Attack pushes new Israeli voters to right

YOUTH BALLOTS: A newly eligible voter said that the 2023 Hamas attack led him to support a party led by the national security minister, which has promised ‘deterrence’

Like hundreds of thousands of Israelis, Amihai will be of voting age for the first time since Hamas carried out its attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

When he casts his ballot this month, he has one priority above all — security.

From a field overlooking the sprawling ruins of the northern Gaza Strip, the 18-year-old says he plans to vote for a far-right party at the ballot box, three years after the deadliest day in Israeli history.

Young people sit at a beach in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Sept. 29.

Photo: AFP

“I’m voting based solely on security — not for whoever will help me buy an apartment in 10 years, but for whoever can guarantee that I’ll even still be alive here in 10 years,” he told reporters.

Amihai, from Shomria in southern Israel, was speaking less than 2km from Gaza, swathes of which have been flattened by Israeli bombardment since the war with Hamas erupted in 2023.

He was attending an event calling for Jewish settlement of the Palestinian territory and said that on Oct. 27 he would be casting a vote for the party of Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir.

“After October 7, [2023] I want death for the terrorists, I want the terrorists here to suffer in prison, I want there to be deterrence,” the teenager said, alluding to a recently passed death penalty law that applies to Palestinians.

Sporting a cap and T-shirt in support of the minister, Amihai said he also wanted “emigration from Gaza, that the people of Gaza will be dying to leave” — another policy advocated by government ministers in the past few months.

About 550,000 Israelis aged 18 to 22 will be voting for the first time this month, Israel’s Channel 12 reported.

In a recent poll commissioned by the channel, 74 percent of first-time voters described their policy views as right or center-right — an even higher share than the broadly right-leaning public at large.

The trend stands in contrast to many Western democracies where young people are among the most left-leaning voters — with some motivated by outrage over Israel’s actions in Gaza.

However, the right-wing turn of Israeli Jewish young people has been building for about two decades, pollster and analyst Dahlia Scheindlin said.

“Older people ... remember the hope of reaching full, comprehensive peace agreements with the Palestinians,” Scheindlin told reporters.

“Anybody who’s an 18-year-old now, his or her entire political consciousness is under [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, it’s a very ultra-nationalist environment,” she said.

At a gathering of young activists for the center-left Democrats party in Tel Aviv last month, 18-year-old Gili said she felt society had turned its back on peace.

“I think especially young people, when they see something so huge happening, something that hurts so deeply and affects everyone, like what happened on October 7 [2023], then the first tendency is fear, to be afraid, and not to believe that peace is possible,” she told reporters. “It’s really logical that everyone kind of became more and more right-wing, and more and more extreme.”

Hamas’ attack in 2023 resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people, according to an Agency France-Presse tally based on official Israeli figures.

In response, Israel launched a massive military offensive that has killed more than 74,200 people in Gaza, according to the health ministry there.

Gili and her friends at the rally said they supported the Democrats’ vision of a political agreement with the Palestinians.

“Conflict management is not a solution and I don’t think the current situation can go on,” said Yuval, an 18-year-old from kibbutz Tel Yitzhak in central Israel. “Certainly not if we want to raise our children here, if we want to believe we have a real future for ourselves.”