Israel’s general election on October 27 is being described by analysts, sociologists and pollsters as a critical juncture. Gone is the era when the right and liberal wings of Israeli politics clashed primarily over the Palestinians; today, near-universal animosity has replaced the old debate over a two-state solution. Jewish Israeli voters are instead confronting deeper questions about the nature of democracy, the legitimacy of governing coalitions, and the character of the state itself.
Palestinian citizens of Israel, at least those who are allowed to vote, are left to hope that a future coalition might curb some of the violence and lawlessness that continues to plague their neighbourhoods.
Social-political psychologist Daniel Bar-Tal said some of the main concerns for Jewish Israeli voters will be the far right coalition government’s attempts to bypass democratic norms and to end the de facto exemption of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox minority from conscription. “One of the most important tasks will be to overturn the nomination of loyal people to many jobs that Netanyahu [has overseen … which] destroyed the civil service and security forces, including the army, Shabak [the Shin Bet], and Mossad,” Bar-Tal told Al Jazeera.
Overshadowing all of this is October 7, 2023, when 1,139 people were killed in Hamas-led raids and an Israeli military counteroffensive. Endlessly replayed on Israeli television, October 7 continues to dominate the public consciousness, while the 73,387 Palestinians in Gaza killed since then are mostly ignored.
Questions over how Israelis and Palestinians might live together, or even the potential of an independent Palestinian state as agreed to in the 1990s Oslo Accords, have been entirely sidelined. Instead, Israelis are calling for an inquiry into how the attack was allowed to happen and, specifically, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s role in the security breach. Netanyahu has repeatedly used the multiple wars he has embarked on since then to argue against holding an inquiry, and he has also called for deferment of his trials over alleged corruption.
Prominent Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani told Al Jazeera: “There’s a large number of people who just want to get rid of Netanyahu.” He said the Israeli opposition, while often almost as right wing as the governing Likud party, is seen as an “Anti-Netanyahu bloc.” “It isn’t just the corruption,” Shenhav-Shahrabani continued. “It’s the sense that he’s at the centre of many of the country’s ills. I get the sense we’ve reached the stage where even [Netanyahu’s party] Likud’s members are reluctant to vote for him.”
There are also wider questions about the fundamental nature of governance and democracy in Israel. Many have criticised Netanyahu for overstepping political norms, including attempting to sideline the judiciary, which still has the power to hold his government accountable. The 2023 judicial overhaul, which sought to free the government from much of this oversight, is part of an assault on state institutions, critics say. Other attacks include placing loyalists in charge of different branches of the security services, and a sustained campaign by the far right to oust Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara. Baharav-Miara is responsible for policing the legality of the coalition’s conduct, and far right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has made her dismissal a condition of joining any future government coalition.
Mairav Zonszein of Crisis Group told Al Jazeera that the issues that matter to voters are almost entirely domestic. “Chief among them is the divide over the right-wing coalition’s judicial overhaul, which critics view as anti-democratic. On the other side, the secular and liberal opposition factions in Israel feel this election is the last chance to save Israeli democracy and restore the institutions that have eroded over Netanyahu’s successive terms.” Zonszein believes Israeli politicians of all stripes are deliberately avoiding the Palestinian issue and focusing on the domestic concerns of Jewish Israeli voters. “In short, the Palestinian issue went from being completely ignored and dismissed to still largely sidelined, but with the added consensus that post-October 7th, a state is off the table and now is not the time for it,” she said.
Most of Israel’s mainstream Jewish parties have ruled out forming a governing coalition with any Arab parties. Far right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has labelled this prospect as “worse” than the October 7 attack. Even the alliance of former Prime Ministers Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett, whose 2021 government included the Arab Ra’am party, has not committed to bringing parties dominated by Palestinian citizens of Israel into a future coalition.
This would leave many of Israel’s Palestinian citizens without a voice amid endemic violence and organised crime, which many believe the government has deliberately allowed to fester. The neglect can be measured in the death toll: this year, 158 Palestinian citizens of Israel have been murdered.
Shenhav-Shahrabani said things are much darker now. “Strains of Israeli society had always been given to violence and right-wing rhetoric, but the trends that had always been present had accelerated under the current government,” he said. “It’s gone backwards.” He also said that the perceived lawlessness in Palestinian neighbourhoods and settler assaults in the occupied West Bank are designed to prevent Palestinians from casting their ballots. “From the pogroms in the West Bank to the violence in Palestinian neighbourhoods, there’s very little sympathy for Palestinians in much of Israel.”
The ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, community and their parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism (UTJ), will likely focus on attempts to conscript their contingent into the military. In the wake of ground deployments to Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, the refusal of the ultra-Orthodox to serve has become one of the most combustible fault lines in Israeli politics. Their leaders continue to frame full-time Torah study as their true national calling and a form of “spiritual protection” for the Jewish people. Thousands of Haredi men blocked thoroughfares in Jerusalem in June to protest attempts to conscript them, prompting heated rhetoric from secular, often right wing politicians.
Yair Golan, a former reserve major general and chairman of the left-leaning Democrats, allegedly called the Haredi “parasites” who “live off the rest of Israeli society,” according to one leaked recording. At street level, the anger has been just as blunt: counterprotesters confronting a Haredi roadblock near Bnei Brak last year held signs reading: “Your brothers will go to war, but you sit here?”
Israeli political analyst Nimrod Flaschenberg said: “The prominence given to [it] is strange, given the scale of what’s happening everywhere else. I think it’s a consequence of the heightened militarism that’s been in place since October 7,” referring to the disparity in scale between the issue of Haredi recruitment and the genocide in Gaza. “It’s a world where every soldier’s death is a cause for national mourning, and stories of reservists serving over a year in combat are everywhere. Against that, the ultra-Orthodox’s refusal to join the army is hard to avoid.”
Any one or all of these factors could determine both the outcome of the election and the shape of Israeli politics to come. Given the political conversation in Israel so far, Palestinian citizens of Israel, as well as those trapped within Gaza or living within the occupied West Bank, have scant cause for optimism.
