Three years after the October 7 massacre, Israel is still at war, and no one can say when it will end. The last hostage is home, and we can at last mourn our dead and care for our wounded. But the war exposed a fragility we have not mended, as the flydubai attack of September 30 showed.
Now, as we are about to vote, the country is divided almost evenly again. A tie could send us back to the polls, as it did five times between 2019 and 2022.
This is my first issue as editor of The Jerusalem Report; I follow Ruth Marks Eglash, who steered the publication this past year. I’m sure I speak for many who thank her for incisive news acumen that continued to make this publication a must-read.
The calendar has largely dictated the themes of this issue: the third anniversary of the October 7 Hamas-led massacres in Israel, and the upcoming election on October 27. The following pages show how closely the two events are entwined.
Herb Keinon’s cover story reports that the next Knesset will include people who fought in the war, lost loved ones in it, or served in it, and who will bring that personal experience into politics. In a recent survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, two-thirds of Israeli Jews called the events of October 7 central to their vote, yet, as Dana Blander writes, they will go to the polls without an independent account of what went wrong.
The way Israelis vote gets a hard look. The Report’s deputy editor Chani Kaplan notes that Israelis choose a party but cannot change the order of its candidates, and asks whether a different way of electing representatives would suit the country better.
Tzvi Jasper from the Post’s news desk, looks at Sweden, where, as in Israel, proportional elections keep producing narrow winners and no government. Feature writer, Dana Ben-Shimon reports on the Arab vote at a crossroads: Arab Israelis head to the polls frustrated by crime and distrust, but aware that their turnout could shape the result.
October 7 is also a story of memory and repair. Tania Shalom Michaelian reports from Moshav Sde Nitzan, where residents are building a new community center and, with it, the community that the war shattered. Danielle Greyman-Kennard examines the Palestinian Authority’s shifting presentations of October 7.
In “State of Emergency,” The Jerusalem Post podcast studio manager Lara Sukster Mosheyof draws on unseen footage from the emergency room at Beersheba’s Soroka Medical Center, which treated most of the wounded that day. And in “Drawn Together,” Zeev Engelmayer’s postcards trace the people Israel mourned and waited for, from October 7 to the last hostage’s return.
The issue also looks outward, and the news there is not any easier. Andrew Fox writes that from football to Eurovision, efforts to exclude Israel are making its international isolation increasingly normal. Neville Teller shows how domestic politics are driving Britain and Israel apart. Dr. Yossi Mansharof and Noa Lazimi from the Misgav Institute for National Security, explain how Iran’s growing leverage through the Houthis is turning the Bab el-Mandeb Strait into a threat to Israel and the region.
I’m delighted to be joining The Jerusalem Report, and I look forward to working with its writers and readers in the months ahead.
– Neria Barr