The most interesting and maybe surprising development politically since the war is how Ben Netanyahu was able to recapture the narrative. He’s completely now in charge of the political discourse in Israel, and he manages and manipulates everything according to his own personal interests. The main one of which, the supreme one, is to stay in power. He has to stay in power, one, because he wants to stay in power, and two, because there’s a criminal trial going on.

If he loses power, he will be present at the trial in December and has to specify his own defense, and he doesn’t want to go there as a private citizen. He wants to go there as prime minister. Aside from his general ambition to be in control, to be prime minister, this is an added layer of urgency for him. For that reason, he would do anything and sacrifice anything to stay in power. That’s the simple truth of his politics at this point.

No, the next elections are supposed to be in 2026. There’s ample time for him to do whatever he wants until then, and maybe he can respond to elections, and we’d say there’s a war; we can’t have elections during war. There’s no threat. The only threat over him is that he agrees for any kind of cease-fire or deal with someone else; in which case, the most extreme nationalists, to put it mildly, in his cabinet would withdraw from the coalition, and he would fall.

The aims of the war in Gaza, as they were declared, was to destroy or at least disable Hamas and secure the release of the hostages. The second aim, to the extent that it was achieved, was achieved through a negotiated deal with Hamas; it was not achieved through war.

Hamas was certainly dealt a very hard blow, but all experts say that in fact Hamas still rules Gaza, to the extent that there is anything to rule there, and that the only option Israel has available to it to deprive Hamas of rule in Gaza is to establish a military government in Gaza like it has in the West Bank. Nobody would say so openly right now, because it would take a lot of soldiers to maintain such an occupation, and these soldiers are needed in the north.

Within this context, what was the purpose of the beeper operation? The secret service showed its virtuosity, but for what purpose? What now? Everybody pretty much agrees that there is no broader strategic aim that is served by this operation or by anything else that is happening. What is happening in the north is a war of attrition, a continuous war of attrition. There’s a lot of public pressure on the government to launch an all-out war with Hezbollah, and the consequences of that for the Israeli home front would be devastating. Everybody agrees about that.

Some people are fed up with Netanyahu, but the other people are not fed up with Netanyahu. In the past weeks, polls have said that he is the most suitable person to head this government. That’s not exactly a sign of being fed up, and like you mentioned before, he could regain half of the Knesset seats that he lost after October 7.

Of course, all of this is in the polls; there are no real elections. A second significant portion of the population hates Netanyahu for many reasons. The main reason right now is not that he’s not doing more to release the hostages. He’s doing everything not to release the hostages, because the only way to release the hostages is through a deal with Hamas, and if he does that, he loses his government. The simple truth is, Netanyahu needs to stay in power, and a deal with Hamas to release the hostages would lose this power for him. This is why he does everything possible to prevent such a deal from being reached.

He doesn’t need unity. He has a solid block of sixty-four members of Knesset. There’s only one of them, the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who is now maybe wavering, but even if he has only sixty-three, that’s enough to stay in power. What does he care about 300,000 or 200,000 people in the street? They cannot make him leave office. These demonstrations don’t affect him at all.

There is this big issue that the ultra-Orthodox do not serve in the military, and their numbers grow exponentially, because on average ultra-Orthodox women have around seven children, and they don’t go into the military. They constitute 15 percent of each cohort that is up for conscription, and they are not conscripted.

Now, the ultra-Orthodox parties on whom Bibi depends to stay in power want to establish this in law, because the high court of justice a long time ago said you cannot continue to rely on purely administrative measures to exempt these people. You have to legislate it, and Gallant, who as defense minister has to submit this law to the Knesset, says he will not submit the kind of law that would in fact exempt these kids, these young men — of course nobody talks about conscripting the women. This means that the law will not be submitted to the Knesset as long as Gallant is defense minister.

The history of it is that David Ben-Gurion exempted four hundred yeshiva students from military service, because after the Holocaust the whole world of the Yeshiva was destroyed and had to be resurrected and so on and so on. When Likud came to power, it lifted this limit of four hundred, and Netanyahu said whoever studies full-time in Yeshiva will be exempted from military service. It got to the point where it’s 15 percent of each year, and it’s a big problem. Reservists are now doing three, four, six months active service, destroying their businesses, destroying their careers.

But the ultra-Orthodox political parties are kingmakers, and Netanyahu has had to abide by them; they want to pass a law that would allow some symbolic number of these young men to be conscripted. In essence, Israel would just eternalize the ultra-Orthodox exemption even though there’s a tremendous shortage of troops. That’s why Netanyahu needs to get rid of Gallant.

First of all, Israelis don’t see the visuals that you see, because Israeli television channels don’t show it You have to look at the foreign channels: Al Jazeera, CNN, or BBC. Most people don’t do that. Basically, the general mode is that it’s not our concern. Whatever happens, they brought on themselves.

Who talks about the occupation? The occupation has not been discussed here since the year 2000. Nobody talks about the occupation. There are, I would say, significant attempts to pressure the government to make a deal in order to release the hostages. There’s no opposition to the war beyond that.

The people who want the hostages released realize that the only way to release the hostages is to stop the war temporarily, or permanently. But beyond that, no. The war is not an issue except for the issue of the hostages.

The response from Israelis goes from “They don’t understand the complexity of the situation’ to ‘They’re all antisemites.” This is the scale, and the vast majority of Israelis are somewhere on that scale in terms of their reaction to the international mood now.

By the way, the media here exaggerates, I think on purpose, the amount of hostility toward Israel. We just came back from three weeks in the States. We haven’t heard one critical remark about Israel from anybody, including on this American Political Science Association roundtable on the war with a Palestinian woman — not one critical comment was made about Israel.

In the introduction of that, which I wrote with Horit Herman Peled, we argued that religious Zionism is a broad tendency within Israeli society spearheaded by the settler movement. It was on the verge of becoming hegemonic in Jewish Israeli society. This was five years ago. Now this is a reality. It has become hegemonic, in a number of senses of the term.

The narrowest one is that the settlers now dictate to Netanyahu his world policy, because without them he doesn’t have a government, and he cannot do anything that they don’t like. Another thing is that the mood of the country has shifted tremendously in that direction: namely that there’s nobody to talk to and there’s nothing to talk about. It used to be the slogan many years ago, and now it’s almost a consensus. I’m talking about the Palestinians. There’s nobody to talk to and there’s nothing to talk about. Israel must maintain its rule, certainly over the West Bank.

That is why there is more and more talk about resettling in Gaza; this is a more or less the general mood. In that sense, the religious Zionist worldview has become hegemonic in Jewish Zionist society. That explains a lot of what’s happening.

The last thing, very significantly, is their role in the military. Forty years ago, they decided they have to take over the military. They’ve worked very assiduously, very successfully, to position themselves in all the senior positions in the military.

Now again, this is a reality. There’s still not a majority among the IDF general staff, but they have a significant presence there. They have a very significant presence at the level of the division commanders who are actually carrying out the war. That’s a crucially important aspect of the hegemonic status that they were able to achieve because of the war.

It’s hard to tell. First of all, you need to define the hard right. What is the hard right? A lot of the hard right is in opposition to Netanyahu. Not all the hard right is in his camp. Now, the hard right in his coalition, including the political party called Religious Zionism, which we should distinguish from the social sector of religious Zionism, currently holds 14 seats in the Knesset, six of which belong to Itamar Ben-Gvir’s far-right Jewish Power party.

This is the most radical right wing nationalist, whatever you want to call it, including the titles that I don’t want to use. Ben-Gvir’s Jewish power was never able to elect even one Knesset member running on its own. It has these 6 members now because it formed and electoral pact with the other faction called Religious Zionism, headed by this other character, Bezalel Smotrich. In the polls now, Smotrich now doesn’t even get in, but Ben-Gvir is between, let’s say, 8 and 10 Knesset seats, if there were elections today.

They don’t have the defense ministry yet, because Gallant is there and the chief staff of the IDF is still not religious Zionist. But you see their influence; the promotion of religious Zionist generals and of lower-rank officers to the rank of general is not done politically. It’s done because there are a lot of them, and they are very good and very dedicated. They are very right-wing and they don’t have any, let’s call them moral considerations, and they get promoted because they are successful officers.

What’s important is that Ben-Gvir is the minister of police. He has completely transformed the nature of the police and turned into his own private political militia. That’s more or less the mainstream view of everybody who’s writing or speaking about this. That’s of course a very dangerous development.

Obviously the economy is suffering, but the government deficit is unbelievable. Businesses are around us in the center of Tel Aviv. We saw new businesses closing down every day because there are no tourists. Tourism was a big earner of foreign currency; I think maybe Israel’s second-most important export industry is tourism. There are absolutely no tourists.

A lot of people are doing months and months of military service, which also harms economic activity. The majority of new companies established this year registered themselves abroad, not in Israel, and we anticipate a wave leaving the country. The doctors are the first ones to leave, and they are leaving in large numbers already, as well as tech people; it’s very easy for them to move.

Israel’s credit rating has been demoted by the major credit assessment companies. We are in for a difficult economic time. It depends on how long this will go on.

Before the war, there was what I would call a constitutional counterrevolution, because the constitutional revolution occurred in the 1990s, and this was a great process of liberalization. Since this current government was it, they immediately launched a counterrevolution to deliberalize the judicial system and the government system as a whole. This caused huge demonstrations, and to some extent it was halted or slowed down, but now it’s done under the guise of the war.

It is done in less dramatic ways but in very important ways, bureaucratically mostly. These moves are what is now commonly called the hybrid regime. The hybrid regime characterizes populism and power. The populist movement has tended to establish or transform the regime to a hybrid regime, which is democratic in form and authoritarian in content.

This is the process that’s been going on and is still going on. The popular base in Israel are the Mizrahi, in other words, people whose families came from the Muslim world. It’s interesting because usually populism is attributed to the economically left behind in the West. The Mizrahi in Israel, historically of course, were left behind, but in the last twenty or twenty-five years, they have been moving ahead. The economic gap between them and the Ashkenazi, whose families came from Europe, is closing.

Still, Mizrahi support for populism is about 60 to 70 percent. Support for populism means support for the populist leader, and the populist leader is Netanyahu. This is the basis of his continuing success. Other populist parties, are most importantly, Shas, the ultra-orthodox Mizrahi political party, and also Ben-Gvir’s party.

Ben-Gvir is a new phenomenon, and since he has never run on his own, it’s hard to tell [how popular he is]. All we have now is polls. By the way, the polls show significantly that in the last elections in 2022, 25 percent of the soldiers in active service voted for Ben-Gvir. In other words, they voted for Religious Zionism, but because of Ben-Gvir. They are supporters of Ben-Gvir, and these numbers will rise as a result of the war.

In Israel, it’s obviously rising and increasing. If we forget about the war for a second, the main reason behind this ethnonationalist populism, is resentment against the Labor Party, which rulled the country when the parents and great-grandparents of the current generation of Mizrahim came to the country and were mistreated very badly. The resentment is very interesting. The resentment is stronger in the third generation than in the second generation.

It’s true that their economic improvement was caused partly by their moving from the working class to the petit bourgeoisie. But their share in the top 10 percent of income earners is now exactly their share in the population. So it’s not just petit bourgeois; they are moving into the upper class and the upper middle class also.

The Labor Party used them as cheap labor for whatever was needed, first in agriculture and then, when industrialization began, in industry. The party placed many of them in the so-called development towns, which were anything but development towns. They were underdeveloped towns to provide cheap labor to kibbutzim that surrounded them.

There’s tremendous resentment, justifiably so, I would say. Even though their objective economic situation has improved a great deal, the resentment remains, and it’s even intensified.

According to polls, more Israelis would favor Benny Gantz’s centrist party over Netanyahu’s Likud. Gantz, a former chief of staff of the IDF, has proved himself to be an utterly incapable politician, a real sucker for various manipulations. But also, the polls show that if there were to be a new, non-Nethanyahu right-wing party, it would take over everybody. It would be by far the largest party in the next elections, if the Right is able to form such a party. The pundits saying that the votes that Gantz has are simply parked in his party, waiting for a real right-wing party to emerge, and then many of them will move to that real non-Nethanyahu right-wing party.

No, I don’t see any of that. Forty-five percent of the soldiers who come back from the war — they come back from the war temporarily — are post-traumatic, and that is only what we know. Many others are probably post-traumatic but don’t seek treatment, so we don’t know about them. But there is no anti-war sentiment, either because of that or because of the increasing casualties.

Meanwhile, businesses are crumbling because the owners have to serve months and months in the military, careers are being destroyed, families are being broken up because of the war. All of that doesn’t amount to any kind of antiwar sentiment yet. Maybe it will come, but it hasn’t yet.

If he can get the United States into this war. . . . He wants to get the US to attack Iran, not Israel by itself. Israel by itself is crazy, but he would very much like to draw the US into a regional war, which would include war with Iran.

That’s partly why he wants Donald Trump to win. He thinks that under Trump this is more feasible than under a Democratic presidency, even though we know the reality is it’s usually the Democrats who are going to fight wars.

The way to achieve that is to maintain this current war until the elections, at least until the elections, and then if Trump wins, see if he can extend it, expand it. If Kamala Harris wins, then he’ll have to see what he can do.

I don’t think there will be much of a difference. I don’t think there’s any major change that is likely to happen in terms of US policy toward Israel, toward the war, toward the general Middle East.

It’s important to remember the only administrations that ever pressured Israel into something were Republican ones: Dwight Eisenhower and George H. W. Bush are the only ones who pressured Israel. Jimmy Carter is the one exception, and Carter lost the presidency. I don’t expect any major change if Harris wins.

Yes, of course. It’s preceded the war by a long time. There’s this efficient definition of antisemitism that was adopted a number of years ago, and then many countries adopted it. According to that definition of antisemitism, any criticism of Israel is antisemitism. Of course it’s formulated in a more sophisticated way, but that’s the essence of it. Now, it’s a hundred times greater because the criticism is much fiercer, for obvious reasons.