On a September evening in a Tel Aviv park, a few dozen teenagers gathered for a first-time voters' meeting run by theDemocrats, the most left-leaning Jewish party still in contention. One of them, an eighteen-year-old named Gili, told a visiting reporter that she felt Israeli society had turned its back on peace. A few weeks later, in Nir Am, a kibbutz a short drive from the Gaza border, a young man named Amihai told the same news agency what he thought should happen instead: Israel should annex the West Bank and put an end, once and for all, to Palestinian hopes for a state.

Of the two, Amihai is by far the more representative. Today, as Israelis vote in their first general election since October 7, 2023, roughly five hundred and fifty thousand of them are casting a ballot for the first time. In a survey commissioned by Channel 12, seventy-four per cent of Jewish first-time voters described their views as right or center-right. Twenty-three per cent placed themselves anywhere on the left. Across much of the democratic world, the young are the most progressive voters, and in some countries anger over the war in Gaza has pushed them further in that direction. In Israel, the arrow points the other way.

There is a fashionable explanation for this, and TRT World, the Turkish state broadcaster, hardly a neutral observer of Israeli politics, gave it a name this week: "Generation Right," a cohort it described as algorithm-bred. The evidence it marshals is not trivial. According to the Israel Democracy Institute, about eighty per cent of young people say they will vote, yet roughly two-thirds have never joined a protest or signed a petition. Their politics arrives through TikTok, WhatsApp, and Telegram, and most say they don't go looking for it. It simply appears. Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, who studies digital democracy at the institute, has described Israel's parties as data factories, sifting search histories and engagement patterns to infer what will frighten or enrage a given voter. Ahead of the election, TikTok said it removed hundreds of bot accounts and nearly fifteen hundred accounts impersonating candidates or officials. In August, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national-security minister, posted an AI-generated video of Palestinian prisoners moving along an industrial conveyor belt; it drew millions of views before it came down.

It is a tidy theory, and an appealing one for anyone who would rather locate a problem in a machine than in a society. The trouble is that the timeline does not cooperate. The pollster Dahlia Scheindlin has pointed out that the rightward drift of young Jewish Israelis has been under way for about two decades, which is to say it predates not only TikTok but the smartphone.

Consider what the parents of today's eighteen-year-olds lived through. They watched the Oslo process collapse into the Second Intifada, when buses and cafés became targets. They watched Israel withdraw from Gaza in 2005, and then watched Hamas take over the territory and the rockets follow. The conclusion many families drew, that land handed over buys danger rather than calm, was passed down at the dinner table long before it was reinforced by a feed. Their children have also known almost no prime minister but Benjamin Netanyahu, who has governed for all but about eighteen months since 2009, when most of this cohort was not yet born.

Demography matters, too. Haredi and religious-Zionist families have far more children than secular ones, so each new class of voters is more observant than the one before it. Channel 12's poll found first-time voters more likely than their elders to keep religious customs, and its analysts suggested that some young Haredim are drifting from Shas, the traditional ultra-Orthodox party, toward Ben-Gvir.

And then there is the fact that is easiest to forget from abroad. Israel drafts its eighteen-year-olds. The people voting for the first time today are the age of the soldiers who fought in Gaza, of the festivalgoers killed at Nova, of many of the hostages. October 7 is not something they scrolled past. It is classmates and units and funerals. Scheindlin's account of what followed is simple: a shock that large produces fear first, and fear makes peace seem impossible. Political scientists have watched the same thing happen in other societies after mass-casualty attacks. An algorithm can sharpen that fear. It does not need to invent it.

None of this makes the digital argument wrong, only misaimed. Voters in a democracy are entitled to their conclusions, and a hawkish generation is not by itself a scandal. What should worry people, in Israel and elsewhere, is how those conclusions are being formed: a cohort that is highly certain but has almost no practice in civic life, absorbing politics passively from systems built to reward outrage. Romania annulled the first round of its 2024 presidential election after a candidate surged on a TikTok campaign that authorities said had been artificially amplified. The machinery Shwartz Altshuler describes does not care which direction a voter leans. It cares only that she keeps watching.

The numbers also deserve a careful reading. The Channel 12 survey covered Jewish youth only, leaving out Arab citizens, who make up about a fifth of the population and include tens of thousands of first-time voters. In Israel, "right-wing" is often less a policy program than a security identity. And a right-leaning label does not translate neatly into votes for Netanyahu. His leading challenger, Gadi Eisenkot, is a former army chief of staff who has said Palestinian statehood is off the table; another opposition figure, Avigdor Liberman, has spent decades on the right. A generation can be hawkish and still want a different government.

History offers one more caution against treating a generation's politics as fixed. In 1977, Israelis who had come of age in the shadow of the Yom Kippur War handed the right its first national victory, under Menachem Begin. Two years later, Begin signed a peace treaty with Egypt. Whatever happens when the polls close tonight, the more durable question is not what Israel's youngest voters believe now but what, over the next decade, might give them reason to believe something else. The answer is unlikely to come from their phones.