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Israel’s New National Consensus: Returning to October 6, by Meron Rapoport – 23 January 2026

From +972 Magazine

Despite the spectacular collapse of Netanyahu’s ‘conflict management’ doctrine, both he and his staunchest critics are campaigning on its revival.

With both the Israeli general elections and the U.S. midterms approaching, 2026 is shaping up to be a tough year for political forecasts. The Israeli vote could redraw the domestic political map, potentially deposing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while the U.S. elections could significantly weaken President Donald Trump’s standing and constrain his freedom of action. 

Yet there is one prediction that can be made with confidence: Whatever the election results, Israel’s entire political and military establishment will remain united around a desire to dial the clock back to October 6, 2023.

This aspiration does not signal a return to normalcy or calm; on the contrary, Israel’s internal tensions are likely to deepen in the coming year. This is not merely because the period preceding the war was already among the most turbulent in the country’s history, nor because election years tend to intensify political tensions. This time, the polarization runs much deeper. 

On one side, we have a government that devotes itself daily to delegitimizing the judiciary, the media, and any dissenting voice. On the other side, we have an opposition that views Netanyahu and his partners as the embodiment of absolute evil, and their continued rule as a threat to both the state’s survival and their own future. What, then, does the aspiration to return the country to October 6 actually mean? 

Before the war, the Israeli public was sold a common thesis by politicians across the political spectrum: that Israel could not or need not resolve its relationship with the Palestinians living under its rule, and that Israel’s economic, social, and diplomatic might could grow independent of it. On this basis, the military adopted a doctrine that abandoned any pretense of seeking a political solution, focusing instead on “managing” the conflict through deterrence and what it calls the “campaign between wars.”

October 7 shattered these assumptions. The army collapsed in the face of an attack carried out by Palestinians “with flip-flops, Kalashnikovs, and pickup trucks,” as Netanyahu later put it in defending his policy of facilitating Qatari cash transfers to Hamas. For the first time since 1948, Israel lost control over parts of its sovereign territory. More than 1,100 civilians and soldiers were killed on what became the darkest day in the country’s history. 

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Meron Rapoport is an Israeli journalist and former reporter for Yediot Aharonot and Haaretz, and co-founder of the the initiative A Land for All. He writes for +972 Magazine and is an editor at Local Call.

A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.

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