In the coming years and decades, how will the friends and classmates of Naftali Fraenkel and Muhammad Abu Khdeir exercise leadership? Fraenkel’s peers may be more conservative than the current generation of Israeli leaders, while Abu Khdeir’s may spurn Palestinian party politics altogether. Perhaps the most dangerous outcome is that many on both sides could go their entire lives without saying a word to one another.

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On the Israeli side, today’s youth are more right-wing than their parents and grandparents. The Israeli right-wing covers the political spectrum from Netanyahu’s Likud Party, the core of the current governing coalition, to Naftali Bennett’s pro-settler Jewish Home Party. Relative to their counterparts on the left, these parties generally take a firmer stance on security issues, like rockets from Gaza and the Iranian nuclear program, and are more distrustful of the peace process and Palestinian intentions. In the last national election in 2013, two-thirds of first-time voters (in Israel, the voting age is 18) defined themselves as right-wingers. A poll in May found that 58 percent of Israelis under the age of 35 described their political affiliation as “right,” compared with 50 percent of those aged 35 to 49 and 47 percent of those above 50. Israelis under 35 were also the most likely to say that the country is heading in the wrong direction and to agree with the statement “most of the Western world is against Israel.”

Israeli youth are mostly in favor of a two-state solution for the Israelis and Palestinians, but deeply skeptical that such a peace deal will be struck. According to a survey conducted last year, 57 percent of young Israelis still desire a two-state solution, but only 25 percent think it’s feasible (compared with 41 percent of their elders).

Idan Maor, the 25-year-old chairman of the Hebrew University Student Union at the school’s Givat Ram campus, attributed these generational differences to the security situation in which young Israelis have grown up, and their disenchantment with the peace process following the successful but ultimately stalled Oslo Accords in the 1990s.

“All my childhood I was afraid to walk by buses,” Maor recalled, in reference to experiencing the Second Intifada, an armed Palestinian uprising that raged from 2000 to 2005, as a young person in Jerusalem. “Almost every day you would see horrifying pictures of people exploding inside buses. … Even today, every time I hear an ambulance, I think there was a terrorist attack.”

“And [the Intifada] happened at the exact time when the [Israeli] peace movement was the biggest,” added Maor, who identifies politically as center-left. “I remember as a child, I believed that everything was going to end and everyone was going to be happy. A lot of people see those days and remember the hope and look at where we are today, and then they become more right-wing.”