In the raw weeks after October 7, 2023, the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas in Israel were not one issue among several – it was the only issue. It didn’t compete with the cost of living or coalition politics; it swallowed them. Three years later, ahead of an election that will be the first real referendum since that calamitous day, the question isn’t whether Israelis still care; it’s whether caring still means what it used to.
The Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) found that 68% of Jewish Israelis still consider October 7 as a central factor in their vote. A majority, to be sure, but not the single, foremost thought on voters’ minds, as many would assume.
The same survey shows foreign affairs and security tied with the economy at 38%-39% as the top consideration, with the identity of the party leader trailing at 23%.
What could have easily been a single-issue election is actually one of the most complex in our country’s history. The Hamas attacks have become one consideration among several, rather than the sole consideration.
Hardened divisions
The IDI researcher behind the survey offers a sharper version of the same idea: October 7 hasn’t pushed voters to change their minds; instead, it reinforced opinions that voters already had.
“If people were on the Left, they are perhaps further to the Left,” said Prof. Tamar Hermann, director of IDI’s Viterbi Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research.
“They have become more radical in terms of where they were. We know that even on the Left, people do not support the immediate implementation of the two-state solution. Even if they still support it, they see it as something that might be realistic in the distant future. In this respect, you can say that they moved to the Right, but they didn’t change their view that the Palestinians are entitled to self-determination.”
While the wound may not be still bleeding, it hasn’t quite healed either. Instead, the data shows entrenchment: existing camps hardening, not new camps forming.
Nowhere is that clearer than among haredi voters, only about a quarter of whom call the Hamas attacks on October 7 central to their vote, compared with roughly three-quarters of secular and traditional non-religious Jews.
That gap likely existed in some form in 2023 too, but Hermann’s finding that the haredi draft crisis, the major topic of 2026, “is not as influential as we thought it would be” suggests something more specific: even an ongoing crisis is not enough to override where religiosity already places a voter. If the draft fight can’t reorder the map when we’re living through that controversy every day, it’s hard to argue that the October 7 attacks alone could change minds after three years.
None of this means that the October 7 atrocities are unimportant. Far from it, actually, as per separate July polling conducted by N12, which found that two-thirds of undecided voters still cite it as their top issue, suggesting that whatever settling has happened among committed partisans, the Hamas-led massacres are still capable of moving the voters who haven’t picked a side.
That same resistance to a single storyline showed up when the conversation turned to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The idea that it is all about Bibi, or only Bibi, is a misperception. What we see, and it’s very interesting, is that there is no single issue around which these elections revolve,” Hermann said, adding that the media may be “personalizing these elections more than the reality warrants.”
Memory and time
The timing of the election was debated in the Knesset extensively before the October 27 date was settled on. When asked whether the election’s proximity to the third anniversary of October 7 could influence results, Hermann pointed to the literature on public memory.
“The span of public memory is normally between six and 10 months if an event is to remain truly influential,” she said.
Three years out, by that measure, is a long time. But she was careful to frame this as one factor feeding into a much larger point, rather than the whole explanation. The public having “a short memory” sits alongside, not instead of, the deeper argument that the election was never only about Netanyahu or October 7 to begin with.
The pattern of fading without disappearing continued into another hot-button issue: the matter of establishing a commission of inquiry.
Hermann noted that the specific demand has lost force, even as the underlying appetite for accountability hasn’t. “People think that the issue should be investigated, but not necessarily by a state commission of inquiry,” she said. “They have no real preference between such a commission and any other kind.” She suggests that this may partly reflect the campaign by Netanyahu’s camp to convince supporters that a Supreme Court-led commission would be biased against him.
This means that roughly half of Likud voters can consider October 7 a real consideration and yet still vote for Netanyahu’s Likud party by following the narrative that he was “misled,” and with Israel ultimately emerging “strategically stronger.”
So what is this election about? What do Israelis actually want?
According to Hermann, Israel is truly at a defining moment, and it’s all about identity. This October 27, the majority of citizens will go to the polls wondering: “What kind of Israel would I like to see in the future?”
Rather than creating a new political map, the massacres by Hamas and the years that followed may have hardened existing divisions while changing the meaning that voters attach to them.
Time hasn’t healed the wound. It’s done something more particular to Israeli politics, as security, Palestinian statehood, judicial reform, religion and state, conscription, and Netanyahu himself now sit inside a larger question about what sort of country Israelis believe should emerge from the war.■