Three Years After October 7: Trauma Reshapes Israel's Politics and Society

Three years have passed since October 7, yet the trauma from those Hamas-led attacks continues to reshape Israel's politics, its ongoing wars, and its standing on the global stage. For most Israelis today, modern history splits into two distinct eras: everything before the assault and everything after. Since Israel launched what observers describe as a genocidal war on Gaza in response to the violence, Israeli society has undergone fundamental changes that cannot be undone.

Experts say a sense of collective trauma has been amplified through political rhetoric and media hysteria to levels unseen in modern Israel. This shift is not limited to abstract ideas but touches the daily lives of citizens who feel the weight of these events constantly. The war on Gaza alone has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians while Israeli forces have expanded their attacks into several regional states. Meanwhile, a series of settler pogroms in the occupied West Bank, fueled by the Israeli far-right, has pushed Israel further toward isolation from much of the world.

Daniel Bar-Tal, an Israeli political psychologist at Tel Aviv University, explained that October 7 shattered the long-held myth of Israeli military invincibility. Before 2023, a powerful sense of confidence regarding Israel's supposed technological and military superiority was common among the public. That mindset ended when Hamas and other groups stormed into territory controlled by Israel, killing nearly 1,200 people and taking about 250 others captive. The Israeli public had generally been isolated from the consequences of the military's violent actions in Gaza until now, leaving many shocked that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might have possessed prior intelligence about Hamas's plans.

Inside Israel, the psychological impact of the attacks was palpable for everyone living through it. Bar-Tal told Al Jazeera that the event disrupted everything immensely and remains a crisis that does not leave the population. Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere have lived with this genocidal response ever since the violence began. Politicians across the spectrum have exploited the fear and trauma of October 7 to further their own ends, often using these emotions to target Palestinians as a whole group rather than addressing specific grievances.

Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani noted that while many Israelis were gripped by genuine fear after the attacks, political forces have exploited that terror to erase virtually every achievement made over the years in Jewish-Palestinian relations. Countless polls suggest that Israeli society has lurched even further to the right over the past three years. Mainstream newspaper headlines now ask whether the left, which served as the main bulwark for a two-state solution in Israel, still exists within the political landscape.

A huge number of Israelis continue to support the execution of Palestinian prisoners charged with terrorism and back the continued expansion of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. In a May 2025 survey conducted by Penn State sociologist Tamir Sorek, an overwhelming majority of respondents said they supported expelling Gaza's residents from their homes. A significant minority also backed the mass killing of all residents in cities invaded by Israeli troops, echoing actions attributed to biblical Israelites at Jericho. Shenhav-Shahrabani called October 7 undoubtedly a watershed moment in contemporary Israeli politics and stated it has taken society back a hundred years regarding collective consciousness and willingness to engage with one another.

This is an enormous setback, one that will be extremely difficult to overcome." That is how Shenhav-Shahrabani put it regarding a political shift he says went too far. He notes that the messianic and racist right in Israel has seized upon the catastrophe not merely to justify its existing positions, but to push the boundaries of what can be said and done in Israeli politics.

Yoav Gallant, Israel's former Defence Minister, described Palestinians in Gaza as "human animals." Meanwhile, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir boasted of handing out thousands of government arms to settler groups already known for their often-fatal pogroms against Palestinian towns and villages in the occupied West Bank.

"October 7 did not create the Israeli right," Shenhav-Shahrabani said. "But it normalised positions that were previously considered extreme." He points out that fear is undoubtedly a major factor in this transformation, yet he insists fear alone does not explain it. Fear is also being politically mobilised.

Anti-Palestinian views did not begin with October 7 either. Such abuses go back to the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 with the subsequent forcible displacement of some 750,000 Palestinians and the erasure of Palestinian villages from the land. In the years since, a growing number of international bodies and rights groups have described Israeli rule over Palestinians as apartheid. Systematic violence, including military assaults on blockaded Gaza, deadly West Bank pogroms and ongoing settler attacks and land seizures, which largely go unpunished, have also been widely documented by rights groups, particularly after October 7.

B'Tselem has noted an explosion in violence across the occupied West Bank, recording 1,107 Palestinians killed in "a single political project" between the Israeli military and settlers that appears aimed at forcing out the local population. Yair Dvir, from B'tselem, told Al Jazeera that October 7 allowed processes that were already under way to gain momentum and escalate.

"The infrastructure of apartheid, repression and control over Palestinians became more violent," Dvir said. He added that while fear played a role, the broader trajectory of eliminating Palestinian collective existence also became clearer and more normalised through the genocide in Gaza, the ethnic cleansing and dismantling of Palestinian society in the West Bank, and the intensification of discrimination and dehumanisation against Palestinian citizens of Israel.