What Israel's Election Offers the Palestinians
What Israel's Election Offers the Palestinians
Israelis voted on Tuesday, October 27, in the first election since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, and they came out in greater numbers than at any election since 1999. With most ballots counted, Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition holds about 53 or 54 seats and the opposition bloc led by Gadi Eisenkot, the former chief of staff of the army, holds about 48 or 49. Neither side has the 61 seats it needs in the 120-member Knesset. Two Arab parties won about 18 or 19 seats between them, the most they have ever held. President Isaac Herzog will not begin consultations until he has the official count next week, and Netanyahu stays in office as caretaker until a government forms or the country votes again.
Most of the commentary asks whether Netanyahu will survive. The question for the Palestinians is a different one. It is whether any government this Knesset can produce would change the facts in Gaza, in the West Bank and inside Israel's own borders, and the campaign answered much of that question before a ballot was cast.
On a Palestinian state the two men who could lead the next government agree. When Mansour Abbas, the leader of the Islamist party Ra'am, told his party's conference that a State of Palestine already exists and called for an end to the occupation, Eisenkot replied that under a government he formed "no Palestinian state will be established." Netanyahu said there would be no such state in Gaza or the West Bank while he held office. His slogan for this campaign was Yamin o Falestin, the right or Palestine, and it worked because none of his main rivals wanted to be placed on the second side of that choice. Gilbert Achcar wrote in Jacobin this week that Palestine entered the debate only as an accusation, with each camp charging the other with serving Hamas.
Gaza would not see a different policy either. At least 73,000 Palestinians have been killed there, Israel is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice and Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court, and both he and the state deny the charges. Eisenkot has not proposed an end to military control of the Strip. In 2008, as head of Northern Command, he set out the doctrine of destroying whole districts in Lebanon where enemy fighters operate, and Achcar points out that the doctrine makes no allowance for the civilians who live there. The Financial Times reports that Netanyahu told the army to prepare a bombing campaign against Iran for the weekend of October 10, and that it did not go ahead because Donald Trump would not approve it before the American midterms on November 3. Yaakov Amidror, a former national security adviser, told the paper he did not expect Eisenkot to object to such an attack if Netanyahu briefed him first. A new war with Iran would pull money and attention away from Gaza and push its reconstruction further down every list.
The West Bank is the one place where a change of government could make a difference that can be counted. Amira Hass, writing from Ramallah in Le Monde diplomatique, tells how the Hamayel brothers went back to their family's farm near the city on August 3, the day after about a hundred sheep were stolen from it. Israelis who may have come from a nearby outpost photographed them and called soldiers, and the soldiers blindfolded and handcuffed the brothers and took them away. Peace Now counts 390 outposts, built without formal approval but with help from the state, against 146 settlements founded since 1967, and 249 of those outposts went up in the last four years. The United Nations has recorded more than 1,600 settler attacks that caused injury or damage this year, and ACLED, which tracks political violence, says 2026 will be the worst year since it began to monitor the territory a decade ago. The Palestinian agriculture ministry counts 41,000 olive trees damaged and 8,000 sheep and goats killed or stolen.
A government without Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who between them run the police and much of the civil administration of the territory, could order the army to stop these attacks and prosecute the men who carry them out. Netanyahu himself has complained about the harm the attacks do to Israel's standing abroad. But Achcar notes that Eisenkot's aim is Israeli control over most of the West Bank and its eventual annexation. Fewer cars and houses might burn under him, but the outposts would stay where they are and the land around them would stay closed to the families who farm it.
The real change in this election came from the Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up about a fifth of the population. Netanyahu spent election day telling his voters that Arab citizens were trying to steal the result, and Likud asked the police and the security services to investigate, though the election committee found no sign of widespread fraud. Arab voters answered by turning out in record numbers. The Joint List of Hadash, Balad and Ta'al offered to support an Eisenkot government from outside if it addressed the living conditions of Arab citizens and backed a Palestinian state. Ra'am ran with Yoav Segalovitz, a Jewish former police commander, in the hope that Eisenkot could accept him as a minister. These seats are the only route by which Eisenkot can replace Netanyahu, but on Wednesday he spoke of a "stable, Zionist government" and did not mention the Arab parties at all. The political writer Shalom Yerushalmi told the New York Times that Israeli society would not accept such a partnership after October 7, and he gave it no chance.
The other outcomes offer less. Netanyahu could drop Ben-Gvir and Smotrich and form a unity government with the centrist parties, as some of his allies have proposed, though Eisenkot has sworn not to serve under him. Or the talks could fail and Israel could hold another election, as it did again and again between 2019 and 2022 with Netanyahu in office the whole time. An Arab citizen in a Jaffa hair salon told the Times he feared that many Arabs would stay home if there were another round. None of these outcomes includes a Palestinian state or an end to military rule over Gaza and the West Bank.
There is a precedent for what Arab votes can buy. In 2021 Ra'am joined the government of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid without a ministry, and it won money for Arab towns and recognition for some Bedouin villages in the Negev, but the settlements grew and the occupation went on as before. The same is the likely outcome now. Palestinians in the West Bank may face fewer attacks if Ben-Gvir and Smotrich lose their posts, and Palestinians inside Israel may win budgets and a say in who governs, but the status of Gaza and the territories will not change. This vote will decide how the occupation is run for the next few years and not whether it ends. What has changed is the arithmetic. With 18 or 19 Arab members in the Knesset, no Jewish bloc can govern without Arab votes or a deal with its rivals, and every party will have to say in public which of those it prefers.