A new poll featured on Israel’s Channel 12 shows that first-time Jewish Israeli voters, due to participate in the upcoming government elections this year, are more right-wing and religious-nationalist in their outlook than older voters.
Channel 12 is considered a centrist outlet and is the most-watched commercial news channel in Israel.
Netanyahu’s current government is the most right-wing in Israeli history, and it has held together since its election on November 1, 2022. New elections will likely be held between May and October.
The new voters in the poll represent 18 to 21-year-old Jewish Israelis, notably excluding Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, and consequently criticized for being an “apartheid poll.”
That isn’t wrong, but when an apartheid reality exists from the river to the sea, the political leanings of members of the self-described master race are not trivial.
The poll found that 75% of voters described themselves as “right-wing,” compared with 68% among older voters. The remaining 25% identify as “center-left,” and the self-identified “left” accounts for only 5%.
It is important to note, here, the relativity of concepts of right and left in Israeli politics. Opposition leader Yair Lapid, who is head of the centrist Yesh Atid party, recently affirmed that he agrees with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee’s affirmation of Israel’s Biblical right to conquer Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and parts of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. This is called the “Greater Israel” vision for Israel’s future borders, stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates
On that same note, the leader of the only “leftist” party in the Zionist spectrum, Yair Golan, advocated in December 2023 for starving Gaza’s population. “We’d all like to wake up one spring morning and find that 7 million Palestinians who live between the sea and the river have simply disappeared,” Golan said in 2025. But let’s get back to those young Zionist voters.
The new voting group is said to be a major numerical addition of half a million voters to the electoral picture, the largest in Israel’s history. It is the equivalent of 17 seats in the 120-seat Knesset.
Netanyahu’s Likud party is by far the most preferred among them, polling at 20%. After that, coming in at 11%, is United Torah Judaism, an ultra-orthodox Ashkenazi (European heritage) Jewish party, which has become ultra-Zionist. Then there’s Naftali Bennett’s party, coming in at 10%, and he’s an even more religious-Zionist fanatic than Netanyahu. Finally, there is Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party, leading by 7%. The rest of the parties receive smaller percentages of 5% or less.
Among these young voters, 59% prefer the rightwing bloc that governs now, while 41% prefer the opposition. On the question of Netanyahu vs. Bennett for premiership, 49% support Netanyahu, and only 24% support Bennett.
The other notable point of information in the Channel 12 poll is the transformation toward religious fanaticism. A full 80% of young voters consider themselves religious (compared to 75% of older voters). To represent the polling data more theatrically, Channel 12 invited 12 young potential votes to their Saturday news broadcast. All of them were clear about having become more religious since October 7, 2023.
When asked directly whether October 7 made them more religious, 11 out of 12 raised their hands.
Religiosity, here, goes hand in hand with a hardline form of Zionism. The voters have all become more militarized in their outlook, and when asked whether they were against “Arab parties” being part of the Israeli Knesset, 11 out of 12 once again answered in the affirmative.
Oz, who is 18 and says he will vote for hardline Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party, said that his parent’s generation grew up on pro-peace songs, while children today grow up listening to “Harbo Darbo,” a popular genocidal song from November 2023. “Once, we dreamed of peace,” he said. “And today, we’re more, ‘live by the sword.’”
One is often used to the younger generation being a bit more progressive than their parents. For Jewish Israeli society, it’s the reverse.
Nine out of ten Israelis are genocidal
The polls conducted throughout the genocide in Gaza indicated a consistent general trend in Jewish Israeli society. About 4 out of 5 Jewish Israelis supported genocide in various formulations, from the 79% not concerned with starvation in Gaza (August 2025), to the over 75% opining that there are “no innocents in Gaza” (June 2025), and to the 82% supporting the total expulsion of Gaza’s residents (May 2025).
In that last poll, commissioned by Pennsylvania State University, authors Shai Hazkani and Tamir Sorek noted that only 9% of men under 40, the main demographic serving in the Israeli army in Gaza, “rejected all the ideas of deportation and extermination presented to them.”
To put that differently: if you’re a Palestinian in Gaza, there’s a 9 out of 10 chance that the Israeli soldier who controls your life wants you dead.
These young new voters are part of this genocidal turn. They are not just entering the electoral picture — they’re entering the army. Military service is also likely to further radicalize them. They are poised to live by the sword.
