Israelis woke last Thursday to the news that many of them had been fervently hoping to hear for two years: The Israeli government and Hamas had agreed to a deal to return all Israeli hostages and end the Gaza war.
If the deal holds, it will bring a much-needed end to the violent conflict that begin on Oct. 7, 2023. But it will also force three reckonings for Israelis that will shape the country’s future in more lasting ways.
The first is a reckoning between Israelis and their leaders.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government had been in power for more than nine months when Hamas launched its assault. And despite the departure of key military and intelligence figures, that same government has remained in power, overseeing Israel’s actions in Gaza, the West Bank, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.
Netanyahu and his government are historically unpopular, and most Israelis at least partially blame them for failing to prevent Oct. 7. But Netanyahu has consistently argued that no accountability, assignment of blame, or even elections are appropriate while Israeli hostages remain in Gaza and the war continues. So far, his argument has worked. Despite feeling that their government has abandoned them, Israelis who turned out by the hundreds of thousands before Oct. 7 to protest Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul and those who turned out after Oct. 7 to show solidarity with the hostages and their families have still been reluctant to adopt an overtly political agenda.
That will now come to an end. Israelis will likely demand that this government resign, and Netanyahu will have a hard time keeping his far-right coalition members from bolting over a deal that they view as a capitulation to Hamas. The coming elections will be the most consequential in Israel’s history, ushering in a government that not only will have to manage the fallout from Gaza and help Israelis heal from their physical and emotional scars but will have to rebuild the basic compact between citizens and their government.
The Netanyahu government ignored Israelis’ preferences on the hostages and the war and also fell short on its basic response to the Oct. 7 attack. This forced Israeli civil society to step into the breach to rebuild communities, secure bomb shelters, provide emergency assistance, and organize a civilian diplomatic effort on behalf of the hostage families.
The next government will have to demonstrate that it can perform basic functions while also managing the next phase in Gaza and fixing Israel’s deteriorated relations with European and Arab states. On top of all this, it will also have to fend off constant mendacious attacks from the Israeli right that it is capitulating to terrorists and midwifing a hostile Palestinian state in Israelis’ midst. This would be a daunting burden in the best of circumstances, all the more so for a coalition that is likely to span a wide ideological gamut and disagree on some of the thorniest issues related to the Palestinians.
The second reckoning is over Israeli attitudes toward Palestinians. Some 1,200 Israelis were killed and more than 250 abducted on Oct. 7, but all Israelis personally felt the impact. The lesson that most took away was that there could be no lasting peace with Palestinians and there was no way to build a Palestinian state that could peacefully co-exist with Israel. As a result, Israeli attitudes toward Palestinians are at their nadir, driven by unprecedented hostility.
Yet U.S. President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan calls for Israel to engage with Palestinians in multiple ways, not only in working together on postwar Gaza but on developing a “credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.” It also commits the United States to convene talks between Israelis and Palestinians on a political horizon for peace—in other words, a renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace process. These are difficult things for Israelis to swallow.
Now, Israel will have to embark on a new phase in its relationship with the Palestinians under a cloud of mistrust, suspicion, and anger. There will be a new Palestinian administration in Gaza, there is the existing Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and there are millions of Palestinians who remain under some measure of Israeli control and want to resume their lives, requiring daily interaction with Israelis and their government. Israelis must figure out what their post-Oct. 7 relationship with all of these entities will be now that that period is set to begin.
Is Israel going to maintain the Netanyahu framework of claiming no real distinction between Hamas and the PA, or will it restore the working relationship that it had with the PA only a few years ago? Will West Bank annexation remain a constant threat just over the horizon, or will the pressure from Arab governments and European states that now recognize Palestine force a shift?
If Israel yields to the pressure and offers any sort of political horizon for Palestinian statehood, many Israelis will view it as a reward for Oct. 7, creating enormous domestic political opposition. Alternatively, if Israel categorically rules out working with any Palestinian entity and continues to discuss Palestinian statehood in apocalyptic terms while also deepening the dispossession of Palestinians in the West Bank, it will make the international landscape increasingly hostile. The result will be more state arms embargos, more businesses barred from trade shows, and more Israeli tourists harassed and even attacked while traveling overseas. This will lead directly to the autarkic economy that Netanyahu recently spoke of.
The third reckoning is between Israel and the United States. The Gaza war has brought a seismic shift in Americans’ relationship to Israel. Polls show a majority of U.S. voters now oppose military support for Israel, while a plurality sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis and believe that Israel intentionally kills civilians. Among Democrats, it has become increasingly mainstream to advocate restrictions on security assistance to Israel. And the most influential voices in the MAGA-verse—from Tucker Carlson to Steve Bannon to Candace Owens—speak about Israel in dark terms as a drain on U.S. resources. There is little question that the U.S.-Israel relationship is going to change. The only question is how much.
While the Gaza war was going on, it was easy to dismiss Israel’s faltering status as a short-term dip driven by the daily news images and to argue that everything would go back to the status quo ante with the war’s end. Now that the war is over, Israelis are likely to discover that the opinions developed by many Americans over the past two years will not easily dissipate. Israelis will have to develop new ways to explain their country to Americans, new arguments for why Israel is an important and worthy ally, and new strategies for operating in a world where U.S. support is not necessarily as fulsome or automatic.
Israel may be able to win over some of the skeptics on the question of Israel’s strategic value. This will be particularly true if improved relationships between Israel and its neighbors allow the United States to reduce its presence in the Middle East and if Israel is seen, as with Russia during the Cold War, as a critical bulwark against China.
It will be harder to convince skeptics about Israel’s democratic values and participation in the rules-based order amid genocide accusations, International Criminal Court indictments of Israeli leaders, and the ongoing effort of the Israeli right to pursue annexation and transfer in the West Bank. If Israeli leaders rely on the old saws about Israel being the only democracy in the Middle East or the Israel Defense Forces being the most moral army in the world without making a genuine shift in policy, they will only compound the problems that the country is already facing.
Israelis will spend the coming days and weeks consumed with the return of hostages from brutal captivity and mourning the loss of those who do not return alive. But they will quickly have to turn to the new challenges on the horizon and steer their country in new directions to deal with the massive currents that Oct. 7 has brought.