Dahlia Scheindlin: Israel’s Political Turmoil

This transcript is from a CSIS podcast published on April 3, 2025. Listen to the podcast here.

Jon Alterman: What's the general mood in Israel right now?

Dahlia Scheindlin: It's a little bit hard to characterize a general mood because Israel is a very deeply divided society. What we have is a combination of very energetic and angry mass protests that have been going on since January 2023 but, in the ebb and flow of protests, have been really resurgent over the last couple of weeks, with new peaks following the announcement of the government and the prime minister that he wants to fire the attorney general and then the head of the Shin Bet.

Jon Alterman: Which is the internal security apparatus.

Dahlia Scheindlin: Yes. There’s also the hostage release negotiations, which are or aren't happening depending on which day you talk to the prime minister—who's sowing a great deal of chaos. There has been a huge wave of anger and protest because of restarting the war. That's backed up by survey research showing that somewhere around 60% of Israelis regularly, every time these questions are asked, believe that the prime minister is making decisions about this war based on his personal political interests, primarily staying in power.

Only about a third of Israelis believe that he's making his decisions, whether it's wartime decisions or decisions about the hostages, for those causes themselves. That is a very fundamental breakdown of how, the majority of the Israeli public, sees the government and its actions.

There's a lot of skepticism. There's a great deal of talk and experiences of officers and high-level figures in the army who are seeing a decline in the response rate of reservists responding to their draft orders, and a great concern that if this war simply goes on with no real end in sight—which is what the government appears to be promoting—there will be a real problem with motivation.

On the other hand, I have to also mention the roughly 30%—sometimes it's more, 30%, 35%—who essentially support most of what this government says and does. If you live in that world and you listen just to the prime minister and what he says, Benjamin Netanyahu is convinced that he is the person leading Israel to a better place, fighting to get the hostages back, the warrior against antisemitism, the person who can defend Israel against Iran and its axis.

His government, of course, wants to do more than that, and is expansionist and wants to annex Gaza and expel Gazans and rebuild settlements. There's a core of about 20%, 25% who support that too. They are included within the broader one-third roughly who support almost anything this government does. From their perspective, as difficult as times may be, they think that the country is doing the right thing. There's always a deep division, but that's the big breakdown.

Jon Alterman: First, who are these one-third of Israelis who strongly support Netanyahu? Second, why are the other two-thirds that think that he's doing this for personal advancement so incapable of moving Israeli politics in a different direction? Israel is, after all, an electoral democracy.

Dahlia Scheindlin: It is an electoral democracy, but it has already lost its status in one of the gold standard indices of democracy, the V-Dem index, of being a liberal democracy. Yes, Israelis will be going to the polls. The question is, how meaningful those elections will be in a year and a half if the government continues on its program, which is well underway, of trying to intimidate and essentially clip civil society, undermine the viability of organizations that are critical of the government and undercut the independence of the judiciary, and constrain independent media.

All of those things make it harder to have a serious electoral competition. If there's no limits on the state, who knows how far it will go in intimidating protesters and dissenters? There's already lots of examples of police crackdown, et cetera, and a lot can be done in the next year and a half until elections are scheduled. The fact that a majority is either skeptical of the government's motivations, opposes, or doesn't trust Netanyahu in various other questions—surveys about trust itself do not translate into toppling the government.

They can't force new elections just because they feel a certain way in surveys or even if they demonstrate on the street. When elections are held, most of Israeli society is still right-wing even if they distrust Netanyahu, so there's going to be a strong showing for right-wing parties even if they're not Netanyahu.

Then after elections, Netanyahu, because of the coalition system and the fragmented party system, is a master at re-engineering his political options. That's the main reason why a majority of people who may not trust him can't automatically get rid of him. The next elections are far away anyway. They're only scheduled for late 2026. In terms of the people who support him, he has a stalwart base.

I would say the government itself—the whole government, the original parties that formed the coalition in late 2022—has a very strong core of support from the ultra-Orthodox and many of the national religious community.

The majority of them will support this government, and did support one of the parties in the coalition. Then, there's a core group who supports Likud itself, traditional Likud voters for generations. That adds up regularly to about a third of the Israeli public. Now, there's another measure, which is whenever public surveys ask, "Who do you trust more or who do you think is best suited to be prime minister?" Those surveys usually test Netanyahu against one other candidate.

Sometimes it's the head of the opposition, Yair Lapid. Sometimes it's the person who's the front runner right now, Benny Gantz, or the theoretical Naftali Bennett, who we all know or think we know is going back into politics soon. Every time that's asked, at this point, Netanyahu is mostly coming out first. Sometimes Naftali Bennett is ahead of him, but he generally gets in the higher 30% range.

When it comes to the individual choice about who is the best possible prime minister, you have an additional portion who still think Netanyahu is better than the alternatives. It can range from 5%, 6% more than the original basis for the government. Those are people who if you ask them, they often say, "Well, Netanyahu is problematic, but there's nobody else." It's the kind of thing that people have been saying frankly for the last 10, 15 years.

Jon Alterman: A lot of these trends were underway before the October 7 attacks. As you noted, Israelis were protesting starting January 2023. How did the October 7 attacks change this dynamic?

Dahlia Scheindlin: It's a very interesting pattern. What we see in most other countries when a war breaks out, especially a war that starts in this way with such a devastating attack on your society, is generally people rally together and support for everything to do with the state goes up. The government gets a huge boost of support. Think of after September 11, support for George W. Bush in the United States or support for Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine after Russia invaded.

We had the opposite effect in Israel. The first thing that happened after the war, after October 7 and Hamas's attack, was a crash in support for Netanyahu personally, for his party, and for his government. Levels of trust, even in a generic way, just plunged. I could cite the numbers from all of these indicators, but one of the most interesting ones was that very question I talked about before, “Who's most suited to be prime minister”? Netanyahu fell 20 points behind every other candidate who was tested.

That's a very unusual outcome in the early phase when people are really clinging together. There was a rallying effect that you saw in survey research and on the streets in Israeli society. The level of social solidarity went through the roof among Jews, among Arabs, among everybody. For the government, it crashed. However, that lasted for about six solid months with these very low ratings for everything to do with the government, its positions, its electoral support, et cetera.

Then over the course of the spring and second half of 2024, the government was able to regain much of what it lost in those early months of the war.

The government made the decision to conduct a serious escalation against Hezbollah and Hamas, assassinating Ismail Haniyeh in Iran, which was considered bold, daring, successful. All of those things together, including the escalations directly with Iran, led to a recovery of support for the government as Israelis began to perceive that the country was behaving in ways that demonstrated its strength.

It's the sort of "Israel is back" power in the region. There were some other reasons. For whichever reason, though, the government did regain its position that it was in pretty much before the war.

In practice, the government is actually even bigger than it was before because it brought back an erstwhile splinter party from Likud. The current foreign minister, Gideon Sa'ar, merged himself back into the government and then into Likud as well. What you have now is a very strong coalition. In survey research, in terms of public sentiment, it still does not enjoy majority support, but it has recovered some of what it lost in the early phase of the war.

Jon Alterman: How does the war fit into Netanyahu's political strategy and how does Netanyahu's political strategy fit into the war?

Dahlia Scheindlin: There is a tendency among analysts and certainly among the Israeli public, as I mentioned, to perceive Netanyahu as making his wartime decisions based on his political strategy. I cannot prove if that's the reason, because there is also a strong minority convinced that he's making his wartime decisions purely for the purposes of Israeli security and sustainability—and maybe expansion, which is one of their goals.

I can tell you about the circumstantial evidence and claims that he is making wartime decisions as part of his political strategy. The logic behind that claim is that his coalition partners—particularly the parties of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, Religious Zionism and Jewish Power, respectively—which are Jewish fundamentalist, extremist parties, deeply oppose ending the war because they ultimately want to annex Gaza and rebuild Jewish settlements there.

They see it as correcting a historic, cosmic, theological, and deeply egregious error—Israel's withdrawal of its settlements in 2005. They view this war as a miraculous sign from the heavens that Israel is destined to recontrol that territory. They basically say as much. We have a minister, Orit Strook, who at one point said, "We're living in a time of miracles." There’s no question that this is their aim.

They have said time and again, and they have demonstrated that they are serious about this, that they will bolt from the coalition and could topple the government if they believe the ceasefires will become permanent and that the war will end. They would protest by toppling the government. What we also saw was that when this current hostage deal was established in mid-January, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was the head of the Jewish Power party, did bolt from the coalition. He made good on that threat.

Bezalel Smotrich, who is the finance minister and also a minister within the Ministry of Defense, stayed in the government but essentially with an ultimatum, saying, "If we don't restart the war, I will then break up the government." At that point, the government would have fallen. Whether or not I can claim to be inside Netanyahu's head, it was a pretty fair analysis at the time, even in January, that that deal was never going to move into phase two, which would have included a permanent ceasefire.

I'm sorry to have been right, tragically sorry, because the day after the deal was signed, it was clear to me, and I wrote this in my analysis, that the deal was destined to collapse and not reach the second phase. That's exactly what happened. Do we know for sure that Netanyahu is making these political strategic calculations instead of actually thinking what's good for the country and good for bringing the hostages back? No, I can't prove what's going on in his head. If you piece those things together, it seems like a very logical connection. That's certainly what the Israeli public thinks.

Jon Alterman: You start off by talking about the various challenges to Netanyahu, Netanyahu's challenges to the rest of the system. There's the issue of the Shin Bet head, who he's been trying to dismiss. They're trying to get rid of the attorney general. There are the bribery cases that are moving forward. There is the prospect of new elections in 2026 at the end of the year.

Several months ago, there was a sense that maybe the government would collapse over an inability to pass a budget by April 1. It seems to have gotten through that problem. As we look forward over the next year or two, what are the kinds of things that could erupt and throw the plans off? When should we expect them?

Dahlia Scheindlin: It's hard to know exactly what might topple the government, considering that the government is in a pretty strong position until the next scheduled elections of late October or November 2026. The government, as you point out, has passed a number of the major hurdles. So far, it has not collapsed over the issue of the ultra-Orthodox draft law, which is still looming. It has passed the budget. It got through the first tumultuous phase of the war when there was a lot of reason to think that the government could not withstand the public pressure, but it did.

We are also speaking on a day when Netanyahu is actually being investigated for yet a new possible scandal. The accusation is that the country of Qatar had been paying some of his own advisors in the prime minister's office to do a positive PR campaign at a time when Qatar is both certainly playing a mediator role in the hostage release negotiations with Hamas but also is being accused of having funded Hamas for all these years, which Netanyahu is accused of having allowed, and maybe even midwifed.

There's a lot of secrecy over the investigation because it's partly under a gag order. The basic accusation is that employees of the prime minister, his close associates, his spokespeople, were actually taking money from an enemy country to advance its own good image. This is a kind of infiltration of Qatar into the Israeli government. These are serious investigations. The prime minister is, at this minute, being investigated.

That's another issue that is brewing. It's very hard to say how that will play out and what it will mean. It might not come to anything, like an indictment against him, or it could. We just don't know. It's too early in that process to say. There is still the issue of the ultra-Orthodox draft law, which the Supreme Court has ordered the government to pass a law that meets the standards of equality in Israeli society in terms of equal obligations.

Of course, the coalition partners, primarily the ultra-Orthodox parties, and, to some extent, the religious Zionist parties, are dead set against any law that would really have teeth in terms of drafting mass numbers of ultra-Orthodox into the army. This is frankly just quixotic from the Israeli perspective, because we are embarking on something like a forever war and possibly the establishment of a military government over Gaza. Who is going to do all that if there's this constant deficit of both morale and manpower?

Jon Alterman: I know you pay a lot of attention to American politics, as you're both an American citizen and Israeli citizen. There's been a lot of commentary in the United States about how the Trump administration is creating a crisis of democracy by asserting the strength of the executive over the judiciary. There certainly have been battles in Israel between the executive and judiciary. It's a little bit different because the executive comes out of a parliamentary majority. As you think about the debates about the future of democracy in Israel, how much do they echo what you're reading about debates on the future of democracy in the United States?

Dahlia Scheindlin: I'm not sure how much it matters. The more fundamental thing is that Israel had much weaker or even missing pillars of its democratic structure, making it far more precarious than the U.S. structure. Remember, the fact that Israel doesn't have a real separation between the legislature and the executive is a major issue.

The executive has control over the legislature in Israel by institutional design. As you pointed out, it's a parliamentary system. We don't have any of the normal additional checks and balances on executive power or even on the legislature. We don't have a federal system. We don't have regional representation. We are a single-constituency proportional representation system.

That means there's no local accountability. We don't have a presidential veto. We don't have a written constitution—a formal written constitution. Even Israel's basic laws, which are considered a stand-in for a constitution, have very precarious status. The basic approach for passing or amending even a basic law is simply a majority of those present in Knesset. Even the ones that are entrenched usually require just 61 out of 120 votes to change them.

There are very few that have a special entrenchment clause that require two-thirds of the Knesset to actually change them—80 members of Knesset. One of those laws that is so entrenched is the date of the next election, of any given election. That would be hard to change. However, there is already grave concern in Israel that somehow this government will try to postpone elections if they feel the need, if they think it's in their favor, to just not hold them anytime soon.

Now, the parallel to that is Trump already talking about the possibility of trying to run for a third term. This is gathering momentum in the president's mind. This is what we've seen over time since he's taken office. Even over the last few days, he's talked about it more seriously. But the starting point is different. There are far fewer pillars of democracy for Israel than the United States.

Practically, in its earliest phase, Israel as a country implemented deeply undemocratic practices such as martial law over its own citizens, not for a few hours like in South Korea, but for 20 years, over one-fifth of its own citizens. It’s also instituted an ongoing occupation ever since then over the Palestinians who are not citizens—a very undemocratic practice that implicates all Israelis who are involved in it. There is, all at once, a missing foundation, an ongoing anti-democratic practice, and strong democratic institutions and democratic practice.

It's a bit of a chaotic understanding of democracy. Then what you see is a real overdrive of assault on those democratic institutions of the kind that we're talking about. If Israel were to just postpone the next elections just as Trump is trying to sow the seeds of justifying a third term, which violates the US Constitution, that would be bringing the assault to a new level. I think they are emboldened by one another.

Jon Alterman: Let's say somebody's listened to your presentation and said, "Well, Dahlia Scheindlin has a lot of interesting points, but there's a lot out there, I can't pay attention to 17 things in Israeli politics. I can pay attention to maybe one, two, or three.” What are the most important signposts that people should be paying attention to?

Dahlia Scheindlin: The most important thing to keep your eyes on in terms of the direction of the country, which will influence both politics and democracy, et cetera, is annexation. Anybody who really wants to know the trajectory of Israel should look at how Israel is already annexing the West Bank in practice and should look at how Israel is laying the groundwork for expelling Gazans in preparation for establishing a military government and some form of permanent control over Gaza.

The groundwork being laid regarding annexation includes, for example, the establishment of an emigration authority and the legitimization of the idea through deceptive language— by calling it emigration by choice or voluntary emigration for Gazans. It's nothing less than driving people out due to wartime conditions that make it prohibitive to actually live there. That is in preparation for Israel essentially expanding, in a kind of empire fashion, its permanent control over the West Bank and Gaza while it does not plan to give citizenship to the subjects who live there and making those regimes permanent.

That will mean that Israel cannot have a democratic system because it will have established permanent control through an undemocratic authoritarian military regime over millions of people. That doesn't trouble this particular government. 

The inflection point will really be the next election. Will Israelis bring back parties that, even if they are right-wing, militant, hawkish, are committed on some level to at least rebuilding something with a far stronger foundation, with democratic institutions of the state.

Or will elections either return Netanyahu and coalition partners to power who are not interested in preserving anything like a semblance of democracy or moving toward that, but are more committed to religious fundamentalism and territorial and imperial expansion? Sorry to use the cliché term, but it does increasingly look like Israel is operating based on 19th-century norms. It could also just manage to get out of elections altogether. Those three pathways on the electoral level are the things that I would look out for.

Jon Alterman: Dahlia Scheindlin, thank you very much for joining us on Babel.

Dahlia Scheindlin: Thank you for having me.

(END.)