Concert crowds hint at Israel’s political divide ahead of elections

With Israel’s election about four months away, a report from two huge concerts, Aviv Geffen’s show at Yarkon Park in Tel Aviv and Omer Adam’s run at Ramat Gan Stadium, used the crowds as a political temperature check. The article suggests the music scenes mirror a divided society, where taste, identity and politics increasingly overlap.

At Adam’s concert, many fans described him as warm, popular and more traditional. Several said that fit the kind of voter who backs Benjamin Netanyahu or, for some, Itamar Ben Gvir. One fan from Beersheba estimated the crowd was “80% Likud, another 10% Ben Gvir,” while others said plainly that “Bibi will take it here.” Still, there were exceptions, including Shiri from Modi'in, who said she plans to vote for Yair Lapid but still listens to Adam because politics and music are separate.

At Geffen’s show, the tone was darker and more political. Fans spoke about grief, war and exhaustion, and many said Geffen has broadened beyond his old left-wing image. On stage, Geffen told the audience it included “all shades” and urged them to “choose hope, choose our children, choose togetherness, choose equality, choose peace,” adding, “We want change.” Several attendees said they had moved rightward or toward the center since October 7, including voters shifting from Meretz and Labor to Benny Gantz, Naftali Bennett, Avigdor Liberman or Yair Golan.

The piece concludes that neither concert produced a neat political map. Adam’s audience was not uniformly right-wing, and Geffen’s was not exclusively left-wing. But the overall impression was of a country split into camps, even as the shared experience of singing together briefly softens the divide.