Three Years After October 7: Fear and a Far-Right Shift Reshape Israel

For most Israelis, modern history is divided into two eras: before and after the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023. In the three years since Israel launched its war on Gaza in response to that attack, Israeli society has undergone fundamental change.

According to observers, a sense of collective trauma has been amplified through political discourse and media hysteria to a degree unprecedented in Israel's modern history.

Israel's war in Gaza has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians, and Israel has expanded its strikes to several countries in the region.

The war in Gaza, along with a wave of settler attacks in the occupied West Bank promoted by Israel's far right, has helped push Israel into deepening isolation from much of the world.

Daniel Bar-Tal, an Israeli political psychologist at Tel Aviv University, argues that October 7 shattered the myth of the Israeli military's invincibility.

Before October 7, 2023, a strong sense of confidence in Israel's supposed technological and military superiority was widespread. That ended when Hamas and other groups poured into Israel: nearly 1,200 people were killed and Palestinian groups seized about 250 others.

The Israeli public had previously been largely insulated from the consequences of the country's military actions in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Bar-Tal said many were shocked by the possibility that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have known about Hamas's plans in advance.

"It shattered [everything] enormously. It is a crisis that does not leave people," he told Al Jazeera. Palestinians, meanwhile, have had to live with Israel's response ever since.

A turn to the right

Politicians have exploited the fear and trauma of the October 7 attack for their own ends, while using them to target Palestinians as a whole.

"There is no doubt that many Israelis were gripped by genuine fear after October 7, but in my view there is also no doubt that political forces exploited that fear to erase almost every achievement made in Jewish-Palestinian relations," Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani said.

Countless polls show Israeli society has shifted markedly further to the right over the past three years. Mainstream newspaper headlines have asked whether the left, once the mainstay of support for a two-state solution in Israel, still exists.

A large share of Israelis continue to support executing Palestinian prisoners accused of "terrorism" and the continued expansion of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.

In a May 2025 survey by sociologist Tamir Sorek of Penn State University, a large majority of respondents said they supported expelling Gaza's residents. A significant minority also backed the "mass killing" of all residents of cities struck by the Israeli military, as biblical Israelites did at Jericho.

"October 7 was certainly a turning point in contemporary Israeli politics," Shenhav-Shahrabani said. "I think it set us back a hundred years – in collective consciousness, in the willingness to talk to one another and, above all, in the level of mutual trust. This is a huge regression, extremely difficult to overcome."

Former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant once described Palestinians in Gaza as "human animals", while National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has boasted of distributing thousands of government weapons to settler groups known for often deadly attacks on Palestinian towns and villages in the occupied West Bank.

"The messianic and racist right seized on the tragedy, not only to justify pre-existing views but to push back the limits of what can be said and done in Israeli politics," Shenhav-Shahrabani said.

He acknowledged that October 7 did not create the Israeli right, but it normalized views once considered extreme. "Fear is certainly a major factor in this shift. But fear alone cannot explain everything. Fear is also being mobilized politically," he said.

'Repression… has become more violent'

Anti-Palestinian views did not begin on October 7, 2023 either. Such abuses date back to the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, which brought the forced displacement of about 750,000 Palestinians and the erasure of Palestinian villages from the land.

In the decades since, a growing number of international bodies and human rights groups have described Israel's rule over Palestinians as apartheid. Systemic violence, including military assaults on the besieged Gaza Strip, deadly raids in the West Bank, and settler attacks and land seizures, has continued largely unpunished, and has been widely documented by rights groups, especially after October 7.

B'Tselem has recorded an explosion of violence across the occupied West Bank, with 1,107 Palestinians killed in what it describes as "a single political project" by the Israeli military and settlers, apparently aimed at driving local residents out.

"October 7 allowed processes that were already under way to gain momentum and escalate," Yair Dvir of B'Tselem told Al Jazeera.

"The infrastructure of apartheid, repression and control over Palestinians has become more violent, while the broader trajectory of erasing Palestinian collective existence has become clearer and more normalized – through the war in Gaza, ethnic cleansing and the destruction of Palestinian society in the West Bank, and the rise in discrimination and dehumanization of Palestinian citizens of Israel."