] mobs.

On one of those days when a hostage was released, I had a friend write to me saying, “You still think there are innocent people in Gaza?” because of the mob.

Now, even if there are thousands of people [jeering at hostages], that’s out of 2 million. And, of course, we had thousands of people on the Israeli side who support, you know, terrible things.

But [the imagery] is part of what explains the very dehumanizing attitudes that don’t allow for compassion.

Is this psychology part of what allows many Israelis to dismiss the seriousness or significance of the international outrage about Gaza?

They would say that the Europeans or whoever simply don’t get it; they haven’t been through what we’ve been through, and they don’t understand what it’s like here. Or, even more aggressively, that they’re either being taken in by Hamas propaganda or are themselves antisemitic.

What [Israelis] are saying now is, “Everybody forgot about October 7.” They forgot who really started it — because, for a lot of Israelis, everything was sort of manageable before that.

I think that the world hasn’t forgotten October 7. They just don’t think it’s an excuse for what Israel is doing anymore.

It’s [also] an extremely widespread view here that the entire global media is against Israel because the world — [including] the UN and the international system — is always critical of Israel. And the government is compulsively pushing the line that the rest of the world is just being spoon-fed lies directly by Hamas.

In their defense, there’s a grain of truth to that, right? Hamas will lie about things all the time; they’re a horrifying organization.

I know, but the assumption is that there’s nobody else getting information out — that there’s no Palestinian journalists who are doing their work, that there’s no social media, that the international organizations who are there are never getting new information — it’s only Hamas, and that international media isn’t making any effort to get information from any source other than Hamas, which is just fundamentally factually not true. International media is getting its information from their own stringers and reporters inside Gaza, from credible vetted social media, or international organizations.

If you think that the whole thing is made up, you’re looking at a vast conspiracy of collusion between Hamas, observers on the ground, average Palestinians — a huge conspiracy of all of them.

It seems to me that there’s a real opportunity here for a politician or political faction in Israel to turn the things that Israelis are mad about — the hostages, soldier casualties — into an indictment of the broader right-wing worldview that is inflicting harm on Palestinians and taking their land is good for Israeli security — to argue that the government’s whole theory of the case is a failure, and that a new approach is needed.

And yet, I just have not seen a very successful articulation of an alternative philosophy — one that has caught fire and become really powerful in Israeli politics — since October 7. The public opinion groundwork is there, but politicians aren’t taking advantage of it.

You’re absolutely right; politicians aren’t taking advantage of it. Nobody’s really making a case for an alternative. The opposition [parties are] maddeningly focused on criticizing; all of the critical points that you and I have just raised are out there. But nobody connects the dots and says, “Here is an alternative. Here’s what we would do differently.”

Everybody limits themselves saying, for example, what we would do differently on a hostage deal. It’s never about the bigger vision: How do you envision Israel ending this war and preventing the next war?

I can tell you, from politicians’ perspective, it’s because they know that, on a deeper level, Israelis are right-wing. [About] 60 percent of Jewish Israelis self-identify as right-wing. They don’t want a Palestinian state, and they don’t want to hear about a negotiated solution, and they don’t want to hear about concessions.

So, that’s why the opposition politicians don’t want to get into it, because they have forgotten that leadership means courage — that leadership means leading, not following. They’re basically just cowards running after a very simplistic reading of public opinion. Even scratching one level below the surface, they would know that you can change public opinion over time.

We’ve seen repeatedly, over a decade, that the public changes its mind slowly and incrementally, but significantly, on issues related to conflict resolution or negotiations, concessions, final status — especially when they see it as a realistic possibility, and especially when their leadership is behind it and makes the case.

I know from personal experience doing public opinion polling for Prime Minister Ehud Barak during the Camp David negotiations [the US-led peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians] in the year 2000. I was literally conducting the research, watching the focus groups, looking at the data through every night or almost every night of that negotiation, and people were changing their minds — slowly, but very steadily considering how compressed it was — over extremely controversial things. Did they love it? No, but they were moving.

When we try to tell people in polls, “Here are the advantages [of peace],” they can change their minds a little bit — but it’s so remote from their experience, so hypothetical. There’s no anchor in reality. If politicians were getting behind this, they would be able to create that kind of momentum.

That’s a bit grim, right?

I thought my previous analysis was extremely optimistic.

What I’m saying is that public opinion can change. The conditions are that there are some realistic policy grounds for a change in the situation and legitimate leaders who are advocating for it. And those two things are not impossible.

Well, they’re just not there now, though. That’s why I said it’s grim.

Right now, sure. However, we have elections coming up; we’re heading into an election year in 2026. [It’s] very unlikely before then, but possibly. And all polls are showing opportunity is there, and the Netanyahu government has not been able to win a majority in any credible survey.

It could still happen that Netanyahu wins again, but it’s also possible that a different government might have a little bit less acumen at spinning the world around their finger — and even start feeling some pressure from the world to move towards two states.

So, then, let me ask one long-term question. There’s a line from the writer Omar El Akkad that I can’t really get out of my head. I’m sure you’ve heard it.

“One day, everyone will have always been against this.”

Exactly. Do you think that’s true when it comes to Israel? That one day, Israelis who supported the war will say, “I never could have supported that”?

I think that this collective sense of regret — the rewriting of history whereby everybody was against it — is probably the exception more than the rule.

I worked in various countries in the Balkans from roughly 2006 to 2010. What I saw there is that every side thought that they got the short end of the deal. Every side thought that the world was against them. Every side was embittered.

But particularly the Serbian side, which I know better and was also viewed as the aggressor. I pretty much never encountered anybody who thought that they did the wrong thing other than losing. I’ll never forget the taxi driver who said, “You know, we lost Bosnia, we lost Kosovo, we lost everything.” And that — [not the genocide] — was his major regret.

Yet, peace between Serbia and both Bosnia and Kosovo seems to be holding.

That’s part of another developing hypothesis I have — which I haven’t proved — but maybe somebody’s investigated. I think there is a habitation factor to both violence and nonviolence. The longer you experience nonviolence, the harder it becomes to break it — even if you kind of still hate each other.

So, no, I’m not waiting for Israelis and Palestinians to love each other. We don’t have the luxury of waiting for that.