On the evening of November 4, 1995, the peace festival in Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv ended with three bullets fired by Yigal Amir, a student at Bar-Ilan University, killing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The assassination was not just a political event, but rather a political and societal earthquake that redrew the maps of identity and belonging in Israeli society.
The killer was a young religious Jew who grew up in a religious Zionist environment and believed that Rabin was selling the “Land of Israel” to the Palestinians through the Oslo Accords. “I acted in the name of God,” he said in court. This description was an announcement of a deep internal conflict that would continue for decades.
The assassination of Rabin...a bullet in the heart of peace
The assassination did not weaken the extreme religious right, but rather revealed its size and audacity. The government and its security services received warnings of the escalating incitement against Rabin, as pictures of him were burned in the squares and the uniforms of Nazi SS units were attached to him.
In the 1996 elections, the first elections six months after the assassination, Benjamin Netanyahu defeated Peres by a margin of no more than 29,457 votes out of about three million. The vote was then viewed as a message of rejection of the peace process for which Rabin was killed. However, the wave of suicide bombings carried out by Palestinians between February and March 1996 had - according to experts - a greater impact on the outcome than mourning for Rabin himself, as security, not peace, decided the fate of the boxes.
In an analysis published by Robert Satloff and Samuel Lewis of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in May 1996, it was stated that popular sympathy for the Labor Party and Peres after the assassination guaranteed a 16-point lead, but the wave of bombings in February and March “re-divided the street again and displaced the effect of mourning in favor of security panic.”
The second intifada...the shock that turned into a permanent political trend
Between 2000 and 2005, Israel experienced a wave of unprecedented violence during the Second Intifada, as suicide bombings on buses, cafes and markets, along with shootings, led to the deaths of more than a thousand Israelis. The children who grew up in those years are now middle-aged, and teenagers among them were voters for the Twenty-fifth Knesset (2022).
For the first time, it became possible to measure the psycho-political impact of this trauma scientifically. A study by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which included more than 9,000 Israelis and tracked their places of residence since 1985, showed that exposure to terrorism during the Second Intifada caused “a clear shift towards right-wing positions that is still detectable twenty years later.”
This result, in addition to what was monitored by the Macro Center for Political Economy with the support of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, indicates that this shift was not a passing emotional reaction, but rather an ongoing trend. 48% of Jewish youth identified themselves as right-wingers in 1998, then the percentage rose to 62% in 2010, while leftists declined from 32% to 12%.
Thirty years of the Knesset: What do the numbers say?
To understand the direction of Israeli society, it is not enough to look at the distribution of seats in isolation from other changes. This is because what the aggregated numbers say from 1996 to 2026 gives a more complex picture.
Right: Likud and its predecessors (including the 1996 alliance with Gesher and Tzomet), Yisrael Beytenu, the national religious parties (Mafdal, Jewish Home, National Union, Religious Zionism, Otzma Yehudit, and Yamina), the ultra-Orthodox parties (Shas, United Torah Judaism), Moledet, and Yisrael Ba'aliyah.
Center: Dima, Blue and White, Yesh Atid, Kahlon (Kulano), Shinui, Central Party, Hatnuah, New Hope, and Yashar.
Left: Labor and its allied parties, Meretz, One Israel in 1999 (including Labor and Gesher), the Democratic Union, and the Democrats.
Other Arab parties: Hadash, the Joint List, Balad, Ra’am, the United Arab List, and Ta’al.
The party distribution between 1996 and 2026 shows a shift in the balance of the Knesset that is much less than the popular rhetoric of the “rise of the right” suggests. The number of right-wing seats reached 64 seats in 1996 and 60 seats in 2026, after a peak of 70 seats in 2022.
As for the real collapse, it was on the left, as it declined from 43 seats to 4 seats in 2022, then to 8 seats in 2026. On the other hand, the center rose from 4 seats to 33 seats, so the total of the two blocs declined from 47 to 41 only, which means that most center-left voters moved to central parties instead of leaving the camp.
The Israeli Democracy Institute (IDI) notes that the rise of the center in 2012 and 2019 came from the decline of the left, not from the decline of the right, and that the center later slid toward the right. That is, the shift was gradual through the center station, not a sharp and direct transition from left to right.
October 7, 2023.. An accelerator for transformations
The attack of October 7, 2023 was an accelerator of existing transformations, not their originator, and produced three intertwined effects that are difficult to separate. The first is that young people no longer vote like their parents; Tammy Hoffman of the Israel Democracy Institute observed that the prevailing belief for years that young people follow the path of their parents is no longer true, and that several studies indicate a shift toward the right among young people in recent years.
The second effect is the increase in religiosity, as 57% of Israeli youth said in a Lazar Institute poll published in Maariv newspaper (2026) that their religious faith “has strengthened since October 7.”
The link between security shock and religiosity is not a coincidence, as in political sociology explanations, societies in the face of an existential threat tend to cling to a religious collective identity.
The third effect is “civilian militarization,” a term used by researchers Yigal Levy and Uri Ben-Eleazar to describe what educational institutions and compulsory military service produce together, in terms of raising young people to glorify the state and its military institution, with a relative absence of a culture of youth protest against militarism, as in some Western societies.
"Generation of the Right": numbers and the full picture
Prior to the elections for the 26th Knesset in October 2026, the Israel Democracy Institute published its study “First-time Voters before the 26th Knesset,” which included a sample of 576 people (443 Jews). According to Dr. Tammy Hoffman, between 80% and 95% of all youth groups intend to vote, everyone's interest in politics is high, and national security and the cost of living are the priorities of this generation.
As for the Lazar Institute poll published in Maariv newspaper, it shows that 56% of those aged 18-22 years define themselves as right-wing, 22% are center-right, and the percentage of those who describe themselves as left or center-left does not exceed 8%.
This poll is linked to seat calculations; Itamar Ben Gvir, leader of the Otzma Yehudit party, has increased his support among young people from 6 seats in the general population to 14 seats if this group voted alone, while Bezalel Smotrich maintains 5 seats among young people despite his significant decline in the general poll.
Media channels described this generation as the “generation of the right,” and wrote that “while young people around the world are moving toward the left, their Israeli counterparts are moving in the opposite direction.” Media outlets quoted a Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper poll as saying that more than 16% of new voters intend to vote for extremist parties.
The war with Iran - an intensifying factor, not a transforming factor
In March 2026, months before the elections, reports indicated that “the Iran war is pushing Israeli voters to the right,” and that Ben Gvir was doubling his strength among the youth, as he was then obtaining 14 seats compared to 6 seats in the Knesset.
Netanyahu focused his election campaign on the Iranian threat and portrayed it as an existential threat, a framework that makes any non-right-wing voice appear “commissive of existence.” But the opposition itself was more stringent than Netanyahu towards Iran during the campaign. The competition was not between a discourse of war and a discourse of peace, but rather between different degrees of the same war discourse, which narrows the space for any different discourse.
Immigration...the wrong interpretation of the correct issue?
Between 2023 and 2025, a total of 268,509 Israelis left for periods exceeding three months, and in 2024 and 2025 50,000 more people left Israel than arrived, according to data from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics. She described these numbers as "the highest immigration rates in Israeli history for the third year in a row."
But the fundamental question is not how many are leaving, but who is leaving. Here lies the real equation. The Israel Democracy Institute study (December 2025) found that:
39% of secular Jews are considering leaving
More than 40% of Jews on the left are considering leaving
35% of Jews in the middle are considering leaving
Only 19% of Jews on the right are considering leaving
This disparity may result in those who leave being predominantly secular left- and center-leaning voices, and those who stay or come (religious immigrants) being those with right-wing or conservative leanings. A study indicates that about 750,000 Israelis live abroad (mostly in the United States and Canada), which represents about 10% of the total Jewish population in Israel.
The result that researchers expect is that even if a single person's convictions do not change, the demographic structure of the voting bloc will shift to the right year after year.
This idea is based on the intersection of two main phenomena studied by research centers in Israel (such as the Israeli Democracy Institute (IDI) and the Center for Statistics and Population Studies), which are the disparity in reproductive rates (fertility demography) and adverse migration or demographic bleeding.
Transformation mechanisms...beyond the numbers
There are three structural mechanisms that work in concert to produce what we see today, and separate studies have documented them in different ways:
The first mechanism: politicization of security shock: The Hebrew University study found that exposure to violence restructures political convictions on an ongoing basis, and does not change them only temporarily. An analytical reading, which the study itself does not provide, assumes that the children of October 7, 2023 will be voters for the 28th Knesset in the year 2030, and right-wing positions may take root in them years before they become politically aware.
The second mechanism: Military socialization as a social tool: Researcher Noa Lavie, in a joint study with other researchers, believes that compulsory military service is not only a duty, but a comprehensive socialization mechanism that “sanctifies obedience” and makes the military environment a primary reference for identity. The study by Orna Sasson-Levy and Gal Levy demonstrates that this upbringing is not distributed equally between groups, but rather reflects and reproduces the class and ethnic positions of the recipients, and that it glorifies the combat soldier as a model of the “good citizen.”
The third mechanism: The left’s failure to formulate an alternative security narrative: Since the Camp David negotiations in 2000 and the outbreak of the second intifada, the left has lost its basic card, which is the claim that it is capable of producing security through peace, and it has not regained its security credibility since then. Young people who place security as their first priority, according to a study by the Israeli Democracy Institute, believe that the left does not provide an answer to the question: “How can you guarantee that Gaza will not be repeated?”, and does not have a solid security plan.
Thus, many young people are turning to the right, which presents the narrative of “absolute power and conflict management” as a possible alternative. The result is that economic discontent, which is expressed by young people, does not turn into a leftist vote, because security comes before the economy in the list of priorities whenever a crisis occurs.
A community between two paths
The Israeli reality today presents a complex scene that cannot be reduced to the phrase “moving towards the right.” Studies and research indicate that the left has declined severely and there is no indication of its recovery. According to studies and research, the overwhelming majority of Jewish youth identify themselves as right-wing, while the demographic-religious composition is shifting in favor of the ultra-Orthodox and national-religious trends, and the accumulated security shock (the second intifada, the Gaza war, the Iran war) is entrenching the right-wing trend.
But the right itself is not a homogeneous bloc - it has four different orientations (Likud, Haredi, religious Zionism, and the secular right) - and its positions vary on military service, the economy, and the identity of the state. Young people do not unite behind one party, while immigration creates a voter bloc, but does not create it in a linear manner.
The most difficult question remains unresolved: Is Israel moving towards a religious right in an irreversible way, or does each election cycle - as indicated by 2026, which returned the right to the level of 1996 - carry within it room for correction and review? Numbers do not decide the answer.
