JERUSALEM — Nearly nine months after the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack, political divisions in the Jewish state have resurfaced, with protests across the country criticizing the government on various, often contradictory grounds.

But a major new poll by pollsters affiliated with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has revealed how the Oct. 7 attack on Israel has hardened the national consensus on what was once the country’s central political disagreement. As for the Palestinians, the poll found that almost all of them are now right-wingers.

“October 7 saw the complete collapse of the old Israeli left,” said Nimrod Nir, a political psychologist at the Hebrew University who led the study. Free Washington Beacon“Just a few years ago, I could find out which political camp you were in by asking you one question: Palestinian state, yes or no? Today, that question does not distinguish between the two camps, because no one supports the old idea of ​​a Palestinian state.”

These results help explain why the Biden administration has so far failed to persuade Israel to end its war to destroy the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas in the Gaza Strip and recommit to a two-state solution.

“There is no longer even a majority for a Palestinian state among liberal voters,” Nir said. “It is simply not an option.”

Nir and his team, known as Agam Labs, surveyed a nationally representative sample of 4,000 adult Israeli Jews in August, then checked in with most of them about every 10 days from Oct. 9 through last month. By following so many of the same people over time, the pollsters were able to minimize noise and uncertainty — providing the most comprehensive picture yet of how Israeli politics have changed since Oct. 7.

Each round of polling had a margin of error of about 4 percentage points. But changes as small as 2 percentage points are significant if they are consistent over time, according to pollsters.

The survey found that the rightward shift in Israeli policy in the face of decades of Palestinian terrorism and rejectionism has accelerated dramatically since Oct. 7. Based on political self-identification, the right wing has grown by 5 percentage points to 36 percent of Jewish Israelis, or 60 percent when the survey includes the moderate and hard right. The left has shrunk by 3 percentage points to just 8 percent of the population, or 13 percent when the moderate and hard left are included. And the center has remained steady at about a quarter of the political spectrum.

The results indicate that more than 160,000 of Israel’s 7 million Jews are moving away from the left, while more than 110,000 are joining the right, the poll showed.

Debbie Sharon, a 60-year-old criminal defense lawyer from Yated, a city in southern Israel, is a newly minted right-winger. She recalled that before Oct. 7, she shared the prevailing view at the time that Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza and subsequent economic support for the Strip encouraged calm and might one day lead to peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

“People on the right warned us that the Palestinians don’t think like we do: They don’t care about peace for their children. They only care about eliminating us,” Sharon said. “But we didn’t believe them. We said, ‘They’re all crazy. They’re all right-wing extremists.’” Then several thousand Hamas terrorists and ordinary Palestinians burst through the Gaza border, a few miles from Sharon’s home. As she hid in her safe room for more than 30 hours, the terrorists murdered dozens of her friends, neighbors and customers. In all, about 1,200 people were killed, most of them civilians, and 250 were taken hostage.

“I’ve always been a centrist, so now it’s hard for me to say directly that I’m a right-wing person,” she said. Free Beacon“But I probably am, and I will probably vote much more to the right in the next election than I ever did before.”

Earlier this year, Sharon volunteered for Tzav 9, a grassroots movement that emerged to protest Israel’s delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza during the war. She eventually left the group — which was recently linked to violence and sanctioned by the Biden administration — saying it had become too divisive. But she stood by her opposition to aid.

“They can get help in Gaza if they give us the hostages. That’s how I feel,” she said. “I think that makes me a right-wing extremist.”

According to an Agam Labs poll, 52 percent of Israeli Jews oppose the government facilitating humanitarian aid to Gaza during the war, while just 30 percent support the policy — roughly a reversal of the data from before October 7.

Support for direct Israeli aid and cooperation with the Palestinians declined even faster and more significantly, falling to around one-fifth of the population in both cases.

When it comes to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, just 30 percent of Israeli Jews still believe in God, the survey found, down 8 percentage points since Oct. 7.

At the same time, support for potential annexation of Palestinian territory by Israel is also low and virtually unchanged since the Hamas massacre, while initial enthusiasm for resettling Gaza quickly cooled and is now supported by just over a third of Israelis. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ruled out the idea of ​​settlements.

The survey suggests that the Jewish public’s attitudes toward the Palestinians since October 7 — which have reversed somewhat during the Gaza war — are driven less by right-wing ideology than by rational security concerns.

“This shift offers a rare opportunity to shift public positions on the conflict,” the pollsters wrote. “Israelis who previously opposed a Palestinian state on ideological grounds may support it if they are convinced that it would benefit Israel’s security and prevent future attacks like those by Hamas, or if the costs of refusing to take the political step are too high. But a plan that presents a realistic vision of an independent Palestinian government while preserving Israel’s security interests is a categorical step.”

Israelis have yet to hear an explanation of how the Biden administration’s Middle East peace plan would protect their national security interests. Even among Jews who plan to vote for Israel’s liberal opposition parties, support for a two-state solution has fallen to about 40 percent, according to Nir. No major Jewish politician has supported U.S. demands that Israel hand civilian control of Gaza to the Palestinian Authority, a Hamas faction that supports terrorism, and commit to a “credible path” to Palestinian statehood.

Yoram Yitzhaki, a 58-year-old businessman from Hanita, a municipal housing estate on Israel’s evacuated border with Lebanon, said that as the son of an Israeli kibbutz movement, he considers the left to be his political tribe, even if “it has nothing to do with the protests on the streets of Kaplan (against the Tel Aviv government).” He plans to vote for the “Democrats,” a new merger of the respected leftist Labor and Meretz parties, and believes Israel should seek peace with the Muslim world wherever possible.

But Yitzhaki said: “October 7 proved to me that we will never be able to trust the Palestinians and we have to be much, much stronger.”

Since the beginning of the war, Yitzhaki has refused government orders to evacuate Hanita, staying with a handful of other residents even as Israeli tanks park on the sidewalks and occasionally exchange fire with Hezbollah terrorists across the border. He has compared the Gaza war — which has threatened to spread north and beyond — to Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, during which an Arab siege cut Hanita off from the rest of Israel.

“The kibbutsniks were the original settlers,” he said. “We were the original patriots.”