The October 7 attacks killed nearly 1,200 Israelis and saw about 250 taken captive. That is the factual floor. What happened next — inside Israeli politics, not just in Gaza — is a story about how trauma becomes policy infrastructure. Israeli political psychologist Daniel Bar-Tal describes October 7 as shattering the myth of military invincibility that had insulated the Israeli public from the consequences of occupation. The population, long shielded from feedback loops, was suddenly exposed to the reality that the security apparatus could fail catastrophically. Bar-Tal says the resulting crisis "doesn't leave the population." That persistent fear became raw material. The far right did not create this fear, but it captured it with remarkable efficiency. Sociologist Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani is blunt: political forces exploited the trauma to "erase virtually every achievement made over the years in Jewish-Palestinian relations." The Israeli left, historically the main constituency for a two-state solution, has been reduced to near-irrelevance. A May 2025 Penn State survey by Tamir Sorek found an overwhelming majority of Israelis supporting the expulsion of Gaza's residents, with a significant minority endorsing mass killing of residents in cities invaded by Israeli troops. The institutional scaffolding followed the polling. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir distributed thousands of government arms to settler groups already conducting deadly pogroms. The Knesset passed legislation making the death penalty a default sentence for Palestinians convicted in military courts. Former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant described Palestinians in Gaza as "human animals." These are not fringe positions — they are state policy enacted by cabinet ministers. B'Tselem documented 1,107 Palestinians killed across the occupied West Bank in what it describes as a coordinated project between the military and settlers aimed at forcing out the local population. The war on Gaza has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians. Yair Dvir of B'Tselem frames this as acceleration of existing trajectories: the infrastructure of apartheid and repression "became more violent" while the elimination of Palestinian collective existence "became clearer and more normalised." Shenhav-Shahrabani places October 7 as a hundred-year regression in collective consciousness and mutual trust. The mechanism is not simply grief or anger — it is the political mobilization of fear into permanent institutional change. Positions that were once extreme have been laundered through crisis into the mainstream, backed by legislation, armed distribution, and demographic engineering. The extraction is structural: Palestinian life, land, and legal personhood are being converted into Israeli territorial and political consolidation. The beneficiaries are the settler-religious right and their institutional allies. The costs fall on Palestinians — in Gaza, the West Bank, and inside Israel — and on whatever remained of Israeli democratic pluralism.
