After 12 months of war, Israel is a changed state, analysts say

After killing more than 42,000 Palestinians in little more than 12 months of fighting in Gaza, many of the reasons Israel stated for starting the conflict remain unfulfilled, analysts tell Al Jazeera.

Its internal security seems even more precarious than when it started fighting on October 7, the day of a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel during which 1,139 people died and about 250 were taken captive.

Israel claimed on Thursday that it had killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who is accused of planning the October 7 attack, a man it had long said was the root of all evil. But instead of talking about a ceasefire and negotiating for the captives’ return, Israel seemed to become even more belligerent.

הרמטכ״ל: ״לא נעצור עד שנתפוס את כל המחבלים שהיו מעורבים ב-7/10 ונשיב את כל החטופים הביתה״ pic.twitter.com/40aG1MnUqF

— צבא ההגנה לישראל (@idfonline) October 17, 2024

Translation: The chief of staff: “We will not stop until we catch all the terrorists who were involved in 7/10 and return all the abductees home.”

The fronts

Israel launched military assaults on one, then a second front after the October 7, 2023, attacks.

It began with Gaza, starting a war on the besieged enclave that, after more than 12 months of fighting, has achieved little but the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians.

Increasingly, it finds itself returning to areas it previously declared cleared, claiming that the Hamas fighters it had declared removed had regrouped.

On October 8, 2023, the Lebanese group Hezbollah started a cross-border exchange of fire with Israel, aiming at Israeli military targets to pressure it to stop the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.

Israel responded to the Hezbollah attacks with aerial assaults on civilian areas, often claiming after the assault that it had “targeted hidden Hezbollah assets” – an excuse it has often used in Gaza after it killed hundreds of people in strikes it declared as having targeted one “Hamas commander”.

As it fought, Israel seemed strangely in thrall of war as a concept.

For many Israelis, Tel Aviv-based analyst Ori Goldberg said, through the last 12 months, war had become part of Israel’s existence.

“People believe that war is necessary,” he said. “We believe it with a passion, even if we no longer know why or to what purpose. We just know that, whatever the problem, war is the solution.”

Meanwhile, 12 months of bloody attacks on Gaza and, more recently, Lebanon have caused major deeper societal changes in Israel, exacerbating long-held divisions and creating chasms in a society that Israeli academics have suggested may be on the point of collapse.

Rising tides

The past year has convulsed Israeli politics with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s formation of a coalition cabinet in the wake of October 7, 2023, exacerbating a rise of the right-wing elements of Israeli politics. These factions were already emboldened through the prominent role they had played in a campaign to push through a judicial overhaul to limit legal oversight of government policy and parliamentary lawmaking.

In the new body, relative political newcomers, such as far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and ultra-Zionist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, acted in tandem, giving themselves an effective veto over Israeli policy and, as a result, an outsized voice in the national conversation.

Under the guise of necessity to get the captives in Gaza back, the aims of both ministers and their growing constituency – which lean more towards expansionism into Palestinian lands – have progressed significantly.

In the past year, Israel’s internal security apparatus, which has responsibility for policing across the country, has morphed almost into a direct extension of its minister, Ben-Gvir.

From left, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich [File: Abir Sultan/Pool Photo via AP]

On appointing hardline Deputy Commissioner Daniel Levy as police chief in August, Ben-Gvir praised him as someone “with a Zionist and Jewish agenda” who “will lead the police according to the policy I have set for him”.

These policies are understood to include Ben-Gvir’s plan to establish a volunteer “national guard” to be deployed in the face of Palestinian unrest resulting from Israeli land grabs, armed raids and general subjugation of the Palestinians in their own country.

In the occupied West Bank, Ben-Gvir’s ideological brother and fellow settler Smotrich now has unparalleled power over construction with the right to seize Palestinian land for Israeli settlements in contravention of international law and equal power to veto Palestinian building.

‘Wild-eyed right’ driving Israelis away

In response to both the Hamas attacks and the human and financial costs of waging war on Gaza, divisions between what many Israelis regard as their secular “rationalist” majority and what the Israeli daily Haaretz described as its “wild-eyed right” have grown, with one analyst telling Al Jazeera that Israel is closer to civil conflict than ever.

Israelis march into the Old City of Jerusalem on June 5, 2024, on Jerusalem Day, a national holiday commemorating the 1967 war in which Israel seized control of all of the city [Ammar Awad/Reuters]

The implications of this are increasingly becoming clear to many among Israel’s traditional secular elite, who, spurred by the rise of the far right, are silently leaving the country, a report by two leading Israeli academics said.

Without citing specific numbers, the authors suggested the scale of the exodus was such that the resulting loss in state revenue and the widening gulf in Israeli society, “there is a considerable likelihood that Israel will not be able to exist as a sovereign Jewish state in the coming decades,” the paper released in May by economist and Professor Eugene Kandel and Ron Tzur, an authority in government administration said.

‘Major national scar’

Throughout the past year, the Hamas-led attacks of October 7 and the fate of the captives have been the through lines. Getting the captives back continues to roil Israelis and prompt the biggest demonstrations of the war so far.

“I don’t think the pain, humiliation and anger of October 7 has ever really gone away,” former Israeli ambassador and government adviser Alon Pinkas told Al Jazeera.

“There have been brief pauses, such as that following the assassination of [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah, but … October 7 and the absence of the hostages have created a major national scar, the extent of which we’re yet to really understand.

“It’ll last. How long, I don’t know, but it’ll last,” he said.

The cause has been co-opted by politicians of every shade on Israel’s political spectrum, the pain left by the captives’ absence being used to support the administration’s ferocious military assault on Gaza.

And yet, despite an Israeli onslaught that defence analyst Hamze Attar said has cut down much of Hamas’s capability, Hamas fighters remain an active military presence on the ground.

Palestinians search for survivors and the dead after Israeli attacks on the Bureij refugee camp in Gaza City on October 8, 2024 [Ahmed Almaqadema/Anadolu]

“Hamas’s capacity to stage another October 7 has been removed,” Attar said. “However, Hamas still has a lot of fighters.”

Senior Hamas officials dismissed Israeli claims that the group has been destroyed as a military force and instead spoke of “new generations” recruited in the wake of Israeli attacks upon Gaza’s camps, hospitals and residential areas.

“I know Israel claims to have killed between 14,000 and 22,000 of them, but they don’t really know,” Attar said.

“The group is still staging well-coordinated and well-timed attacks upon the Netzarim Corridor [the heavily fortified strip of land established by the Israeli military that bifurcates Gaza] as well as quickly retaking areas that Israel has previously cleared,” he said.

Despite the assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in July – which international observers and the families of the captives said made the prospect of their return less likely – Hamas has strengths Israel cannot beat, Attar explained.

“Hamas’s greatest strength lies in its capacity for civil government. Every time it brings out its bulldozers [to clear damage from Israeli assaults]; introduces the police, who restore stability; and produces all the infrastructure of local government, they’re contradicting an Israeli line and, I would say, undermining Israel’s plans to separate Gaza into controllable islands,” he said.

Israeli soldiers pose for a photo at a position on the Gaza Strip border in southern Israel on February 19, 2024 [Tsafrir Abayov/AP]

Future

As Netanyahu continues conducting the wars on Gaza and Lebanon, observers in Israel point with concern at what they describe as the increasingly “messianic” bent of the hostilities.

“There’s no plan, no strategy, nothing,” Pinkas commented of his interactions with officials.

“Since the killing of Nasrallah, Netanyahu has gone full-fledged messianic. On the one hand, it’s really weird, but it also fits with how he wants to see things, … as a civilisational war.

“He’s in the UN [in September,] telling them he’s fighting their war. Before that, he was in [the United States Congress in July,] saying he’s fighting for their values.

“He sees himself as some sort of Churchill, pushing back against Iran’s ring of fire. This is not a man who’s going to sue for peace, not until his failings of October 7 are eclipsed and he feels vindicated.

“It’s complete lunacy.”