Alongside familiar feelings of fear and uncertainty, the newly escalated conflict with Iran has forged a renewed mood of national unity, in which the usual political and social divisions of Israel’s fractured society appeared to have been subsumed by a collective sense that a conflict long willed by so many had finally arrived.
Speaking from inside a shelter as the sounds of missiles and explosions shook the city, Orly Hareuveny, a physiotherapist, told Middle East Eye that Israelis had become so accustomed to war that it was now a distinct characteristic of Israeli life - “the same as the weather is for people in England”.
Hareuveny considers herself a leftist and a supporter of co-existence with Palestinians, political views that have been marginalised in the Israel of Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition and its three-year genocidal war in Gaza.
