One poll number has become the centerpiece of Israel’s public diplomacy: 81% of Israelis support the attack on Iran. Among Jewish Israelis: 91%. Among opposition voters: 77%. Even among self-identified leftists: 79%.
Politicians have invoked these figures internationally as proof of an overwhelming public mandate. But this number conceals more than it reveals.
The data comes from a survey conducted by Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in early March.
To understand what actually constitutes public support for war, we need to disaggregate public judgment along several dimensions: 1) Necessity: is the external threat real, and have alternatives been exhausted?
(2) feasibility: What are the likely benefits, and at what cost? (3) scope: Is this a limited strike or a campaign to topple a regime? And (4) trust in the institutions conducting the war and in the proportionality of their conduct.
Beyond the 81%: two visions of Israel’s war
When we break the data down this way, what looks like national unity turns out to be two markedly different understandings of the war, imagined by two different publics.
Among coalition voters, who constitute 51% of Jewish voters in the poll, the picture is internally consistent. Support for the campaign runs at 96%.
Some 60% are worried about external threats, and 79% trust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Approximately 86% believe Iran’s nuclear program, missile infrastructure, and regime will be significantly damaged, and 40% expect a full regime collapse.
The costs seem manageable: the home front is seen as resilient and the escalation risk as moderate. Fully 86% support continuing until the regime falls.
This is a coherent position across the dimensions: a real but not paralyzing sense of necessity, given the high trust in Netanyahu – a reasonable inference that alternatives were seen as exhausted; strong feasibility with benefits that outweigh costs; trust in the institutions conducting the war; and a mandate for the maximal scope.
Among opposition voters – 49% of Jewish voters in the poll – the picture is entirely different. Even though 77% nominally support the attack, only 9% trust Netanyahu. Expected benefits are lower: only 48% believe Iran’s nuclear program will be meaningfully degraded, with just 11% expecting a full regime collapse. Meanwhile, 62% fear escalation.
Net feasibility – benefits minus costs – stands at 23 points for the opposition versus 60 for the coalition. For the coalition, benefits dramatically outweigh costs. For the opposition, they barely do.
So what sustains that 77% figure among opposition voters? Three pillars. First, threat perception: 81% of them are worried about external threats – 21 percentage points higher than the 60% among coalition voters.
Second, institutional trust: 83% of opposition voters trust the IDF, which partially offsets their wholesale distrust of the government.
Third, and most revealing, opposition voters support a fundamentally different campaign: while 86% of coalition voters support continuing until the regime falls, 40% of opposition voters prefer a ceasefire following limited degradation of capabilities, and 7% are unsure.
Among the left-leaning third of the opposition, this divergence is even starker: 48% prefer a ceasefire, 8% unsure, and 45% want to continue until the regime falls.
The Israeli Left is imagining a bounded military operation. The Right is imagining regime change.
The Arab public (16% of the total sample) presents yet another configuration.
Threat perception is high (80%), and trust in Netanyahu is negligible, as is trust in the Jewish opposition. But trust in the IDF stands at only 37%, offering no buffer against distrust of political leadership.
The result: only 38% of Arab citizens support the attack. Threat perception alone, without institutional trust, is not enough.
The difference between coalition and opposition is not merely one of content but of structure. Coalition supporters hold a coherent, internally consistent position.
Opposition voters support an action they do not believe will succeed, led by a leader they do not trust, toward a goal they do not endorse.
Political psychology research suggests that ambivalent attitudes are less likely to translate into political action, which helps explain the paralysis we observe in the Israeli opposition today.
That 77% will not become political pressure. It will not become accountability.
One dimension the survey did not measure – and one strikingly absent from public discourse – is proportionality: what counts as acceptable collateral damage, which targets are legitimate, and what are the limits of force.
This absence is itself a finding. The war is being discussed in Israel in the language of military procedure rather than moral judgment.
As the campaign unfolds, the limits of the strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities have grown clearer, as have the costs, the campaign’s extended duration, and the risk of regional escalation. If anything, that trajectory makes the original division more consequential.
Now, as decisions about the campaign’s continuation are being made in Washington and Jerusalem, leaders are invoking that 81% as a mandate. They should not. The Israeli public did not endorse this war unanimously; it endorsed two different conceptions of the campaign, without a shared understanding of its scope or endpoint.
What lies beneath the 81% figure is a fractured and ambivalent opposition, driven mainly by heightened threat perceptions, whose silence should not be mistaken for consent.
The writer is a professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem & Stony Brook University.