Israel’s political map has always been fluid, but never has it tilted so decisively to one side as in the 20 months since the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023.

In cafés and classrooms that once brimmed with debate, the old “peace camp” now feels like an endangered species. Headlines ask whether the Israeli Left can survive; Shabbat-table conversations often assume it has already died. Yet the numbers and the people behind them tell a more complicated story – one that mixes retreat with reinvention.

Even before the war began, the Zionist Left was shrinking. In the November 2022 election, the Labor Party limped in with just four Knesset seats, and Meretz failed to cross the electoral threshold, together winning barely 7% of the vote. (By comparison, Yitzhak Rabin’s Labor captured 44 seats in 1992.)

The two parties formally merged last June to create “The Democrats,” a move Labor chair Yair Golan called “historic” as he signed the agreement, perhaps because survival, not victory, was at stake (The Jerusalem Post, June 30, 2024).

Public opinion data traced the same downward slope. According to the Israel Democracy Institute’s Israeli Voice Index, roughly 20% of Israeli Jews placed themselves on the Left in 2019; by early 2025, that share had slid to about 12% (IDI monthly surveys, Viterbi Center).

YAIR GOLAN speaks after the results were announced in the Labor Party primary election, in Tel Aviv, on Tuesday. (credit: TOMER NEUBERG/FLASH90)
YAIR GOLAN speaks after the results were announced in the Labor Party primary election, in Tel Aviv, on Tuesday. (credit: TOMER NEUBERG/FLASH90)
Demography amplifies the trend: Among 18- to 24-year-olds, 73% identify as right-wing, the IDI reported in a pre-war 2023 benchmark poll. In other words, the pipeline of future voters was already tilting right long before Hamas attacked.

October 7 and the great lurch right

Then came the massacre. Channel 12’s “N12” poll on November 24, 2023, found 36% of Israelis saying they had moved further right since October 7, while just 6% had shifted left. Even 10% of self-described center- or left-wing voters acknowledged a rightward turn. The trauma of seeing 1,200 people slaughtered – and of sending children and reserves into a drawn-out Gaza war – turned security into the only political currency that mattered.

The Pew Research Center quantified the same phenomenon this month: Only 21% of Israelis now believe a peaceful two-state coexistence is possible, the lowest number Pew has measured since 2013 and down 14 points since spring 2023. Gallup’s parallel tracking shows hope for permanent peace at a record-low 13%.

Celebrity chef Meir Adoni captured the raw emotion in an Instagram post that went viral days after the massacre: “The delusional Left in me died on October 7… I repent my sin.” Across social media, thousands “liked” the confession and reiterated it.

Converts, critics, and a crisis of belief

The most dramatic voices are those who once carried a leftist banner and now wave the opposite flag. Historian Dr. Gadi Taub, a former Peace Now activist, wrote in Tablet, “The October 7 massacre sealed the fate of the two-state solution on the Israeli side.” Taub accuses the remaining progressives of “clinging to dovish generals” while ordinary Israelis “can see the failure of the peace framework quite plainly.”

Likewise, ex-Labor MK Einat Wilf, still liberal on many fronts, told this newspaper that Israel’s “natural government” should be “a Mapai-type, hawkish centrist coalition… aware of the ruthlessness of our enemies, while still striving for peace.” Pure left-wing governments, she argued, also “failed” to win public trust. Her message resonates with voters who no longer believe in utopia but still want governance that is competent and democratic.

Not everyone abandoned the old ideals. Uri Zaki, a veteran Meretz activist who lost friends on October 7, told The Jerusalem Post Magazine that the massacre “has not changed my views but only confirmed them… I believed we should fight Hamas like a terrorist organization and still pursue a diplomatic solution.” For Zaki and a stubborn minority, Hamas’s brutality proves that hard security and a political horizon are both indispensable.

Grass-roots organizer Alon-Lee Green of Standing Together has tried to hold a centrist line of solidarity. Speaking to Haaretz in May, he insisted that “both peoples deserve life and security” and warned that extremists thrive on dividing Jewish and Arab citizens. Such voices are scarce on prime-time television these days, but they have not disappeared.

A Left pulse, but faint

Where does all this leave the ballot box? After the Labor-Meretz merger, most polls give The Democrats 5-9 projected seats, barely above the four-seat threshold and a fraction of the Left’s historic weight. Meanwhile, Benny Gantz’s National Unity and Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid, both stylistically centrist but hawkish on security, harvest the lion’s share of opposition votes.

Yair Golan is gambling that military credibility can rescue the brand. “Reject separation and adopt annexation, and what we get is a messianic dictatorship,” he warned in an interview last year with the Post’s Eliav Breuer. Whether that warning cuts through wartime anger remains unknown; Maariv’s May 2025 poll suggested Golan’s party actually lost four seats after he criticized IDF tactics.

The war also narrowed the space for dissent. When 18-year-old Tal Mitnick became the first to refuse IDF service after October 7, he was jailed for 30 days and blasted as a traitor.

“More killing won’t bring back lives,” he told The Guardian on his release, adding that Israelis were “manufacturing consent to keep bombing Gaza.” Mitnick’s pacifism won praise abroad but hostility at home, another sign of how lonely the remaining Left can feel.

Is the Left finished? Two scenarios loom:

Rebirth as a tough-minded liberal center. Figures like Wilf and Golan believe Israelis could rally behind a party that marries iron-clad security credentials to democratic guardrails and social liberalism. If centrist giants such as Gantz ultimately strike alliances with them, a new bloc could emerge – more “Ben-Gurionist” than Oslo-era Meretz but still distinct from today’s nationalist-religious Right.

Continued eclipse. Many former Left voters now see Israeli politics as a binary choice between Right and “responsible Right.” If the war in Gaza drags on, if fighting with Hezbollah escalates, or if 2026 brings another security shock, caution may trump any appetite for diplomatic daring. In that climate, the Left could stay in single digits for the foreseeable future.

Much depends on the war’s endgame. A painfully prolonged campaign without a clear political horizon could renew interest in separation. Conversely, a decisive Israeli victory–or a wider regional conflict–might entrench hawkish sentiment for a generation. The only certainty in Israeli politics is volatility.

So what’s left of the Left? According to the most recent IDI survey, roughly one in eight Jewish Israelis still calls themselves left-wing, and perhaps twice that number share a vote for left-branded parties. That is a remnant, not a movement. Yet within that remnant are activists, ex-generals, academics, and ordinary citizens who refuse to surrender the idea that Israel can be both secure and liberal.

Their challenge is twofold. First, they must translate moral language into a security discourse that the mainstream trusts. Second, they must forge alliances with centrists who share a commitment to democratic norms, if not the full peace-camp catechism. If they fail, the political spectrum will continue to narrow until even moderate dissent sounds radical. If they succeed, they could offer Israelis a patriotic alternative.

Many left-wing and center-left Israelis – but not all – have focused their energy in recent years on combating anything that had to do with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This camp is called by people on the Right, rak lo Bibi, or anyone but Bibi (Netanyahu).

The Zionist Left may not be dead, but it is unrecognizable. What remains is a scattered collection of individuals clinging to ideas few want to hear. They speak of peace to a nation that no longer believes in it and of coexistence while rockets still fly. For now, the Israeli mainstream has chosen clarity over complexity, survival over sympathy. Whether history will vindicate that choice is another matter.

In the next few weeks, I will focus on this issue in the column, as well as through interviews with fascinating Israelis who will provide their analysis of the political Left’s situation in Israel in The Jerusalem Post Studio.