‘Peace is not in people’s minds’: October 7 scars take center stage for first-time voters

Like hundreds of thousands of Israelis, Amihai is of voting age this month for the first time since Hamas carried out its devastating onslaught on October 7, 2023. When he casts his ballot on October 27, 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.

“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 AFP.

Amihai, from Shomria in southern Israel, was speaking less than two kilometers from Gaza, swaths of which have been flattened by Israeli strikes and operations since the war with the Palestinian terror group erupted in 2023.

He was attending an event calling for Jewish settlement of the coastal territory, and said that he would be casting a vote for the ultra-nationalist party of National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.

“After October 7, 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 Ben Gvir-pushed, recently passed death penalty law that applies to those convicted of terror acts that kill Israeli citizens.

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 long advocated by some government ministers.

Over 500,000 Israelis aged between 18 and 22 are expected to be voting for the first time this month.

In a recent poll commissioned by Channel 12, 74 percent of first-time voters described their policy views as right or center-right — a 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 in recent years motivated by outrage over Israel’s actions in Gaza.

But the right-wing turn of Israeli Jewish youth has been building for around two decades, said pollster and analyst Dahlia Scheindlin.

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

“Anybody who’s an 18-year-old now, his or her entire political consciousness is under [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu; it’s a very ultra-nationalist environment,” she said. “Peace is not in people’s minds.”

At the same time, it’s not a given that young voters will be voting mainly for parties supporting Netanyahu: His leading rival in the polls, Gadi Eisenkot, is a centrist but hawkish former army chief who has said Palestinian statehood is not on the table, while the opposition also includes longtime right-wing politician Avigdor Liberman and his Yisrael Beytenu party.

‘Real future’

At a gathering of young activists for the left-wing 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, then the first tendency is fear, to be afraid, and not to believe that peace is possible,” she told AFP.

“It’s really logical that everyone kind of became more and more right-wing, and more and more extreme.”

The Hamas-led invasion of southern Israel resulted in the deaths of some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and the kidnapping of 251 to Gaza, amid widely documented atrocities and systematic targeting of civilians.

The ensuing war between Israel and Hamas has killed over 74,200 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in the enclave, although the toll does not differentiate between combatants and civilians.

The Israeli military believes that Hamas’s overall toll is largely accurate, with IDF officials estimating that two to three civilians were killed for every dead terror operative. The IDF says it has killed over 24,000 combatants in Gaza and another 1,600 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 onslaught.

Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools and mosques.

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.”

‘Win decisively’

For yeshiva student Yishai Neeman, who hopes soon to enlist in a combat unit in the military, the horrors of October 7 and the wars that followed strengthened his resolve to fight for the country.

Neeman, who is now 19, was at a synagogue when he heard of Hamas’s attack and spent his final years at boarding school running to bomb shelters.

From his home in the central city of Petah Tikva, Neeman said he would be voting for the Religious Zionism party of far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

Neeman said he wanted peace, but felt it wasn’t possible under the current conditions. Israel should annex the West Bank, he said, and “erase their hope for a Palestinian state.”

Soon heading to fight himself, Neeman said he wasn’t in favor of endless wars, but that Israel “can’t return once more to the understanding that preceded October 7.”

“That’s why now we must fight and win decisively.”