Gideon Israel gazed toward a minaret rising from a Palestinian village below, where a muezzin would soon call the faithful to prayer. Give this ridge over to the Palestinians and you can be sure that missiles will rain down on Israel with deadly accuracy, he said. Just look at what happened to the liberal kibbutzniks near Gaza who were murdered and kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7.
“They believed ‘We can live here, they can live there,’” he told a group of visitors. “‘We can have a fence. We can have mutual respect. We can have economic relations. And everything will be fine.’ October 7 shattered all that.”
There is little reason to believe that most Israelis support his views that Israel should annex the entire West Bank, resettle Gaza, and push Arab and Muslim countries to accept Palestinian refugees. “We don’t see growing support for settlements,” Tamar Hermann, a senior researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute, told me.
But in the aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, the settlers’ movement is having a moment. Two of its strongest advocates hold two of the most powerful posts in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government: Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security. In August, the pair engineered approval of a sprawling 3,400-unit development east of Jerusalem known as E-1, a long-sought goal of their movement that is particularly controversial because it will sever the West Bank from East Jerusalem. United Nations officials have said that E-1 and other Israeli settlements “have no legal validity and constitute a flagrant violation of international law and UN resolutions.”
Yet even if Gideon Israel does not express the views of his average fellow citizen, he has sounded a common chord: The terrorist assault on southern Israel two years ago this week shattered many conventional views about life in this tiny, embattled nation.
To travel today in the West Bank and across Israel, fewer than 300 miles from north to south, is to hear the word “shattered” over and over again. For many, Oct. 7 shattered the idea that Israel’s military would always protect its citizens from invasion. For others, it shattered the hope of a two-state path to peace, at least in their lifetimes.
In those conversations are also the sounds of a country wrestling mightily with itself over the causes, lessons, and aftermath of the attack, which killed about 1,200 people and from which 48 Israelis, most of them now dead, remain hostages in Gaza.
For conservatives, the attack has given new impetus to officially make the West Bank and Gaza part of Israel. For liberals, it has brought a sense of powerlessness — but perhaps also renewed determination — to stop Israel from becoming what international critics contend it has long been: an apartheid state. For Palestinians in the West Bank, many devastated by the suffering of friends and family in Gaza, it has led to a tightening of the security conditions they say oppressed them for decades before Oct. 7.
What I did not hear in those conversations was anything resembling a plausible consensus on a path toward rebuilding Gaza, though a possible agreement brokered by President Trump last week for the release of the hostages and a cease-fire have kindled some hopes of peace.
Nor was there widespread discussion about the death, destruction, and hunger in Gaza itself. Restrictions on independent reporting in Gaza by the Israeli military have limited information, leaving the work to local Palestinian reporters who have faced grave danger. Meanwhile, the government has strenuously rejected international assertions that starvation is widespread, saying that humanitarian aid is being allowed into the strip — only to be hijacked by Hamas.
What I came away thinking is that Oct. 7 has left the country bitterly divided among factions talking past each other, a condition Americans might understand all too well.
Indeed, recent polling by the Israel Democracy Center found that about half of Israelis see the conflict between right and left as “the most acute social tension” in their country today, a big change from a decade ago, when the conflict between Jews and Arabs was considered the main tension, Hermann told me.
Underlying that tension has been the ascendency of the Israeli right and far right, which has liberals frustrated and searching for answers.
“I remind myself that ideas tend to travel to more extreme places in times like this,” said Yuval Dvir, the principal of an international school called Givat Haviva. “I really believe things will return to where they were. It will just take more time.”
Irit Lahav can still summon fond memories of her life in Kibbutz Nir Oz even as she escorts visitors through the rubble of bungalows that were burned to ash and twisted metal by Hamas invaders on Oct. 7.
She used to jog through the mile-wide field separating the Gaza border from Nir Oz, an agricultural community her parents helped found in the socialist spirit of an earlier era. Palestinians worked in the kibbutz, where the residents raised chickens, grew wheat, and tended avocado orchards. On weekends, Lahav would drive Gaza residents needing specialized medical care to Israeli hospitals.
Today that time seems like a faraway dream. On Oct. 7, about a third of the kibbutz’s 415 residents were killed or taken hostage by Hamas attackers. Lahav’s home is one of the few still intact. But she can’t bear to live there full time, with so many neighbors dead or held captive still. As she shows us the safe room where she hunkered down on Oct. 7 with her daughter, one can understand why.
Like many safe rooms in Nir Oz, hers was built solely to protect against rockets: Designed to let people in, not keep them out, it had no lock. When the sound of automatic-rifle fire made it clear they were being invaded on the morning of Oct. 7, Lahav hid under a table in the safe room with her daughter, frantically texting neighbors about how to bar the door.
She grabbed a small wooden oar, a keepsake from her parents, and strapped it to the door handle with wire and strips of leather. Somehow it held. Thus thwarted, the attackers looted the house and left them alone.
A jewelry maker and self-described “leftish” supporter of Palestinian nationhood, she has adorned the house with paintings of Buddha and other South Asian art. As she speaks, green Australian parrots shriek in the eucalyptus trees outside. It is weirdly incongruous.
Asked if she could still imagine having a Palestinian state next door, she surprised me by saying yes. She also said she does not want Israel to annex or build settlements in Gaza. “I think that taking over Gaza, either by military or by putting Jewish people inside, is a terrible action,” she said.
But if she remains steadfast in those beliefs, she has utterly changed about the timetable for Palestinian nationhood. Asked about American protesters and European governments that have called for Palestinian statehood now, she said: “In the long run, I really would like them to have a peaceful country of their own. But right now, when they still have 48 or 49 of our hostages, it’s stupidity.”
“I used to think that there were the few extremists, Hamas, and they controlled the rest of the two million population [of Gaza] that only wants to have peace with us,” she added. “But after the Oct. 7 attack, I changed my mind….This illusion that I had before was shattered.”
Ori, who asked that her last name not be used, is a high school senior from a different kibbutz in the area, which is known as the Gaza envelope. Like Lahav, Ori spent 12 hours huddled in a safe room with her family on Oct. 7 before Israeli troops rescued them. Their kibbutz suffered far less damage and far fewer casualties than Nir Oz, but its residents emerged deeply scarred.
“A lot of Israeli people are filled with anger and revenge and cannot see beyond that,” Ori told me. She too struggled to contain her fury but found an outlet when she returned to her boarding school, Givat Haviva, located 35 miles north of Tel Aviv. There, she was able to talk through her feelings with her Arab Israeli classmates — the only Palestinians her age she had ever known intimately.
“This was the only stable place I had after Oct. 7,” Ori said. “My roommates and I had a lot of arguments. It was really, really difficult. But it also allowed me to let my emotions out.”
After she graduates, she plans to attend college abroad. “I need a break from this country,” she said. “I need to learn how to miss this country.”
Givat Haviva is an unusual oasis of diversity among Israeli public schools, with a mix of Palestinian Israeli, Jewish Israeli, and international students, almost evenly divided among Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Unlike many Israeli schools, they discuss Palestinian narratives in Israeli history, including about the Nakba — Arabic for “catastrophe” — when some 700,000 Palestinians were driven from Israel in 1948.
In a time when the Israeli left is a shadow of its once powerful self, the school is like a walled garden for the liberal vision of Jewish and Palestinian comity.
Like Ori, teachers and administrators at the school say they feel alienated from both Israeli conservatives, who see their liberal ethic as almost traitorous post-Oct. 7, and progressives overseas, who condemn their government for the unrelenting military campaign in Gaza that has killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza officials. To some of them, it feels as if their personal loyalty to Israel and its right to exist are under attack.
Clare King Lassman, the school’s director of fundraising and communications, is originally from Britain. She fell in love with Israel after multiple visits and decided to move here to raise a family 18 years ago. She abhors the war, but said that she also feels anguish when her progressive friends back home lash out at Israel as a genocidal state.
“Our beautiful country has become a pariah state,” she told me. “Sometimes I think it would be so much easier to be right-wing.”
Seventy miles and a world away lies Efrat, a sprawling settlement just south of Bethlehem in the part of the West Bank that Israelis know as Judea. Blink twice and you might think you were in a Southern California suburb, with all the red-tiled roofs, tiny green lawns, and SUVs parked along the street. Founded by an American rabbi in 1983, it attracted American emigres, and today perhaps a quarter of its 15,000 residents are from the United States, many of them professionals who work in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
“Settlement residents are not just crazy people who came in the middle of the night,” Eve Harow, 64, who has lived in Efrat for nearly 40 years, told me. “Some came for the quality of life, so they can live in a home with a nice garden for the same money as a tiny apartment in Tel Aviv.”
Harow’s paternal grandfather moved his family from Berlin to Israel in the early 1930s, anticipating Hitler’s rise, but then transplanted them again to the United States in the 1950s, after Israel became a nation, because of the perpetual threat of war and the lack of modern conveniences.
Harow grew up in Los Angeles but by the time she was a young woman, she had resolved to “make aliyah” — move to Israel — and married a man who felt the same way. After he finished medical school in the States, they transplanted to Israel and raised a family. Today she has seven children and 16 grandchildren, with another on the way.
She worked for a time at One Israel Fund, which advances the settler cause, and now gives guided tours of the region. As she navigates through the collection of settlements known as Gush Etzion, she ticks off Old Testament references at every turn. That valley is where King Herod built an aqueduct system. That village is where one of the Maccabee brothers died fighting to create a Jewish kingdom.
Each one is offered as dispositive evidence that Jews are not interlopers here. “We are called Jews because we are from Judea,” she said.
There have been numerous reports about intensified violence by settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank since Oct. 7, particularly north of Jerusalem in the Samarian highlands. “Settlers have been stealing the Bedouins’ sheep and goats,” Hiba Husseini, a Palestinian lawyer in Ramallah, told me. “They have been cutting down olive trees, burning cars, attacking people on the road. People are fearful.” Settler groups say such reports are exaggerated.
But in Gush Etzion, Harow contends that Hamas-inspired attacks originating in Hebron or Bethlehem are the greatest threat to peace. She bought a Glock 42 pistol during the second intifada in 2000, and began carrying it regularly after Oct. 7. “It became a reality that we could be invaded,” she said.
For that reason, she — like many in the settlement movement — wants the Netanyahu government to impose Israeli law across the entire West Bank, not just the 60 percent that it now controls under the Oslo Accords of the 1990s. In time, she also hopes that Israel will control the entire Jordan Valley, running from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea, to reduce the threat of invasion from the east.
“They claim they hate us because we took their land,” she said of the Palestinians. “But it turns out that’s not why they hate us. It’s about the essence of who we are.” She added: “Most Israelis understand now that we can’t have a Palestinian state.”
Indeed, a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute released on Sept. 30 shows that three out of four Israelis now think that Palestinians do not have a right to their own state, a jump of 11 points from a year ago. Even nearly half of self-identified liberals said they do not think it is in the country’s best interest to allow a Palestinian state at the current time.
The chance of Israel agreeing to a two-state path to peace “absolutely is dead, for now,” Tamar Hermann told me.
As Harow sat on her patio overlooking Bethlehem, she said she had long predicted something like Oct. 7. “For me it was always: Where and how big?” she said. Then she told a story about Vivian Silver, a peace activist and ardent supporter of Palestinian nationhood who was murdered on Oct. 7. Harow later visited Silver’s kibbutz and knelt in the ashes of her incinerated home.
“On Oct. 6, I would have had nothing in common with her,” Harow said. “It was beautiful how she felt. But it was too naive. I sat there and wept for her. I wept that I was so right. But I get no joy out of being right.”
The road from Bethlehem to Hebron is spotted with settlements, new and old, each with its own set of security checkpoints and guard posts. To Ghaleb Kweder, a Palestinian tour guide, each one is as illegitimate as the next, all built on stolen land.
Where Harow could pinpoint sites of ancient Hebraic significance in every town, he offered a Palestinian rebuttal. He even gestured toward Mount Nebo in Jordan on the distant horizon, where Moses looked upon Israel before dying. “God told Moses to see the promised land, not to step into it,” he quipped, suggesting the promised land was not meant to be a Jewish land. “That is not my story. It is in the Bible.”
As he drove, he checked a WhatsApp group thread that provides crowdsourced intelligence on which checkpoints are open and where the traffic is lightest. Today he didn’t find the shortcut he had been hoping for, so we funneled onto the central road into Hebron, where a mile-long backup awaits.
Hebron is the largest Palestinian city in the West Bank, with about a quarter-million residents. It is also considered the fourth-holiest city in Islam because it is where Abraham, revered by Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike, is buried along with his wife Sarah and son Isaac.
Like so much of this land, the burial site is claimed by Jews and Muslims, and both worship here: For Jews it is the Tomb of the Patriarchs; for Muslims, al-Ibrahimi Mosque. Also like so much of this land, the site has witnessed terrible violence, most notably the 1994 Ramadan massacre of 29 Muslim worshippers by a far-right Jewish settler named Baruch Goldstein.
The feeling of occupation weighs heavily over the city’s narrow and crowded streets. At a cavernous gift shop called Golden Bazzar, the shelves were fully stocked with crafts made by local artisans, many of them depicting the golden Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. But the aisles were empty of shoppers — the result, the proprietor said, of checkpoints erected after Oct. 7 to keep Palestinians from driving through a handful of Jewish neighborhoods. He predicted he would have to shutter the store and lay off his 14 workers if the streets did not reopen soon.
For Kweder, the endless war in Gaza, the tightening security, and the expanding Jewish settlements are all of a piece. “Even when the war is over, they will not open the gates,” he said of the Israeli government. “Because the war is just the first step. Next they will take over all the West Bank.”
Later, he added: “If we had given more autonomy to Gaza, Oct. 7 wouldn’t have happened. You give people no control over their lives and the pressure builds up and then explodes.”
Such bitterness is not always shared by the Palestinian citizens of Israel, whose lives are materially better than most West Bank Palestinians’ and who can vote and hold office.
Still, many describe their lives as perpetually haunted by a sense of second-classness and of being unable to openly express their thoughts. Even before Oct. 7, Palestinian Israelis were arrested for displaying Palestinian flags, though courts often dismissed those cases.
Adham Darawshe is a 16-year-old senior at a public high school in Jerusalem called Hand in Hand, where Palestinian and Jewish Israelis are taught together in Arabic and Hebrew. Tall, handsome, and athletic, Darawshe speaks Hebrew well enough that his Jewish friends sometimes forget that he is Palestinian and lapse into derogatory language about Arabs in front of him. He says he usually lets it slide.
But in a recent encounter with police in a train station, he was questioned by an officer who clearly thought he was Palestinian. When he responded in Hebrew, the officer said, “Oh, you’re Israeli,” implying he thought Adham was Jewish. Rather than say yes and move on, Adham told the officer the truth, that he was Muslim. The officer seemed puzzled, then let him go.
Such encounters underscore to him his double life. He wants to attend university in Israel and study computer science “to prove I’m as good as anyone.” But afterward, he plans to leave Israel and find a life somewhere that he won’t feel like “the other.”
“When I’m with Arabs, I’m a Jew. When I’m with Jews, I’m an Arab,” he said. “I want to have a place to go and be myself.”
Almost since the Oct. 7 attack, protesters have gathered in cities across Israel every Saturday night to demand the return of the hostages still held by Hamas — 20 of whom are believed to be alive – and an end to the war in Gaza.
During one recent demonstration, tens of thousands of people gathered in a plaza in downtown Tel Aviv that has been dubbed Hostages Square. They listened to folk music and heard speeches as photos of hostages flashed on a huge screen behind the stage. Many wore T-shirts saying “Bring them home now” in Hebrew and English. Blue-and-white Israeli flags waved throughout the throng.
More than once that evening, appeals were issued not to the Israeli government but to the American president. “President Trump, you saved my life. But the mission is not finished,” Keith Siegel, who was released after 484 days in captivity, told the crowd. “You have the power to bring them all back.”
Toward the back of the crowd, Dani Elazar observed: “They call on Trump to save us because they have no hope that the prime minister of Israel will do anything.”
Elazar was until recently the CEO of the Hand in Hand schools. Born in Detroit, he came to Israel as a child, attended university, and then worked as a tech executive before turning his energies to education. Eventually he helped build Hand in Hand into a system of six schools with 2,100 students.
It is a small but passionate experiment meant to demonstrate that Israeli Jews and Arabs can live together in equality. A painting in the lobby of its Jerusalem school says much about its philosophy, depicting the Arabic word for democracy morphing into the Hebrew one, and then back into Arabic. The piece underscores how astonishingly similar the two words look.
On Sept. 30, Elazar resigned his position to work in politics. The suffering in Gaza, the push to expand West Bank settlements, and the general right-wing drift of the country led him to believe he must do more to rally political opposition to Netanyahu’s coalition in advance of elections scheduled for the fall of 2026.
Polls suggest Netanyahu is not popular and that most Israelis want him held accountable for what happened on Oct. 7. But his approval rating has stabilized in recent months, and he remains among the most resourceful and resilient politicians in Israeli history.
On the other side, the Israeli left remains profoundly weak: The once proud and powerful Labor Party that helped create Israel had grown so irrelevant that it merged with another party and rebranded as The Democrats, who hold a meager four seats out of 120 in the Knesset.
Moreover, the Israeli military has scored a series of breathtaking triumphs since 2023, against not just Hamas but also Hezbollah and, with American assistance, Iran. The historically threatened country now straddles the Middle East as a military juggernaut.
Yet if the country’s military victories have helped Netanyahu stay in power and emboldened the far right, they have not brought it any closer to lasting peace, Elazar argued.
“When the war ends, people will have to rethink their world views,” he told me. “After all this, two peoples are still on the same land. They will have to make decisions about how to live together. Will we continue fighting? Or find ways to coexist?”
When the demonstration in Hostages Square ended, the crowd sang the national anthem and then filed back into the city through the darkened streets, past outdoor cafes that buzzed with conversations over wine.
The next week, the war would rage on, the hostages would remain in captivity, the agony of Gaza would deepen, and the protesters would be back.
Reporting for this piece was sponsored in part by the American Middle East Press Association.