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.

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