There is something quietly striking in the contrast between young voters in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and those in Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel. In one case, youth drove a political upheaval. In the other, they have largely stepped back from the streets — after once filling them.
Before Oct. 7, 2023, tens of thousands of Israelis, many of them young, poured into city centers week after week to protest the government’s proposed judicial overhaul. They returned again in the war’s early months to demand action on the hostages. Today, those crowds are thinner, older and far less visibly driven by the country’s youngest generation.
At first glance, that absence can look like apathy. It is not necessarily so.
The instinct to equate declining protest participation with democratic disengagement is understandable. Across much of the world, youth movements have become the visible engine of political resistance. If young people are not marching, the assumption follows that they no longer care.
Israel does not fit that pattern — and that divergence may say less about democratic weakness than about national circumstance.
Start with the obvious: Israel is a country at war, or close to it, with a generation that is not merely politically invested but physically enlisted. Military service is a shared experience that shapes priorities and worldview. When the “cool thing to do” shifts from protest to reserve duty, that is not necessarily ideological surrender. It is lived reality.
That reality creates a different hierarchy of engagement. In many countries, protest is the primary way young people experience collective purpose. In Israel, that purpose is often expressed through service — military, volunteer and communal. Many of the same individuals who once filled the streets have redirected their energies into forms of contribution that feel more urgent and immediate.
There is also a harder truth: young Israelis are, on balance, more conservative than their counterparts elsewhere in the democratic world. That reflects demographics, including the growth of religious communities, but also experience. A generation raised amid terrorism, war and instability will not necessarily mirror the assumptions of Western Generation Z.
That shift does not automatically signal a rejection of democracy. It may instead reflect a prioritization of stability, cohesion and national resilience — values that carry different weight in Israel’s context.
None of this is cost-free. A diminished protest culture can reduce pressure on governments and narrow visible channels for dissent. Fatigue is real. So is the sense among many Israelis that protests no longer meaningfully move events.
But political energy has not necessarily disappeared; some of it may simply have migrated — to military service, civil society, quieter organizing and eventual electoral engagement.
It is possible that many young Israelis have concluded that this government is unlikely to be dislodged in the streets and that elections, whenever they come, are the more meaningful arena for change. It is also possible that exhaustion, trauma and wartime solidarity are temporarily suppressing visible dissent. The truth is that no one yet fully knows.
What does seem clear is that the relative absence of young Israelis from today’s protest movement should not automatically be mistaken for indifference to the country’s future. This is a generation deeply entangled in Israel’s burdens, risks and responsibilities. Whether that engagement eventually reappears politically — and in what form — remains to be seen.