Cracks form in Israel’s pro-war consensus
Dina Kraft — March 30, 2026
Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.
A teenage Israeli boy carries his grandmother, Rosa, in his arms down four flights of stairs to the apartment building bomb shelter every time the eerie wail of air raid sirens sounds following the jump-out-of-skin blare of an alert. During this war with Iran, now entering its fifth week, this has regularly meant back-to-back trips, going up and down the stairs with his grandmother’s arms clutched around his shoulders.
“This is our reality. But is it normal?” Rosa’s daughter asks as she trails them during yet another journey down the narrow stairwell. Compounding everything, the family says, Rosa has not been functional since another grandson was murdered at the Nova music festival during the October 7 attack that not only launched the Gaza war but was a prelude to this one.
It’s rare that Israelis agree on much, but the decision to go to war again with Iran, its arch foe — the country that has sworn to destroy it for decades and which Israelis have been told is close to a nuclear bomb — initially found almost unanimous support among its Jewish majority.
But over a month into what has morphed into a punishing war of attrition for the homefront, cracks are beginning to appear in the national consensus, even if many Israelis still see Iran as an existential threat that must be confronted.
According to a new survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, seventy-eight percent of Jewish Israelis support continuing the war against Iran. That’s a notable dip from the 93 percent who said they supported the war during its first week. The share of Jewish citizens opposed to the war has nearly tripled, from 4% to 11.5%. Another key shift: Those who identify as “strongly” supporting the war have declined from 74% to 50%.
The survey, whose complete data was published Monday, found that a majority of Jewish and Arab citizens alike think the architects of the joint US-Israeli war have underestimated Iran’s endurance. This week, the fifth of the war, has seen Iran launching twice as many missiles as it did in week four, according to one study.
“Israelis realize this is going nowhere… they thought that this was going to end with regime change,” said Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman. Bergman reported in a recent New York Times article that the director of Mossad had presented a pre-war plan to Netanyahu (and shared it with American officials) to stoke an uprising that might lead to the regime being ousted.
“Even when you have the best intel and best Air Force and even when you can send the pagers and kill the chief villain (of Iran), it is still not enough – and will never be enough unless you have the closing political deal,” he told PBS News Hour this weekend. “Otherwise, this will never end. You will just have more and more rounds.”
Some 1,500 Israeli protesters gathered in Tel Aviv’s Habima Square Saturday night, joined by hundreds of others on bridges and gathering places across the country, with a clear message that the war needs to end. In Tel Aviv and Haifa, border police came to break up the protests, claiming the gatherings violated wartime regulations against large gatherings. As protesters there noted, there was a massive underground parking garage just under the square, and the police had not moved to break up much larger ultra-Orthodox gatherings during Purim or crowds of beachgoers earlier the same day.
Some demonstrators in Tel Aviv said they felt like they were witnessing the work of a police state in action. Police pushed and threw people to the ground, among them senior citizens, and took over the stage where speakers were scheduled to speak. After witnessing up close the heavy-handed policing measures, one person told me, citing the danger from the Iranian ballistic missiles they had just spent the last month seeking shelter from, “It feels like danger everywhere, from every direction.”
Kalanit Sharon, an activist with the anti-government protest group Pink Front, was among those forcefully removed and arrested by the police after being slammed to the ground. "The whole idea of dispersing everyone was very violent from the get-go. There was an escalation of pushing, throwing, and then arrests,” she told Haaretz.
“I don't trust those who are leading me down this path. We protesters don't agree about everything, but we're fighting for common causes, and that's exciting. The feeling is that they're trying to silence any criticism. The police were out of control,” she added.
Avi Issacharoff, a veteran Israeli journalist, wrote in a recent op-ed that although he, like most Israelis, believes the war was justified based on the threat Iran poses, both as a potential nuclear power and the sponsor of proxy armies (including Hezbollah and Hamas), he fears Netanyahu has transformed it into a war with no clear endgame.
“There have been significant achievements on the battlefield — damage to missile systems, progress against nuclear-related infrastructure. But as long as we do not know the fate of roughly 450 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60%, we cannot say whether the war’s objectives have been achieved,” he wrote. “As long as we do not understand what Iran will be able to do in the future — in terms of uranium enrichment, ballistic missile production and support for its proxies — we simply cannot know whether this war has produced meaningful results or bitter disappointment.”
Residents of the northern border, some of them without proper shelter — even after returning after being evacuated following the Hamas October 7 attack — are bearing the brunt of a second front of this war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. There are fewer “feel good” videos on Tiktok and Instagram of northern residents bonding in bomb shelters than there are of salsa dancing, yoga lessons, and general social solidarity bonding happening, for example, in Tel Aviv public shelters.
Some Israeli social media influencers are beginning to call out the fetishization of Israeli resilience that is going on online, some with humor, others with more pointed critique.
Margot Touitou, whose Instagram tagline is “Your Big Sis in TLV” posted on her account, “Can we please stop romanticizing Israeli resilience? There’s much more going on beneath that word than people realize, and looking away and pretending it isn’t happening isn’t helping any of us,” citing headlines referring to mental health and PTSD statistics.
Referring to the wave of what she calls “toxic positivity” about the war, without going into any political opinions on her thoughts on the actual war itself, she said, “Being honest about what’s happening in this country is the only way to make things better.”
Meanwhile, Noga D’Angeli, an Israeli stand-up comedian who has been posting about the exhaustion of life this last month, running to her apartment building's bomb shelter with her three young children, made a direct appeal to President Donald Trump in her latest reel: “Trumpoosh, Enough is enough… You need to save the energy in Iran, but what about the energy of the Israeli people?”
Dina Kraft is a journalist, podcaster and the co-author of the New York Times bestseller, My Friend Anne Frank, together with Hannah Pick-Goslar. She is a creator of the podcast Groundwork, about activists working in Israel and Palestine, and was formerly the opinion editor of Haaretz English.
