JERUSALEM (AP) — As Israel gears up for its first elections since Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attack, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his opponents are putting it at the heart of their campaigns.
Nearly every poster, stump speech or televised debate seems to reference the attack, which has scarred the country and remains fresh in the minds of voters. Three years on, the worst security failure in Israel’s history now threatens to end the career of its
longest-serving prime minister.
“October 7 is kind of a framework for the entire political discussion that is going on,” said Tamar Hermann, an expert on Israeli public opinion at the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem think tank. “All of us are post-traumatic in a way.”
Netanyahu’s opponents want him to pay for the failures that led to the deadliest day in Israel’s 78-year history and plunged the country into a series of inconclusive wars. His defenders say Netanyahu was betrayed by the military establishment and that he has led Israel through a dramatic rebound from its darkest hour.
A loss in the Oct. 27 election would likely end the career of the soon-to-be 77-year-old Netanyahu. A victory would mark the greatest turnaround yet for a man who has defied naysayers for three decades.
On the morning of Oct. 7, Hamas militants fired several thousand rockets into Israel and thousands of militants attacked through holes blown in the border fence or with boats or motorized paragliders. Some 1,200 people were killed and 251 others taken hostage.
Israel responded with a military offensive that has killed over 74,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to local health authorities, left the territory in ruins and sparked an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe. Israel later went to war against Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, seized a chunk of Syria, attacked targets in Yemen and joined the U.S. in two wars against Iran.
Hundreds of Israelis, mostly young soldiers, have died, and nearly every household has been touched by the violence. Netanyahu promised “total victory,” but Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran’s theocratic government all remain intact.
Israel’s international standing has plummeted, a number of foreign governments have accused it of genocide — a charge it vehemently rejects — and Netanyahu is now wanted by the International Criminal Court.
After a string of resignations by top security officials, Netanyahu is the only senior figure from Oct. 7 still in office, making this month’s election in many ways a referendum on his leadership.
Netanyahu and his opponents have put Oct. 7 at the forefront of their campaigns — for different reasons.
His opponents — from across the political spectrum — call his outgoing coalition “the massacre government.” Netanyahu says he has led a “war of redemption.”
His chief rival is Gadi Eisenkot, a former military chief whose son and nephew were killed in battle in Gaza. The opponents have pledged to form a government of “repair and reconstruction” — beginning with the formation of an official commission of inquiry into Oct. 7. They also have vowed to end draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox religious men, a long-standing policy that has outraged the secular majority at a time of war, and accuse Netanyahu of threatening Israel's democratic institutions.
“The most fateful elections in the history of the State of Israel are between evasion and enlistment,” Eisenkot wrote on X. “Between taking responsibility and fleeing from responsibility.”
Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected calls for a commission of inquiry while trying to shift the blame to security officials. He recently accused the then-head of the Shin Bet security service, Ronen Bar, of withholding information ahead of the attack. Bar has vowed to file a defamation lawsuit.
Netanyahu has meanwhile denied reports in American media outlets that the United Arab Emirates and Egypt warned him ahead of Oct. 7.
He insists the country is stronger than ever.
“Our enemies expected us to collapse,” Netanyahu said in a recent address to the United Nations. “Well, we didn’t collapse. Instead, we rose and fought like lions.”
Eisenkot’s new Yashar party list includes two parents who lost children on Oct. 7. Netanyahu’s Likud party also includes two grieving parents, among them the mother of a policeman killed in battle on Oct. 7 whose remains were the last to be returned to Israel as part of a ceasefire. Another Likud candidate lost both legs while serving in Gaza.
The leader of the dovish Democrats party, Yair Golan, is a retired general who put on his uniform and rushed to the southern border to fight on Oct. 7. The centrist Together party’s list has another former general, Noam Tibon, who also battled militants as he rescued his son’s family, and the mother of a soldier killed that day.
Other parties have also added people directly impacted by the attack.
Organizers, including victims' relatives, say they are keeping politics out of a mass memorial service in Tel Aviv on Wednesday. But they have hardly concealed their anger at the country’s leadership.
“We will not let anyone evade responsibility,” Yonatan Shamriz, whose brother was taken hostage and mistakenly killed by Israeli soldiers after escaping captivity, said in a radio interview.
Largely missing from the Israeli public discourse is any discussion of the dire situation in Gaza or the fate of the Palestinians.
Israeli leaders have said little about the unprecedented death toll in Gaza, the humanitarian catastrophe and the lack of reconstruction. Instead, they have focused largely on the country’s pain over Oct. 7.
There is almost no mention of peace talks, and even Netanyahu’s challengers largely oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, the international community's preferred solution for the decades-old conflict.
When a pair of Israeli filmmakers released a documentary last month about civilian deaths in Gaza, party leaders across the spectrum, including Eisenkot, accused them of treason.
Polling suggests a close race between Netanyahu and his chief rival, Eisenkot, with an uncertain outcome.
According to the Israel Democracy Institute, over 60% of Israelis say their attitudes toward Oct. 7 are a central factor in whom to vote for. That number jumps to 68% among the Jewish majority; Arab voters are most concerned with a crime wave in their communities.
But Hermann, the IDI polling expert, said this doesn’t necessarily mean bad news for Netanyahu. She says the past three years have hardened attitudes on both sides.
Just because everyone says Oct. 7 is important, she said, “doesn’t mean that they will come out with the same conclusion.”
