The New Yorker:

The Prime Minister’s domestic popularity has rebounded to pre-October 7th levels, despite his refusal to prioritize a hostage deal in Gaza.

By Isaac Chotiner

The political scientist Dahlia Scheindlin is a longtime expert on Israeli public opinion and analyst of the country’s domestic political scene. With the new year upon us—and with the fall of the Assad regime, in Syria; a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel, in Lebanon; and continued hostilities in Gaza, where more than forty thousand Palestinians have been killed since the Hamas-led attacks of October 7th, 2023—I wanted to get a handle on exactly what has and has not changed in Israel in the past few months. I spoke by phone with Scheindlin, who is also 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 has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how her understanding of Israel’s aims for the region has shifted lately; why the popularity of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, has ticked back up after falling in the immediate aftermath of October 7th; and why the immense number of Palestinian civilian casualties is still barely registering within Israel.

In terms of domestic politics, does it feel like Israel is finally in what we could call a post-October 7th period?

The post-October 7th period is very easily defined in survey research. It’s unusual for survey researchers to have such clear trends in the data that are so unambiguous. For the first six months after October 7th, the government’s ratings plunged on every indicator, and there was a common wisdom that Netanyahu could not survive. And then, around April, 2024, there was a very clear beginning of a turning point, and his polls began a slow and incremental recovery on all the same indicators.
The same is true of the popularity of his party and his original coalition—they recovered to roughly where they were before the war. For Netanyahu, that’s around forty per cent. He is leading polls against his opponents in terms of who people think should be the Prime Minister. This is not as good as where they were in the November, 2022, elections, in which Netanyahu and his coalition partners won sixty-four out of a hundred and twenty seats in the Knesset. So they’re not doing that well, but we are definitely in a post-October 7th period.

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