‘They’re fed up’: Post-ceasefire, Israel faces an enormous political reckoning

People standing at a viewpoint in Sderot in Southern Israel look at the damage in the Gaza Strip on Oct. 14. Photo by Jalaa Marey/AFP via Getty Images

Senior Columnist Rob Eshman October 14, 2025

My brother-in-law, David Levy, didn’t sleep much the night before the release of the last living hostages. That day, he stayed glued to the family TV — along with what seemed like the entire country.

“You could just see the injection of spirit this has given to Israel,” he said.

“I finally get why Judaism talks so much about ‘the redemption of captives,’” he said, referring to the religious duty to free prisoners. “You see how this has just driven Israelis crazy for the past two years.”

Now, there’s a budding sense of normalcy, he said, and a tentative if clear-eyed hope for the future.

But when I asked David if he thought Palestinians and Israelis would achieve coexistence — the last point on President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan to end the war — he broke into a smile.

“Yeah,” he said, “maybe Hamas will ask for the sheet music to ‘HaTikvah.’”

After the hostage release, a reckoning

I called David, my wife’s brother, on Oct. 7, 2023, after news broke of the Hamas attack. He and his wife, Etti, had just endured a two-hour missile barrage at Kibbutz Mishmar HaNegev, where they have lived for 48 years, some 20 minutes by car from the Gaza border. He was seething with anger at how his government could let this happen.

“This is a total f—-up,” he said at the time. He spent the next several days at funerals, shivas and memorial services for many murdered friends and colleagues.

With the release of the 20 living hostages Monday, in exchange for close to 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, there’s finally a real chance for the anger he and other Israelis felt that day to have a political impact, David said when we spoke by video app on Monday.

There will likely be an election before fall, David said — elections are mandated in 2026. He expects Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to face a reckoning over three primary issues: the cash payments Qatar made to Hamas under his watch, essentially financing the Oct. 7 attack; his refusal to force Haredi men to serve in the army, which has contributed to enormous strains on Israel’s reserve forces amid the war; and his rejection of a government investigation into Israel’s failures on and leading up to Oct. 7.

“As opposed to almost everybody else, he has never said, ‘I’m sorry,’” David said.

The long-running complaint of many Israelis is that the political opposition to Netanyahu has never coalesced around a strong candidate. But David said the past two years may have changed that as well. A new generation of young people became politically engaged because of the attack, the hostage crisis and the war.

“You had guys with jobs and families spending 400, 500, days in the army doing reserve service,” he said. “They’re fed up. All these young, capable people that just went through this war, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re going to get their say and do something.”

‘Israelis are still mourning’

I asked David if that reckoning will include an acknowledgment of Israel’s destructiveness in the war in Gaza. If the ceasefire holds, rebuilding efforts will surely be accompanied by more reports on the death toll and devastation — although international journalists are still being denied entry to the strip.

How will Israelis come to terms with it?

“What did Mosul look like after the Americans left?” he asked. Meaning: American, Iraqi and allied troops destroyed an estimated 60% of the Iraqi city of Mosul in a 2017 effort to rout ISIS fighters, killing an estimated 9,000 civilians. Did Americans ever really confront that harm — or even, as a collective, feel an obligation to?

“I don’t think the mindset was we just turn the place into rubble for the sake of turning it into rubble,” he said.

He has seen the rubble of Gaza himself, during visits to friends in border communities, and said he agrees “the destruction is going to be something that has to be reckoned with,” he said.

“But you know, Israelis are still mourning. That sounds like a cop out, but Israelis have not totally not dealt with the other side.”

The reason, he said, is that two years later, the trauma of Oct. 7 is still fresh.

“The Israeli public has been so devastated,” he said, “we’re wrapped up in ourselves. I don’t know when we’ll get over it. Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who’s been affected directly by this war.”

What comes next?

Israel wants its image abroad to improve, David said. Trump’s peace plan, although fragile — already, there are clashes over Hamas’ delay in returning the bodies of slain hostages — offers an opening.

“If there’s peace, and Gaza gets rebuilt properly, so that these people can have a good life instead of just being pawns in this crazy death cult of Hamas, then I’m sure that this will improve Israel’s reputation around the world,” David said. “But will Hamas give up power and disarm?”

That question is central to fears over whether Trump’s plan will be fulfilled. It’s a serious concern. Even as David raised it, I noticed an incoming news alert that Hamas militants had killed at least 33 Gazans whom the group accused of collaborating with Israel.

Yet there are still reasons to be hopeful. After attending a day of memorials on the second anniversary of Oct. 7, David said he was preparing to spend Simchat Torah — the holiday on which the massacre took place in 2023 — at a festive family meal, cooked by his son-in-law, who owns a Jerusalem restaurant.

Is that kind of true celebration a sign the war is really over? I asked.

“I want to hope so,” he said. “I really, really want this to be over.”