Why do Israelis remain overwhelmingly in favor of the Gaza offensive?

In a Jerusalem asleep in these times of desertion of pilgrims, it is impossible to miss the applause rising at the Zion Gate. Soldiers have just crossed this entrance leading to the Old City. The Israelis who are there did not miss the opportunity to support them. This benevolence towards the army and the operation underway in Gaza, despite the 37,925 deaths 1 that it has caused, is shared by the vast majority of the population since the massacres of October 7, 2023. On May 30, 96% of Israeli Jews did not consider that Israel’s military response against Hamas went too far 2.

Even left-wing sympathisers, who demonstrate every Saturday in Tel Aviv to demand the departure of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, justify military reprisals. Hostages remain to be freed: about a hundred are being held in the enclave. Their photos are posted at the airport, in cafés, along the beaches, on the crash barriers of highways… Every Saturday, the families cry out their despair on television. In this atmosphere of mourning, the feeling of injustice often turns to anger.

Atonal voices of peace

At the June 29 demonstration, Orly, 44, clings to the portrait of her friend Ohad Yahalomi, one of the two French-Israeli hostages who remains in Gaza. “One of the best guides in the desert. He had lived near the Gaza Strip for a long time, he was involved in charitable actions for the Palestinians,” she says, honoring the memory of her friend. Close to the family, Orly recalls that Eitan, 12, one of Ohad Yahalomi’s three children, had also been kidnapped. Since released, the teenager told her about his detention. His captors kept him in the dark for two weeks, forcing him to watch videos of the rapes and murders of October 7. “Even animals don’t do that, Hamas are monsters,” she sobs, distilling a warlike fatalism new to her: “If the army had not gone to Gaza, other terrorists would have come to kill us. We couldn’t do nothing.”

If Orly has long defended peace, the massacre has shaken her convictions. And like her, many Israeli pacifists have seen their world collapse. “One of my friends was very involved in inter-religious dialogue. But many of her pacifist companions were massacred on October 7,” says Bernard Thibaud, director of the Maison d’Abraham in Jerusalem. “She withdrew to the fields for five months to think about something else.”

Inevitably, if the voices of peace are stifled, those campaigning for total war thrive. “Israel is doing humanity a service since we are fighting terrorism,” says Yoram, a 21-year-old Franco-Israeli who will be doing his military service in a few months. Without falling into martial lyricism (“we are experiencing this war as a mourning”, “we have all lost loved ones…”), the young man remains skeptical about the investigations reporting the death of Gazan children. “Don’t believe everything Hamas says. They manipulate the information.” The bombed civilians? “It’s Hamas’ fault. It deliberately mixes with civilians.” The risks of famine in Gaza, confirmed by NGOs? “That’s false. Israel even brings them food. What other country does that to its enemy?” Yoram’s soldier friends sometimes send him news, which he believes more than the Israeli or foreign media. For him, as for so many others, the current war represents the bulwark that preserves the Jews from annihilation.

On October 7, Israel suffered as many deaths in one day as it had in twenty years of attacks and intifada. “It’s very difficult for outsiders to understand our fear. You’re not part of a people who are always playing for their survival,” says Jacob, an Israeli from the Mea Shearim neighborhood of Jerusalem. Like many ultra-Orthodox, he has difficulty recognizing the legitimacy of the State of Israel; for them, it should only exist after the arrival of the Messiah. But October 7 transcends all else. Jacob even thinks that Israel should have gone further in previous wars, by expelling the Palestinians to neighboring countries. “That would have prevented many of the deaths that are happening now.”

A cycle of violence

Yehuda Shaul is one of the rare 4% who criticize the intervention in Gaza. This former soldier founded Breaking the Silence, an association that gives a voice to soldiers who want to denounce inhumane orders. For him, Israeli radicalization comes from the illegal installations of colonies in the Palestinian territories. “The occupation corrupts. It imposes a violence that gangrenes minds and then spreads throughout society. Morality erodes.” While in 2004 the assassination of the leader of Hamas by Israel had provoked a national outcry because a dozen civilians had been killed in the airstrike, “today, a bomb sometimes kills a hundred innocent people. Without reaction. Our hearts have hardened in twenty years. They have become stones for the suffering of the Palestinians.”

Why such harshness? Fear, certainly. And a series of unfortunate decisions since 2000, as well as the failure of the peace negotiations at Camp David, which triggered the endless cycle of violence and bloody reprisals. Fueled, on the one hand, by the Islamization of Palestinian society, with its suicide attacks and rockets launched blindly at Israel; on the other, by the rise of illegal Israeli colonies in the Palestinian territories. These settlers have increased from 388,000 in 2000 to 710,000 today. The more numerous they are, the more the two-state solution, and therefore peace, will fade.

1) Hamas Health Ministry count, considered realistic by the UN. Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu himself spoke of “30,000 dead” in Gaza in May.

2) Pew Research Center survey.