Earlier this month, the world reeled from the death of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza. U.S. President Joe Biden expressed outrage; Secretary of State Antony Blinken threatened a change in policy; and congressional Democrats, including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi—hardly a representative of the party’s left flank—urged Biden to halt the transfer of weapons to Israel. But after Iran’s strikes on Israel this weekend—attacks that, per Israeli officials, included more than 300 missiles and drones, and that, per Iran, were a response to the April 1 Israeli attack on an Iranian diplomatic facility in Syria that killed seven—Biden reaffirmed American support for Israel. However, he also reportedly told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the United States would not back a counterattack against Iran. More broadly, many in the U.S., including in the Biden White House, fear that further escalation could turn into a wider regional conflict.
In Israel, meanwhile, these two strikes made headlines, seized public attention, and generated debate and discussion, but the conclusions drawn were—and are—quite different from what they’ve been here in America. In both instances, the Israeli public’s reaction wasn’t much changed from where they stood beforehand on the war, the government, and the military. Instead, if anything, the past couple of tumultuous weeks have seen Israelis’ priors confirmed as much as they have been challenged.
“This is not the thing that will tip the Israeli public against the war,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israel-based public opinion expert and strategic consultant, of the WCK strikes.
News of that disaster did cut through in Israel. The Israel Defense Forces issued a rare apology and, after an internal investigation, removed two of the officers of the Nahal Brigade, the military unit that ordered the strike. José Andrés, the celebrity chef founder of WCK, went on Israeli TV to tell the Israeli public that they are better than the way this war is being waged.
But if many Israelis’ assurance in their military’s competence was shaken, it was not shattered. And, in any case, reactions to the strikes, and to the government and IDF responses, broke down along familiar political lines, confirming preexisting opinions more than changing them.
For example, said Arie Dubnov, the chair of Israel studies at the George Washington University, “the minute there were strong statements from the U.S. and also Britain,” the Israeli right wing did what it’s done for the past six months: dig down into the belief that the entire world is antisemitic and overly judgmental.
As Dubnov put it, “Relatively speaking, you won’t find it difficult to find Israelis saying something’s wrong with the government. … But what Israelis fear deeply is that you will say something bad about their military.”
In this case, however, “I think the question of who they hold responsible, political or military level, breaks down over political lines,” said Scheindlin. Netanyahu’s staunch supporters blame the military. On the other hand, those who are critical of the prime minister—or have left his Likud party’s fold over what they see as a lack of military planning and a mishandling of the country more generally—are blaming the government, said Will Cubbison, an independent campaign consultant in Israel.
But the political lines are what they were, and the strikes and international reaction haven’t changed them. Since mid-October or November, Netanyahu’s coalition has polled at around 45–50 seats in the Knesset, Cubbison said. “Nothing has changed that to go one way or the other,” he said. “Nothing’s moving this stuff that I can see.”
That doesn’t mean that no one is asking questions about the conduct or competence of the Israeli military. Dubnov, for example, said some Israeli liberals will take the WCK strike as evidence of the IDF’s “indiscriminate killing policy” and that the image of the military’s professionalism is at odds with the military in reality—a view to which Dubnov himself is sympathetic.
Dubnov cited the work of sociologist and political scientist Yagil Levy, who has connected the WCK strikes to a shift in Israeli military culture that has been ongoing and has, over the past several years, intensified. In 2016 a Palestinian man named Abdel Fattah al-Sharif stabbed an Israeli soldier and was subsequently shot and wounded by the military, then immobilized—at which point another Israeli conscript, Elor Azaria, executed him. This was caught on camera. Azaria was prosecuted and sentenced to prison, but his arrest and trial sparked a backlash, particularly from the right wing.
In a recent piece in Foreign Policy, Levy wrote, “From that point forward, the military began to announce the number of Palestinian fighters killed in its operations, demonstrating that its forces did not hesitate to engage.” And “the approach of using body counts as a metric of success has notably intensified during the current war.”
But “Show them who’s the boss” is not a description of a military mission, Dubnov said, adding that since Oct. 7, “the overall environment is revenge.” And for some, particularly on the left, that reality—this image of the military as an unaccountable Wild West—has been sharpened by the WCK strike.
But the faction holding that view remains a minority in the country. And if the general Israeli public didn’t turn on the military or the war after members of the Israeli military shot three hostages in December, Scheindlin pointed out, then it isn’t going to after the death of seven aid workers in a war zone. In fact, after the Nahal Brigade soldiers were dismissed, Iris Haim, the mother of one of the three hostages who was shot and killed, wrote a letter to IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi reminding him that she had asked that the soldiers not be blamed for her son’s death, saying, “Is the blood of my son less important than the blood of citizens of a foreign country?”—that is, why did the military feel it necessary to take such a step now but not after her son was fatally shot?
“It’s not that [the WCK deaths have] not made headlines, not that it’s not there. But it [wasn’t] the public’s first concern,” Scheindlin said. And “even as broader swaths” are asking questions like “What have we become?” and “Are we behaving as the most moral army,” she added, “they are very reflexively able to answer those questions as, ‘we didn’t choose this war.’ ”
And so the war rages on, the government holds on, and the population argues with itself over who is to blame.
That dynamic is unlikely to shift anytime soon, experts say. Israelis are not only processing the news differently than, say, Americans are, an ocean away—they are also getting different news. Left-leaning Israeli outlet Haaretz has charged that Israeli television has become a propaganda arm of the government during this war. Or, as Aymann Ismail put it in Slate earlier this month, in Israel, “media and nightly television depict a very different reality than the rest of the world is seeing.”
Public opinion polls show that Netanyahu and his government are unpopular, and mass protests are ongoing. But his coalition has not fallen, and though many have called for elections to happen now, the next Israeli election does not have to be held until 2026. What’s more, Benny Gantz—who, per polls, would win the election if it were held today—is in the wartime Cabinet with Netanyahu and is broadly supportive of the war. Those who lead the country will likely continue leading the country, at least in the short term; those who come after them will have supported this war too.
Further, Iran’s strikes—and the fact that Israel and its allies and partners (and even, surprisingly to some, neighboring Jordan) were able to defend against them—were seen as a “huge success for the military” in Israel, Dubnov said. He added that this weekend reflected the way that many Israelis would prefer to think about security, as Israeli defense relied on superior technology and diplomatic cooperation to protect its citizens, with the air force as a “bastion of secular rationality” in an increasingly religious country.
Cubbison agreed: “I don’t think last night really changed that much. I think reactions are more fitting already-held beliefs in terms of the importance of having strong allies and critiques of Bibi’s handling the relationship with the U.S., [the] necessity of responding in some way, etc.,” he wrote in an email. “I don’t think it would have changed too much, instead just confirming things people already thought.”
The filters that Israelis are using to process information “conform to how people saw things before,” Scheindlin said of the WCK strikes. “Like so much else, we’re left wondering whether Oct. 7 changed everything or nothing.”
