For the majority of Israelis, modern history is divided between before and after the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023. In the three years since Israel launched a genocidal war in the Gaza Strip following the attacks, Israeli society has undergone fundamental changes.
Observers say the sense of collective trauma has been amplified through political rhetoric and media hysteria to levels never seen before in modern Israel.
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Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians, and Israel has expanded its attacks into several provinces in the region.
The war in Gaza and a series of settler pogroms in the occupied West Bank instigated by the Israeli far-right have contributed to Israel’s isolation from much of the world.
Daniel Baatar, an Israeli political psychologist at Tel Aviv University, said October 7 shattered the myth of the Israeli military’s invincibility.
Prior to October 7, 2023, strong confidence in Israel’s technological and military superiority was common.
This situation ended when Hamas and other groups rushed into Israel. Nearly 1,200 people were killed and Palestinian groups took about 250 prisoners.
The Israeli public has generally been isolated from the consequences of military violence in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, and Bartal said many were shocked that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have had advance information about Hamas’ plans.
Inside Israel, the psychological impact of the attack was clear. “(Everything) has become very chaotic. It’s a crisis that cannot leave the people,” he told Al Jazeera.
Palestinians in particular have lived with Israel’s genocidal response ever since.
lean to the right
Politicians are using the fear and trauma of the October 7 attacks to further their own agendas and to target the Palestinian people as a whole.
“There is no doubt that many Israelis were gripped by genuine fear after October 7, but there is also no doubt that political forces used that fear to erase almost all the gains made over the years in Jewish-Palestinian relations,” said Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav Sharabani.
Countless opinion polls suggest that Israeli society has moved further to the right over the past three years. Headlines in major newspapers question whether the left that was the main bulwark of Israel’s two-state solution still exists.
Huge numbers of Israelis continue to support the execution of Palestinian prisoners of war accused of “terrorism” and the continued expansion of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.
In a May 2025 survey of Israelis conducted by Pennsylvania State University sociologist Tamir Sorek, an overwhelming majority of respondents supported expelling Gazans. There was also a sizable minority who supported the “mass murder” of the entire population of cities invaded by Israeli forces, as the Biblical Israelites did at Jericho.
“October 7 was undoubtedly a turning point in modern Israeli politics,” Shenhaf-Shahrabani said. “I would say that we have gone back 100 years, both in our collective consciousness, in our willingness to engage with each other, and above all in our level of mutual trust. This is a huge step backwards, and it will be very difficult to overcome.”
Israel’s former defense minister, Yoav Galant, described Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as “human animals,” and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir boasted that he had distributed thousands of government weapons to settler groups already known for often deadly pogroms against Palestinian towns and villages in the occupied West Bank.
“The messianic, racist right has seized on this disaster not just to justify its existing position, but to push the boundaries of what can be said and done in Israeli politics,” Shenhaf-Shahrabani said.
He acknowledges that October 7 did not create the Israeli right, but it did normalize positions previously considered extreme.
“Fear is undoubtedly a key driver of this change, but fear alone cannot explain it. Fear is also politically mobilized,” he said.
“The repression…became even more violent.”
Anti-Palestinian views also did not begin on October 7, 2023. Such abuses date back to the creation of Israel in 1948, the subsequent forced displacement of some 750,000 Palestinians, and the erasure of Palestinian villages from the land.
Since then, a growing number of international organizations and rights groups have described Israel’s rule over the Palestinians as apartheid. Organized violence, including military attacks on blockaded Gaza, deadly West Bank pogroms, and ongoing settler attacks and land grabs with little impunity, has also been widely documented by rights groups, particularly since October 7.
B’Tselem noted that violence has erupted across the occupied West Bank, documenting the killing of 1,107 Palestinians in a “single political project” between Israeli forces and settlers that appears to be aimed at forcibly displacing the local population.
“October 7 allowed the process that was already underway to gain momentum and escalate,” B’Tselem resident Yair Dovir told Al Jazeera.
“The foundations of apartheid, oppression, and domination against the Palestinian people have become more violent, while the broader trajectory of eliminating the Palestinian collective existence has become clearer and more normalized through genocide in Gaza, the ethnic cleansing and dissolution of Palestinian society in the West Bank, and Israel’s intensification of discrimination and dehumanization of the Palestinian people.”
