For the vast majority of Israelis, modern history is divided between the period before the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, and after. In the three years since Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza following the attacks, Israeli society has undergone fundamental changes. A sense of collective trauma has been amplified through political rhetoric and media hysteria to hitherto unseen levels in modern Israel, observers say.
Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians, and Israel has expanded its attacks to several regional states. The war on Gaza and a series of settler pogroms in the occupied West Bank, fuelled by the Israeli far-right, have contributed to Israel’s growing isolation from much of the world. Daniel Bar-Tal, an Israeli political psychologist at Tel Aviv University, said October 7 shattered the myth of Israeli military invincibility.
Before October 7, 2023, a powerful sense of confidence regarding Israel’s supposed technological and military superiority was common. That ended when Hamas and other groups stormed into Israel: Nearly 1,200 people were killed, and Palestinian groups took about 250 others captive. The Israeli public had been generally isolated from the consequences of the military’s violent actions in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, and Bar-Tal said many were shocked that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might have had prior intelligence about Hamas’s plans.
Inside Israel, the psychological impact of the attacks was palpable. It is a crisis that doesn’t leave the population,” he told Al Jazeera. Palestinians, in particular, have lived with Israel’s genocidal response ever since.
Politicians have exploited the fear and trauma of the October 7 attacks to further their own ends, and are using them to target Palestinians as a whole. Countless polls suggest that Israeli society has lurched even further to the right over the past three years. Mainstream newspaper headlines have asked the question whether the left, which was the main bulwark for a two-state solution in Israel, still exists.
A huge number of Israelis continue to support the execution of Palestinian prisoners charged with “terrorism” and the continued expansion of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. In a May 2025 survey of Israelis by Penn State sociologist Tamir Sorek, an overwhelming majority of respondents said they supported expelling Gaza’s residents. A significant minority also backed the “mass killing” of all residents of cities invaded by Israeli troops, as the biblical Israelites did at Jericho.
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