28 Aug 2025
In summary:
- Unprecedented war and devastation: Since 7 Oct 2023 the Israel–Gaza war has reached catastrophic levels of destruction, displacement and casualties;.
- Mainstream Israeli discourse now openly embraces genocidal language and policies once confined to extremist fringes, normalising dehumanisation of Palestinians.
- Structural shifts before the war: Israel consolidated a “single regime” of apartheid-style rule, saw its ruling post-1948 elite replaced by a Jewish supremacy bloc and entered a “cold civil war” between rival Jewish factions.
- Backed by Western powers, Israel has undermined international law while pursuing strategies of mass displacement, starvation and annexation.
- The war reflects not only trauma and fear after 7 Oct but also long-term settler-colonial dynamics and the central aim of reducing the Palestinian population both inside Israel and in the occupied territories.
The war that began on 7 Oct 2023 and tragically remains ongoing in Gaza, is a pivotal event whose full implications have yet to be understood. Still, it would not be unwarranted to suggest that its domestic and regional consequences will rival those of the 1948 and 1967 wars.
The scale of physical and rhetorical violence and the war crimes committed by all sides have been unprecedented. On 7 Oct alone, approximately 1,200 Israelis were killed and 250 taken hostage. This surprise assault probably delivered an even greater military shock than the coordinated Egyptian-Syrian offensive of 1973. It marked the first time since 1948 that Israeli settlements within the state’s internationally recognised borders were overrun. In the months that followed, the number of displaced Palestinians rose to at least twice that of the 750,000 refugees created by the 1948 war.
The Israeli approach to the war has taken on apocalyptic and biblical dimensions, reflected in the names of its military campaigns in Gaza and Iran: Operation Iron Swords, Gideon’s Chariots and Rising Lion. Hamas, for its part, named its 7 Oct attack Al-Aqsa Flood.
Both sides launched highly aggressive operations driven by deep despair and perceived existential threats, with little political planning for what might follow. Hamas feared that the near finalisation of normalisation talks between Saudi Arabia and Israel would provide Israel with the needed political capital and regional legitimacy to permanently suppress Palestinian aspirations for independence.
Amid these developments, Hamas prioritised its military offensive—its Plan B—after efforts to join newly reformed Palestinian Authority institutions and the Palestine Liberation Organisation were blocked by Israel and the United States in early 2021.
The Hamas–Fatah Agreement signed in Beijing in July 2024 merely revived the terms already negotiated in 2021, leaving Hamas’s path to political participation firmly closed.3
Israel’s campaign in Gaza has pushed conditions in the Strip from nearly uninhabitable before the war, under Israel’s siege, to outright catastrophic.
An Israeli war quite without precedent in its geographical reach
The scale of casualties—both physical and psychological—surpasses that of any of the previous Israeli Arab wars. International experts estimate that the number of Gazans killed is perhaps as much as double the 55,202 deaths recorded by the Gaza Health Ministry.
The number of buildings destroyed in Rafah and Jabalia has surpassed those demolished by the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or by Assad’s assault on Aleppo. As of this writing, the war has lasted over 600 days, and its geographical reach—spanning sovereign Israel, occupied Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon, Iran and Yemen—is unprecedented.
The participation among Western powers has also been unprecedented. The United States took part in defending Israeli airspace, assisted in strikes on Iran and, with Britain, attacked the Houthis in Yemen—who launched missiles and rockets at Israel and disrupted maritime navigation in the Red Sea. Additionally, the severe damage Israel inflicted on Hezbollah removed a key ally of the Assad regime, clearing the way for Syrian rebels to capture Damascus and overthrow the regime in December 2024.
Equally dramatic has been the change in Israeli attitudes about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Before the war, in 2021-22, more than 60 per cent of Israeli Jews said they held right-wing positions; by March 2024, that figure had risen to nearly 70 per cent. Similarly, the percentage of those defining themselves as leftists decreased from 13.3 to just 10.6 per cent.
Public opinion has also hardened on the question of Gaza. In March 2025, Tel Aviv University’s Peace Index found that 62 per cent of Israeli Jews supported the use of military force to expel Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and 71 per cent favoured providing incentives to encourage Gaza Strip Palestinians to leave “voluntarily.”
In both cases, 70 per cent believed that, once gone, Palestinians should not be permitted to return. Only 10 per cent of Israeli Jews believe that peace with the Palestinians is possible in the coming years. Just 20 per cent support a two-state solution, while 37 per cent favour the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and 25 per cent prefer to maintain the current system of Israeli occupation and Jewish dominance.
In Hebrew social media, a surge in pictures of war crimes, genocidal language and the concept of ‘us or them’
Less well-known to those who do not follow Hebrew social media has been the extent of radicalisation within Israeli society.
Once broadly aligned with Western liberal norms, large swaths of the Israeli public now openly embrace rhetoric and imagery that was once confined to the margins. Soldiers proudly upload photos of war crimes they enthusiastically committed; senior figures—including politicians, professors, rabbis and military commanders—alongside ordinary citizens use genocidal language openly, often blended with Biblical quotations.
Dehumanising Palestinians has become a point of pride, detached from any specific act or provocation. The perception that the war constitutes an apocalyptic, existential struggle—”us or them”—has moved from the militant right’s racist fringes into the political mainstream, even finding traction among circles on the left.
This narrative is projected onto the enemy and invoked to justify Israel’s wartime measures. In public discourse, calls for the extermination of Gaza’s civilian population have surfaced alongside demands for deportation and starvation, all rationalised as strategies to secure Israel’s political objectives and national security.
Beyond its regional and geopolitical consequences, the war has had serious implications for the status of international law. The legal structures that Palestinians have long relied on to counterbalance Israel’s superior power has effectively become a dead letter.
Supported by the United States and Germany, Israel has joined Putin’s regime in undermining the global order established after World War II, with international law at its centre. Israel has rejected the authority of the Hague’s international courts (the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice), including the arrest warrants issued against Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.
The Israeli Government and, to a large extent, Israeli society insisted on searching for an absolute victory against Palestinian nationalism, whether before or after a hostage deal. This vision rests on the illusion of Gazans’ “voluntary” emigration and the physical and political elimination of Hamas. It seeks to eradicate the claims of the 1948 war refugees by destroying refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and dismantling the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees..
The right-wing end goal is to annex the West Bank and Gaza Strip areas after reducing their Palestinian population.
What has happened to most ordinary Israeli Jews: how do they remain blind?
What has happened to the majority of Israeli Jews—ordinary people with good intentions: working-class individuals, educated professionals, middle- or upper-middle-class persons who volunteer in community centres and donate to welfare NGOs? How is it that such people can remain blind to what the Israel Defence Force does in their name to the Palestinians—or worse, come to support acts of genocide?
What follows is by no means a defence of Israeli actions—genocide, war crimes and atrocities—but an effort to understand the circumstances that made them possible. It is an interim report by a participant-observer of a bloody shift still in the making.
This radicalisation is a collective traumatic reaction to Israel’s severe human and material losses inflicted by Hamas forces. The unprecedented scale of casualties drove Israelis to believe that their very existence was under threat. Fears of another sudden attack from Hamas prompted widespread civilian armament.
The ongoing discourse over ceasefires and hostage deals, combined with the military inquiries into the failures of 7 Oct, has kept the collective trauma alive. At the same time, it is difficult for Israelis to admit that they or their loved ones may be complicit, directly or indirectly, in war crimes. This discomfort is compounded by mandatory conscription and the national conviction that the IDF is the “most ethical army in the world”.
Similar psychological barriers have prevented Germans, Soviet citizens and Japanese from acknowledging their nation’s war crimes during World War II, just as Americans struggled to confront the reality of the Vietnam War.
In France, public reckoning with military atrocities in Algeria remains rare and taboo. While sociopsychological explanations should be taken seriously, they are ultimately insufficient. They lack concrete context—any kind of grounding in the specific socio-political conditions that shape collective emotions and cultivate imaginations. My argument is that the Israeli genocide is not merely an event but a structure. The focus here is on the structural construction of a genocidal society rather than the operations on the ground.
The preconditions that made genocide in Gaza possible
In this, a modified theory of settler colonialism provides a useful structural mode of analysis, yet it too remains incomplete. I reject the deterministic assumption that the Zionist settler-colonial project culminated in an inevitable genocide. Settler colonialism does not aim to exploit local resources, but rather to shape geography and demography to suit the needs of its new population.
If the natives resist, they face transfer, elimination or both. Yet, throughout the long history of the Zionist/Israeli–Palestinian conflict, numerous alternatives to escalation have been proposed—only to be rejected because of circumstantial political will. Genocide in the Israeli context was not predetermined; it emerged through a series of decisions and the country’s sense of itself. Hereafter, I wish to investigate these factors and explore the historical preconditions that made the Gaza genocide possible.
Considering that Israeli existential fear is a genuine—though not based in any actual balance of power, as revealed by Hamas’ own documents—I explore what type of existence Israeli Jews are afraid of losing. Which sociopolitical forces construct their collective imagination? In referring to collective imagination, I draw on the late historian Alon Confino, who suggested that the Nazi imagination of a world without Jews gradually led to the “Final Solution” for the Jewish problem. While Confino studied the cultural components of the Nazi collective imagination, I am interested in the socio-political apparatus behind Israeli war crimes.
Prior to the 7 Oct attack, Israeli society underwent three interrelated structural transformations: it established a single apartheid-style regime grounded in powerful ethnoreligious factors; experienced a shift in its political elites; and saw the emergence of a cold civil war within the country. The Hamas attack struck a nation already deeply divided, and these divisions profoundly shaped Israel’s response.
Examination of settler growth shows that there were 307,800 settlers in 1994: 127,800 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and 180,000 in East Jerusalem. During the Oslo negotiation years, this number more than doubled to 650,870, with development concentrated in the West Bank. This massive settlement expansion—combined with the collapse of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations after the Oslo Accords and Israel’s hardline suppression of Palestinian political organisation—has ensured the formation of a single regime from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.
Doubling down on the primacy of Jewish supremacy
In this one regime framework, demographics are not a future problem for the Jewish population, but an immediate one. According to a 2021 report from the Israeli Bureau of Statistics in Israel, there were 6,870,000 Jews, 1,956,000 Arabs, and 456,000 “other” in Israel. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported 4,780,978 Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem in 2017.
Together, this amounts to 6.87m Jews and 6.37m non-Jews—mostly Palestinians—living under a single, unequal regime. Centre-left governments seeking to retain both a Jewish state and democracy proposed reducing the Palestinian population under Israeli control by ceding territory for a small, weak Palestinian state. Subsequent right-wing governments have rejected any such territorial concessions and have doubled down on the primacy of Jewish ethnicity.
For these right-wing governments, preserving territorial control and maintaining Jewish supremacy is seen as requiring the separation of Palestinian groups—citizens of Israel, permanent residents of East Jerusalem, residents of the West Bank and residents of the Gaza Strip—each assigned a different set of limited rights and political statuses.
In Gaza—despite the evacuation of settlements and military bases from the strip in 2005 and claims of “disengagement”—Israel has maintained control by means of external siege regulating nearly every aspect of life there. Palestinians in Gaza were nominally governed by their own authorities, but in practice remained subject to the conditions imposed by Israeli military control from outside the enclave.
The siege, first imposed after Hamas seized control of Gaza from Fatah forces in 2007, was originally intended to incite the population to revolt against Hamas. Coupled with periodic military operations, systemic dehumanisation, and policies of starvation and mass civilian casualties, it became one of Israel’s principal tools to weaken Hamas’s rule and to preserve the political division between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
Meanwhile in the West Bank, Israelis and Palestinians live on the same land under different legal status. Israeli settlers are governed by Israeli law and their communities are seamlessly integrated into pre-1967 Israel without any physical or administrative barriers. Their Palestinian neighbours live under military law or the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority.
The overarching Israeli regime imposes ethnogeographic divisions. The Israeli regime enforces these ethnogeographic divisions in the West Bank through a blend of de facto annexation, apartheid and military occupation practices. Across the territory, Israeli forces and settlers act to expand and entrench Jewish superiority, with the Palestinian Authority functioning as a “sub-contractor” for Israeli control. Since the Gaza War, Israeli forces have intensified their operations, entering major Palestinian cities and expelling over 42,000 Palestinians from their homes since January 2024.
The single regime also draws Jewish national-religious motifs, shaped by the “New Judaism” that has developed in Israel. This is well expressed in the case of the Temple Mount/Haram al Sherif, which has come to represent Israel’s shift towards overt ethnoreligious nationalism. Following the June 1967 war, and in line with the rabbinical consensus prohibiting Jews from entering the holy mountain where the temple once stood, Israel allowed the local Waqf and Jordanian state to manage the site. Now, the site sees record numbers of Jewish visitors, state-backed religious rituals and growing calls—from both rabbis and politicians—to take control from the Jordanian Waqf, restrict Muslim worship and even build a Third Temple.
The geographic and demographic reality of the single regime has dramatic sociopolitical consequences, which I shall discuss. Chief among them is the transformation of the Palestinian struggle—from an external national liberation movement to a domestic fight inside the Israeli ruling system. This shift has accelerated a transformation within the Israeli elite, driven gradual regime change and deepened a cold civil war in the country.
Elite transformation post-Rabin: to the Likud, the religious parties and the march to authoritarianism
The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a religious ultranationalist in 1995 marked a turning point in the transformation of Israel’s ruling elite. Rabin’s career epitomised the militaristic Zionist establishment, which had led the Zionist project and the early Israeli state since the early 1930s. This political establishment was ultimately supplanted by a new Jewish supremacy elite, represented by the Likud Party and its religious partners.
Crucially, militant Zionists understood the post-1967 internationally recognised borders as the legitimate boundary of the state. They considered settlements beyond those lines as temporary or not constituting an obstacle to a two-state solution. As a result, they avoided acknowledging the reality that Israel already functioned as a single authority from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea—and therefore overlooked their own role in bringing about that reality.
After the collapse of the peace process and the outbreak of the second Intifada in 2000, the new Jewish supremacy elite moved from the political margins to the mainstream.
The new ruling bloc is a coalition spanning religious messianism, conservative authoritarianism, to open fascism, a convergence that points toward an increasingly illiberal future. In the current Government, Jewish hegemony—both as an ideology and a political force—exercises dominant influence over the police, the justice system, state bureaucracy, mainstream media, the army in particular, security services and even academia.
Some of these institutions submitted willingly; others, through weakness. As this new order established itself, resistance—particularly during wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran—has faded. Because militaristic Zionism is fundamentally oriented around national defence and loyalty to state power, it is compelled to support the war being managed by the Jewish supremacy Government. This leaves it unable to mount a meaningful opposition and, in effect, strengthens the very forces it might otherwise resist.24
Under the prevailing regime of Jewish supremacy, the Israeli–Jewish population maintains political dominance, economic and financial superiority and control over the tech and security sectors. To preserve this privileged position within a binational reality, the unchallenged ruling coalition has advanced judicial reforms that elevate Jewish ethnicity above equal citizenship of non-Jewish Israelis, expand executive authority over the judiciary and tighten control over the media. These measures reflect a shift towards a new paradigm of Jewish supremacy that has pushed Israel closer to authoritarianism.
A Cold Civil War between the religious, the Right and the working class and the old Ashkenazi elite
“One of the best predictors of whether a country will experience a civil war is whether it is moving away from democracy,” writes Barbara Walter. She adds that the risk is even greater when a society is divided into two dominant groups—especially if one becomes a “superfaction” unified by ethnicity, religion, class and geography”.
Israel exhibits these conditions. While it has never strictly operated a liberal-democratic state, the rise of the Jewish supremacy coalition has accelerated the country’s shift away from democratic norms. Additionally, it maintains two increasingly polarised fronts. The first is an inter-Jewish conflict between the old elite of militaristic Zionists and the new Jewish supremacy elite. Their divide is primarily political—centred on disputes over the authority of the High Court and clashes over wartime priorities.
Each camp draws support from different factional bases. The Jewish Supremacist finds its coalition among religious communities and the middle and lower classes, particularly second- or third-generation immigrants from Muslim countries or the former Soviet Union. In contrast, the previous elite is backed by secular academics, high-tech and industrial leaders and wealthy Ashkenazi professionals. Their economic welfare and establishment status depends greatly on maintaining good relations with Western partners. They are afraid that Netanyahu’s move toward authoritarianism combined with the de facto annexation will provoke international sanctions and boycotts.
In recent years, these two factions have clashed over two major flashpoints: Netanyahu’s corruption trial and the fallout from the 7 Oct attacks. Netanyahu’s supporters claim his trial is a politically motivated conspiracy orchestrated by the old elite and its loyalists in the deep state. They also blame his opponents—particularly senior army and security officials for the security failures and collusion that led to 7 Oct.
The second front lies between Jewish and Arab citizens over the latter’s status within Israel. This divide has been codified by the “Basic Law” passed by Knesset in 2018, which formally defines Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. In declaring that “the Land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people” and that “the exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish People”, the law elevates Jewish identity over the principle of equal citizenship. It also reclassifies the Arabic language from an official state language—alongside Hebrew as it was constituted in the Declaration of Independence—to “a special status in the State.”
Yet these tensions are nothing new. In 2000, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to Temple Mount sparked mass demonstrations and violence in mixed Arab towns across Israel. Israeli authorities responded with force, killing 12 Israeli Palestinian citizens. Clashes between Palestinians and Israeli police flared again during Israel’s 2008 (Cast Lead) and 2014 (Protective Edge) operations in the Gaza Strip. Each time, Jewish citizens launched large-scale boycotts of Arab businesses—often lasting weeks after calm had been restored.
May 2021 saw a drastic escalation of violence in the West Bank. The clashes were the culmination of years of settlement in cities like Jaffa, Acre and Lod by Israeli settlers seeking to “Judaise” them. Armed Jewish groups poured into these areas claiming to defend these new settlers and their “Jewish honour”. In the ensuing weeks four people died, a mosque and a synagogue were burned and the Israeli Attorney General indicted 616 people, nearly 90 per cent of them (545 people) Arabs and 71 Jews. “Today,” writes Barbara Walter, “civil wars are waged primarily by different ethnic groups, by guerrilla soldiers, and militias, who often target civilians.” In effect, this was a small-scale civil war rather than a mere riot. And, as in other sectarian conflicts, the symbiotic relations between Jews and Palestinian Arabs within one regime redefine each of the two collective identities through the practices of ruling or resisting the Other.
In the Israeli-Jewish collective imagination: the ‘minor Palestinian nuisance’ became a real internal danger
These three structural transformations left enduring tensions in the Jewish-Israeli collective imagination.
Prior to the Hamas attack, most Israeli Jews conceived of Palestinians as contained—kept outside their collective boundaries. The advantageous status quo had been maintained without territorial compromise, but through the expansion and the assertion of Jewish supremacy. Under this perspective, Iran stood as the primary threat, operating through Hamas and Hezbollah as proxies.
Yet, for many Israelis, this danger seemed manageable thanks to Israel’s military dominance and its “solution” to the Palestinian problem: keeping the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah separate from Hamas in Gaza and using periodic military incursions to suppress resistance to the perpetual siege. Netanyahu further reinforced this order by persuading the international community to abandon consideration of a two-state solution, thereby tacitly accepting the framework of single regime Jewish supremacy.
The Russian attack on Ukraine and United States isolationism under Trump worried West European countries and they neglected the Palestinian Authority. In addition, global crises—from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the US turn towards isolationism under Trump—drew Western attention away from the Palestinian issue. The EU’s internal divisions and Germany’s longstanding support for Israel compounded this neglect. Against this backdrop, the Israeli imagination cast Palestinian terrorism and acts of resistance as little more than a minor nuisance, easily contained while they continued to enjoy security and prosperity.
This worldview was also maintained in large part through the dehumanisation of Palestinians fostered by Israel’s political and military dominance. In the Jewish-Israeli mind, Palestinian national movements ceased to matter, and individual Palestinians themselves faded from view—literally walled off by the barriers constructed between 2003 and 2005. With Israeli human rights organisations and left-wing NGOs failing to raise broad public awareness of the severity of the Palestinian situation, particularly in besieged Gaza after 2007, most Israeli Jews came to see Palestinian suffering as remote, abstract and irrelevant to their own lives.
The 7 Oct 2023 attack shattered this comfortable Israeli self-deception. It revealed a sharp dissonance between the right-wing vision of permanent dominance over Palestinians and the reality exposed by Hamas’s ability to breach Israel’s defences and inflict casualties.
For years, Israeli Jews had imagined their supremacy was unshakable. In their eyes, the conflict was an issue of management within Israel’s political and security system rather than an existential struggle. Hamas’s assault within Israel’s 1948 borders forced the conflict back into the centre of Israeli consciousness. In its aftermath, mass killing, starvation and the displacement of more than 2m Gaza Strip civilians were normalised as tools of war.
Homes, mosques, community institutions and entire neighbourhoods were systematically destroyed with the aim of restoring Jewish supremacy in both the Israeli collective imagination and in fact. These operations were not conducted merely out of anger or revenge, even though the war crimes committed by rank-and-file soldiers gave it that complexion. They reflected calculated decisions by political and military leadership to address the longstanding fact of demographic parity between Jewish and Arab communities.
Israel’s ruling elite is seeking to secure its long-term dominance through overwhelming force and reducing the Palestinian population.
In February 2025, the Israeli Defence Ministry established a dedicated office to oversee the displacement of Gaza’s residents. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called the initiative “the only plan that’s realistic,” explaining: “If we remove 10,000 people a day, seven days a week, it will take six months. If we remove 5,000 people a day, it will take a year. Of course, this is assuming we have countries willing to take them.”
While awaiting such countries to absorb Gazans, the Defence Minister announced plans to concentrate all Gaza’s population in a guarded zone built on the ruins of Rafah. It strongly resembles a 2024 proposal by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a conservative US-backed aid group with informal ties to Israel’s security establishment, to build large “Humanitarian Transit Areas” where displaced Palestinians could “could temporarily reside, deradicalise, reintegrate and prepare to relocate if they wish to do so”.
The Gaza War also narrowed the gap between the former and present Israeli political elite and widened the gulf between the Israeli public and the Palestinian public.
Many of those slaughtered, kidnapped or driven from their homes on 7 Oct belong to the militaristic Zionist contingent. Shaken by unprecedented loss and bound by a deep commitment to militarism, they have thrown themselves into the war effort—one that, under the banner of Jewish supremacy objectives, involves the perpetuation of war crimes.
Across both parties the overriding fear became the same: that losing Jewish superiority was equivalent to the loss of an ultimate guarantee of survival. Israeli Jews do not envision alternative models of sovereignty grounded in equality or partnerships, whether in a single state or two.
Within the framework of a single regime that governs both Jewish citizens and Palestinians, resistance is no longer viewed as an external threat from outside of the state but as arising from within its own population.
Menachem Klein is professor emeritus of Political Science at Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel.. He was an advisor to the Israeli delegation in negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organisation in 2000 and was one of the leaders of the Geneva Initiative. His most recent book is Arafat and Abbas: Portraits of Leadership in a State Postponed.