TEL AVIV, Israel — Israelis are convinced that elections scheduled for Tuesday are the most pivotal in their nation's history.
Will they vote out Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — and his coalition of far-right, ultranationalist and religious political parties — because he failed to prevent the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust?
Or will they reelect him to continue his campaign of retaliation, waging wars that aim to reshape the Middle East? His main challenger, former military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, leads a center-right opposition promising more diplomacy and less extremism.
It is Israel's first vote after these years of battle and bloodshed. Israelis are so concerned about their country's future that tens of thousands of expats are expected to fly back to cast ballots, since Israel does not allow absentee voting.
"We almost could have been destroyed on Oct. 7," said Israeli lawyer Shoula Romano-Horing, who flew in from Kansas City, Mo., to vote. "This is why I'm voting for Netanyahu, to make Israel so secure and so safe."
In the opposite corner are those Israelis distressed by the global backlash to the wars Netanyahu's government has waged.
"The actions of this government cause Israelis in general and Jews in general to be tagged as, you know, mass killers," said Yochai Ben-Haim, who works in renewable energy in California and is flying home to Israel for 36 hours just to vote. "This government is led by extremists that do not represent who we are, and we need to change it."
In conversations with dozens of Israelis over the last few weeks, a portrait has emerged of who Israelis are today.
They are a people defiant, but also weary after three years of incessant war. They are enraged at their enemies, but also at their leaders.
Many are impervious to the pain of their Palestinian neighbors, but traumatized from the war they have wrought. They are resistant to Palestinian independence, but also revolted by the Israeli settlers pushing Palestinians off their land.
They are fed up with the world's rebuke over the Gaza war, but also fearful of their growing global isolation. They are a people in a tug-of-war with themselves.
"Israelis want to be feared and to be loved," said Israeli author Micah Goodman. "The problem is that you have two reputations you need to protect, but you can't."
What Netanyahu knew
As elections near, Israelis are learning more about what led up to Oct. 7, 2023.
Throughout that year, as Israelis poured into the streets to protest Netanyahu's far-right government and its plan to weaken the judiciary, Netanyahu's security chiefs warned that regional enemies could take advantage of the turmoil to attack.
Behind the scenes, Israel received direct warnings that Hamas was planning something big. Israel and Hamas had been holding secret talks for more than a year, Palestinian mediator Sufian Abu Zaida said. When the talks stalled, Hamas' leader in Gaza had Abu Zaida relay a message threatening an "earthquake."
What kind of earthquake was unclear, said Abu Zaida, but he insists he relayed the warning to Israeli intelligence. The leader of the United Arab Emirates and Egypt's intelligence chief relayed similar warnings, according to reporting by NPR and other media outlets. "All what happened in 7 of October is needless," Abu Zaida said.
Nearly 1,200 people were killed when Hamas attacked army bases, residential communities and an outdoor music rave — and 251 people were taken hostage back to Gaza. Netanyahu denies he was warned and has never admitted any kind of responsibility for the security failure.
"Within days, his PR people were trying to shape the public narrative about events," said Amos Harel, a defense analyst for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and author of 06:29 – Anatomy of a Failure, which details the Israeli failures to prevent the Oct. 7 attack. (The attack began that day at 6:29 a.m.) Netanyahu's strategy, he said, was "to shift the blame" to the security services and the military.
For much of the Gaza war, Israeli protesters flooded the streets demanding that Netanyahu strike a deal with Hamas to release Israeli hostages and end the fighting. It would take two years, Israel's longest ever war, before a hostage deal was reached. Netanyahu said he was seeking the total defeat of Hamas, though former officials who worked with Netanyahu allege he prolonged the war for political reasons — a charge that Netanyahu has denied.
"I'm absolutely convinced that this is what happened," Harel said. "He felt that if this would move on too fast, then there will be more of a significant public demand for a national commission of inquiry."
There is a great demand among Israelis for an investigation into the attack, like the 9/11 Commission in the United States. Netanyahu has blocked one in Israel.
So Israelis grappling with Oct. 7 go to the spot of the day's deadliest attack, where hundreds of people were killed when Hamas attacked the Nova music festival. The memorial there is a dusty field of plaques and thin poles bearing the pictures of smiling young people who were partying when they came under attack.
Kati and Meir Zohar, whose 23-year-old daughter Bar was killed there, helped build the memorial with other families. The Zohars say they received no government funding for the effort and no phone call from Netanyahu expressing his condolences.
"We are angry," Kati Zohar said.
She believes Netanyahu bears the responsibility for what happened to her daughter on Oct. 7 and, like other Israelis, hopes Netanyahu faces a reckoning for it on election day.
"It's a hope that something will change," Zohar said. "I hope that someone will come and take his place and be the one who [is] trying to keep this country together."
Who has fought the wars?
The Oct. 7 attack left Israelis in a state of shock.
"I think the general line of thinking — not only among decision-makers, not only among ministers of the government, but also among commanders in the field — was that something biblical has happened to us and that something biblical needed to happen in return," Harel said.
What happened in return was an Israeli military onslaught that has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians and left most of Gaza destroyed. Today, Israel is fighting back against charges of genocide. Netanyahu faces an international arrest warrant for alleged war crimes. Israeli soldiers who fought in the war risk arrest in some countries.
"I'm proud of what I did and I know what I did," said Lior, 34, who was one of those soldiers. "I don't mind to be in front of a judge."
Lior spoke on the condition that his last name be withheld to protect his family overseas from harassment because of the nature of his role: he commanded an Israeli sniper unit in Gaza and Lebanon, serving over 500 days in uniform.
" When you're inside Gaza, your life is under danger 24/7. There is shooting, there is booming… sometimes you hear about Hezbollah, Hamas, what they are doing. So your body, your mind is under survival tension 24/7," Lior said.
He is among the nearly 19,000 Israeli soldiers who have been newly diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder or related illnesses. It touches every part of his life: He imagines snipers on the streets. He sometimes breaks into tears riding the train. He struggles in his sex life. He and his fiancé broke up.
Lior said he often returns to one memory from Gaza: his order to shoot and kill a man he described as a Hamas terrorist, standing next to his child in a place where he shouldn't have been.
"Unfortunately, yeah, the kid saw his father dying in front of him," Lior said.
He does not regret any of his decisions to open fire.
"To be honest, in my opinion, I don't have any mercy of people in Gaza. I know what's going on there. I know of the poverty, I know about the lack of water, electricity. I don't have any mercy on them," Lior said. "When you see things with your own eyes and you remember what happened on the 7th of October, I'm not forgiving for that."
Is there anybody innocent in Gaza?
"You know, my Jewish identity (is) saying that I'm sure there is, but…I don't see it that way. That's what I told you about the kid," Lior said. "If he have the chance, he will kill me."
He is among the nearly 300,000 young Israeli military veterans ordered to leave their civilian lives and serve as reservist soldiers after Oct. 7.
No mercy
More than 67 percent of Israelis in a July 2025 poll said they were not very troubled about the suffering of people in Gaza. More than 60 percent of Israelis in an August 2025 poll said they believed there were no innocent people in Gaza. That view has been reinforced by mainstream Israeli media.
"There are no uninvolved civilians in Gaza," said Israeli reporter Almog Boker early last year on leading news network Channel 12.
This was not always the way Israeli media covered Palestinians in Gaza. Anat Saragusti, a veteran journalist, used to report from Gaza in the 1990s and early 2000s for Channel 12.
"I tried to cover Gaza as if I was living in a foreign country, to show the complexity of life, to show different stories," Saragusti said from her Tel Aviv apartment. "To show the Israeli audience that Gaza is not what they thought and think now, you know, a black hole of terrorists."
Twenty years ago, after Hamas took an Israeli soldier captive in Gaza, Israel practically sealed Gaza shut to Israeli journalists and to all Israelis. Then, Hamas took control of Gaza, Israel imposed a blockade, there were years of Hamas rocket fire into Israel and Israeli retaliation.
Since Oct. 7, most Israeli media chose not to show what Palestinian journalists were reporting day after day from Gaza: the tens of thousands of men, women and children killed; the forced displacement; the starvation; the misery of trying to survive.
"The majority of the Israeli journalists didn't do one story, you know, not even one story was done on Gaza… to see whether what these Palestinian journalists are claiming is true," said Saragusti. "They were afraid of the pushback by the audience if they dare say something about Gaza."
Harel, who writes a regular column for the Haaretz newspaper, says the nation's continuous war trauma also afflicted Israeli media.
" We were so busy with our pain and our suffering and worrying about the fate of the hostages — hundreds of hostages were held at that time by Hamas — that we didn't focus on what we did to the other side," he said.
What is happening in the West Bank
There is one place where even veterans of Israel's military and security establishment say what Palestinians are enduring has gone too far: the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Since Oct. 7, Israeli settler violence toward Palestinians has skyrocketed. Settlers have seized more and more land there, with the support of the military and Netanyahu's pro-settler government, which has approved more than 100 new Jewish settlements in the West Bank, a record number.
"We are making a historic revolution," cabinet minister Bezalel Smotrich said this July as he announced the 104th new settlement approved by Netanyahu's current government. He said it "would prevent the establishment of a terror state in the heart of Israel."
A retired Israeli military general, Yaakov "Mendy" Or, leads groups of former Israeli military and security officials to Palestinian communities in the West Bank to show them the radical changes that have taken place over the last three years.
On a recent tour, he brought them to Umm al-Kheir, a Palestinian village surrounded by an expanse of desert hills, where Israeli settlers have set up trailer homes right outside a Palestinian family's property.
Palestinian activist Eid Hatlin said barbed wire in the yard was placed by settlers. The settlers have blocked the family's outdoor bathroom and the Israeli army has blocked the path to their sheep, he said.
"This is nasty. This is evil," said Ari Shuali, a former senior Israeli intelligence official who was part of the visiting group. "I don't believe that we as a people became such kind of unhuman behavior. I'm an Israeli. I'm a proud Israeli and I'm ashamed to be an Israeli [at] the same time."
It's one reason why some Israelis — like him — want to vote Netanyahu out.
Netanyahu's battle cry
Netanyahu has downplayed Israeli settler violence in the West Bank and his allies are campaigning on a pledge to expel Palestinians — what they call encouraging emigration.
Netanyahu is campaigning on what he's done to fight back against external threats — with the wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran as examples of how he's making Israel safer since Oct. 7.
"On that darkest of days, our enemies expected us to collapse. Well, we didn't collapse. Instead, we rose and fought like lions!" Netanyahu said at the United Nations last month.
Over the last three years, Israel has killed the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. It has sent soldiers to capture new territory in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. It has fought Houthis in Yemen and militias in Iraq. Netanyahu vows to destroy Iran's nuclear capabilities if he is reelected.
"We're entangled in endless wars and this was done on purpose," Harel said. "It's not a bug, it's a feature. The whole idea is for Israel to keep fighting, because endless wars serve Netanyahu to maintain… a constant state of emergency."
Netanyahu has called them wars of "no choice," alongside a "war for truth" waged in international media and social media.
Netanyahu's main challenger
At a recent stump speech, Gadi Eisenkot took the stage. He is short with cropped white hair and he was wearing all black. He was speaking to a crowd in Kiryat Gat, a city near the Gaza border — historically a conservative Netanyahu stronghold.
Eisenkot is the former military chief of staff, appointed by Netanyahu a decade ago, who came back into the public spotlight in the days after Oct. 7 when he joined Netanyahu's war cabinet. Soon after, Eisenkot's son was killed as a soldier in the Gaza war. The very next day, his nephew, too, was killed there.
Eisenkot told the crowd that he began to disagree with Netanyahu's prosecution of the war three months in. "I saw a deep dysfunction in the decision-making process," Eisenkot said. "I saw that political and personal considerations were put above everything else."
He has pledged, if he wins, to launch an official national investigation into the security failure of Oct. 7 — something Netanyahu has refused to do.
"He's straight," said Yair Amar, a longtime Netanyahu voter, who said he has switched allegiances to Eisenkot.
"Many Israelis wish for a saner future," said Harel, the Haaretz columnist. "For somebody who perhaps is not as charismatic and doesn't look the part of an American senator, but is one of us and is seen as somebody who sacrificed a lot."
What happens if neither candidate wins
The race is tight. Most polls show Eisenkot's camp ahead of Netanyahu's, but those same polls show neither has a clear path to victory. To win, parties must form a coalition to control a majority in Israel's parliament. The election could tip on a small amount of votes or it could end in stalemate, forcing a repeat election next year. If that were to happen, Netanyahu would stay in power with full authority to make fateful decisions, like going to war. He strongly suggests he wants to strike Iran again.
If Netanyahu loses, Eisenkot vows a different approach. He has spoken of cracking down on settler expansion and violence against Palestinians in the West Bank and of reaching diplomatic agreements in the wars Netanyahu has kept open, but cautioned he would not withdraw troops from Lebanon and Gaza anytime soon.
"Truth be told," Eisenkot told the crowd, "it will take a lot of time."
On the biggest question of all — how to solve Israel's conflict with the Palestinians — Eisenkot boasted that he "never said the solution was two states for two peoples." Meaning the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel — the vision that the U.S. and the majority of the world have advocated for decades. Eisenkot thinks Israel should preserve possibilities for a solution in the future. After Oct. 7, Israelis do not want to discuss a Palestinian state.
"It's not something that the Israeli public can swallow at this time," Harel said. "More and more people suspect that the Arabs, the Palestinians, are out to kill us and that the world is out to get us. And there's less support for any kind of concessions because people keep bringing up Oct. 7."
This is not a race of conservatives versus liberals, right versus left. Eisenkot is leading a group of politicians who are largely right-wing, focused on matters of security and campaigning to enlist religious ultra-Orthodox Jews to the military, which Netanyahu has resisted in order to placate his ultra-Orthodox political allies.
"I'm trusting him on the military level, but is it enough?" said Israeli high school theater teacher Anat Ben-Ari, who came to hear Eisenkot speak. She was almost nervous voicing an unpopular opinion out loud: she wants him to forge peace agreements.
"The only way to end war — all the history says that — is by agreements, is by people talking to people, even enemies. Mostly enemies," Ben-Ari said. "I think we should also pay the price for peace in order for less people to die here and not always live on our swords."
Lior, the soldier, is resigned to a future of war.
"There will always be an enemy, so I think we will always be in a war. We [will] always live on our sword," Lior said. "It will always be."
The zero-sum game of love and fear
Israeli voters now consider two different visions for their country. Should Israel fight to regain the world's acceptance or to increase their neighbors' deterrence?
Israelis yearn for both says author Micah Goodman, who has written about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and previously served as an unofficial advisor to Israeli prime ministers.
"In the Middle East, you wanna have a certain kind of reputation. You want to be seen as unpredictable and a little crazy. Like, don't mess with us… and in the West, we want to be seen as a Norwegian, nice, sweet country playing by the rules, predictable."
Goodman said Israelis made their choice.
"After Oct. 7, the Middle East didn't fear us and you have to restore fear. But everything we did to restore fear eroded the love."
Additional reporting by NPR journalists Itay Stern, Abu Bakr Bashir and Michael Levitt.
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