In the lead-up to Israel’s 27 October election, media headlines declared this would be the most “consequential” in Israel’s history. At stake is the fate of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, who faces corruption charges at home and an international arrest warrant for war crimes in Gaza.
Israeli politicians debated the cost of living, the independence of the judiciary, conscription of ultra-Orthodox Jews into the military, a state inquiry into security failings on 7 October and Israel’s growing isolation abroad. Not up for debate was Israel’s Gaza genocide, nor the massive expansion of Israeli settlements, settler violence and military invasions in the West Bank, nor Israel’s seizure of territory in southern Lebanon and Syria.
This was a contest between two blocs, a pro-Netanyahu coalition of far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties against an alliance of centrist and right-wing Zionist parties seeking to depose him, led by retired General Gadi Eisenkot, the former military chief of staff. A third bloc, made up of the two Arab-majority parties, the Joint List and Ra’am, was initially barred from participation by Israel’s Central Elections Committee before the supreme court overturned the ban.
Right-wing parties Likud and Otzma Yehudit petitioned for their exclusion, accusing the Arab-majority parties and candidates of denying Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state, supporting armed struggle against Israel or inciting racism. A ban was, however, upheld against Sami Abu Shehadeh, leader of the Palestinian nationalist Balad party and one of the Joint List candidates, on the grounds that he had supported armed struggle against Israel.
The evidence? An opinion piece published in Alaraby on 8 October 2023, in which Abu Shehadeh described the previous day’s Hamas-led attack on Israel as a “significant historical event”.
Accusations of “inciting racism” against Ra’am and the Arab List are of course rank hypocrisy coming from Netanyahu and his coalition partners who have called for the “total annihilation” of Gaza’s cities and the burning of Lebanon, as well as the death penalty for Palestinians accused of “terrorism” offences.
On the eve of the election, Netanyahu’s social media posts drew attention to long queues of Palestinian voters at polling stations and urged Likud supporters to come out and vote.
“If we don't wake up now, we'll find ourselves with a government of Mansour Abbas and Ahmed Tibi”, he said, referring to the leaders of the two Arab-majority parties.
Netanyahu’s coalition ally and Jewish supremacist Itamar Ben-Gvir described the level of Arab voter turnout—people exercising their democratic right to vote—as “crazy”. As national security minister, Ben-Gvir has armed Israeli settlers and established a paramilitary police force in the West Bank.
Basel Smotrich, another Jewish supremacist Netanyahu ally, and leader of the Religious Zionism party, announced he had suspended his election day campaigning to convene an emergency meeting to discuss what he described as unusually high turnout among Arab voters, alleging voter fraud.
While Netanyahu failed to win this election, he remains far from defeated. His ruling coalition, dominated by Likud, will likely secure 53 of the Knesset’s 120 seats, a major drop from the 64 seats he won in 2022, and significantly short of a majority. However, the opposition bloc is trailing with 48 seats. The opposition’s only pathway to power is to govern with the support of the two Arab-majority parties, the Joint List and Ra’am, which together secured an additional 19 seats (nearly double the ten they secured in 2022).
This would not be unprecedented. In 1993, the Oslo Accords were signed by a minority Israeli government with the support of the Arab List parties.
In 2021, Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas broke with the Arab List to join an eight-party coalition, the first time an Arab-majority party had joined an Israeli government. For Abbas, this was an opportunity to secure some short-lived investment in Palestinian communities inside Israel, while turning his back on the elephant in the room: the Israeli occupation. The coalition collapsed within a year following defections from its right flank.
Abbas has declared his intention again to seek a coalition that can unseat Netanyahu. His Islamist Ra’am party put a Jewish former police chief in second position on its slate. However, such overtures have so far been rebuffed.
Israeli musician Yali Sobol delivered Israel’s opposition politicians this blunt message via Facebook according to the Guardian: “If you stop being racist two amazing things will happen to you. First, you will stop being racist. Second, you will discover you have won.”
However, this is a message unlikely to be heeded by an opposition that is as firmly committed to the Zionist project as Netanyahu.
Eisenkot has said he would consider partnering with any party that recognises Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, endorses the values of the Declaration of Independence and commits to all Israelis performing national service, knowing that the Arab List and even Ra’am would be highly unlikely to countenance such a capitulation.
Former prime minister Naftali Bennett, who leads the Together alliance, and Avigdor Liberman, head of the nationalist Yisrael Beytenu party, have throughout the election campaign ruled out such a coalition.
This opposition bloc has much more in common with Netanyahu and his far-right allies than it does with the Arab-majority parties. Eisenkot, who served in Netanyahu’s government for eight months during the Gaza genocide, is responsible for a long list of war crimes and crimes against humanity, opposes Palestinian statehood, and is credited with being the mastermind of the Israeli’s army’s Dahiya Doctrine, which calls for disproportionate force against civilians.
Bennett served in the Sayeret Matkal and Maglan special forces units of the Israel Defense Forces, before launching himself as an IT entrepreneur and subsequently entering politics as Netanyahu’s chief of staff. Accused of involvement in the massacre of more than one hundred Lebanese civilians in Qana in 1996, Bennett has openly called for the extrajudicial killing of Palestinians. He reportedly told a national security advisor, “If you catch terrorists, you simply have to kill them”.
Lieberman, a former Netanyahu minister, is also no stranger to controversy. He has advocated that Israel’s citizens should sign a loyalty oath or lose their right to vote. In April 2018, during the great March of Return, Lieberman justified the killing of at least 189 unarmed Palestinian protesters by declaring that there are “no innocents in Gaza”, a belief now widely shared by the Israeli public, according to a Hebrew University poll.
General Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats, is considered the most “left-wing” of the opposition coalition, and has been the sole leader of a Zionist party to countenance governing with the support of Arab parties. “We must no longer accept Netanyahu’s racist division between Jewish votes and Arab votes”, said Golan, according to a Guardian report. “We have a majority. We have a responsibility. And we have an opportunity to form a change government in partnership with Arab citizens of Israel.”
Yet Golan, who was previously the army’s deputy chief of staff, has been one of the most strident advocates of genocidal crimes against Palestinians in Gaza. In an October 2023 interview with Ynet, Golan said: “First of all, close all the electricity switches to Gaza. I think that in this battle, it is forbidden to allow a humanitarian effort. We need to say to them: listen, until the [captives] are released, from our side, you can die from starvation. It’s totally legitimate”.
Where will all this lead? We can anticipate weeks of horse-trading between Israeli politicians to stitch together a coalition. In the liberal media, this is presented as democracy in action. “Israel has always been two things: a Jewish state and a liberal democracy”, the New York Times insists. Voter turnout—the highest in almost three decades—supposedly demonstrates Israeli citizens’ enthusiasm for the democratic process. And “Arab Israelis” (Palestinians) voted in record numbers, making two Arab parties “potential kingmakers”, according to the Times.
Neither claim bears any resemblance to the truth. Israel is and always has been a racist, settler-colonial state. Just like its colonial predecessors, Israel has long pursued a “divide and rule” policy towards its colonised subjects. In 2025, there were nearly 7.5 million Palestinians living in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, according to the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics. Together these 7.5 million Palestinians narrowly outnumber Israel’s Jewish citizens.
Yet, the vast majority—the 5.6 million who live in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem—are denied citizenship and the right to vote in Israeli elections. Crushed under the heel of Israel’s military jackboot, they have no say over who governs them.
The last Palestinian Legislative Council election was held 20 years ago: and Israel refused to recognise the outcome. Mahmoud Abbas, Palestine’s president, hasn’t been elected since 2005, and has postponed every election since. The Palestinian Authority, though recognised as a “state” by most countries, including Australia, is a toothless and corrupt entity with a history of collaboration with Israel’s repressive security apparatus.
In Gaza, where Palestinians have been the target of a three-year genocidal onslaught, at least 75,000 have been killed. The survivors are now forced to live in tents in just 40 percent of the Gaza Strip, while being starved by a so-called “liberal democracy”.
In the West Bank, Palestinians are not only denied freedom of movement by walls, checkpoints and curfews, but are increasingly the target of settler pogroms, resulting in their eviction from their ancestral homes and lands. More than 11 million Palestinians rot in Israeli jails, either on “security grounds” or for the crime of being in Israel “illegally”.
In this Kafkaesque scenario, the settlers who carry out these violent pogroms do get to exercise a vote in Israeli elections, and they mostly vote for Netanyahu’s Likud party or his far-right allies.
For all the talk of democracy and multi-party elections, the most likely outcome, and the outcome we can expect to be favoured by Washington, will be a “national unity” government, or rather a grand Zionist coalition from which Palestinian voices are once again excluded. We can expect more of the same for Palestinians.
Nick Everett is the chairperson of Friends of Palestine Western Australia.
