July 27, 2026
Diana Buttu, a lawyer and former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organization, is a DAWN fellow.
Israeli elections have finally been set for Oct. 27, the latest possible date per Israeli election law. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, against all odds, will rule through the full four-year term for just the second time in Israel's history. The question now, however, is whether the coming elections suggest an opportunity for a change in the Israeli government's policies as mainstream political parties increasingly reflect unity in harming Palestinians and the future of a Palestinian state.
Before the election date announcement, campaign posters littered streets across the country. Israeli society has been hyper-focused on the coming elections given Netanyahu's divineness and the unique moment for both the country and the broader Middle East. Most political rhetoric in Israeli media concentrates on the number of seats the "Netanyahu bloc" can win in the coming election versus the "anti-Netanyahu bloc," alongside how the "Arab vote" will influence future coalition building to form the next government post-election.
Missing in Israeli political discourse is what elections mean for Palestinians, both in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). To be clear, that dynamic has defined Israeli politics since the country's establishment. It should be unsurprising that countries based on an ideology of supremacy rarely focus on what their actions mean for the oppressed.
Yet in the case of Israel, a country that continues to commit genocide in Gaza and which has attacked Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Qatar and Yemen since 2023, including daily military operations in the OPT, one would suspect some inner questioning of the morality, utility and long-term strategic vision of continuing this "forever war." That model, one that could equally be defined as adopting a "forever war crime" mentality, has defined Israel's approach to Palestine since the 1947-49 Nakba that displaced and ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians upon the creation of Israel.
The ideological underpinnings of Israel's political leadership and wide swaths of the population reflect limited interest in shifting from its occupation model. None of the major candidates have mentioned ending the genocide in Gaza. None have considered challenging how the state's "never again" mantra can simultaneously exist alongside its open commitment to and support of genocide, including its flattening of Gaza, its killing of over 73,000 people, including more than 20,000 children, and its deliberate starvation of the people of the Strip to the point of famine.
The list goes on. None of the candidates dare address the daily torture and rape of Palestinians, many wrongfully detained, at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) or the Israel Prison Service. None of the candidates speak about the continued abduction of thousands of Palestinians, including doctors, journalists, the sick and the elderly, held in Israel's torture chambers under a fictitious legal status, called the Unlawful Combatants Law, designed only to present a lazy depiction of the rule of law. No candidate has addressed the unrelenting and government-supported attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the OPT, who kill and maim to steal Palestinian land, including attacks on American citizens.
Instead, candidates speak about Israel's "public relations problem," never the brazen actions that cause the problem. In their telling, Israel's global standing has fallen because it has not managed to sell the genocide more artfully. They, alongside a vast majority of the Israeli Knesset, instead throw hundreds of millions of dollars at propaganda campaigns, known in Hebrew as hasbara, to malignly influence publics abroad. The lack of self-reflection is telling.
The main opposition candidates include Yair Lapid, a former journalist turned politician who, though proclaiming to be "centrist," has aligned with a former prime minister: far-right, pro-settler politician Naftali Bennett. Gadi Eisenkot, a former IDF chief of staff who developed the Dahia Doctrine, an Israeli military strategy designed in Lebanon in the 2000s to inflict maximum pain on civilian populations to force their capitulation in war and that has likely been applied in Gaza and Lebanon, has recently surged in the polls.
The names of the two main opposition parties and their slogans are, in fact, telling in that they build upon Netanyahu's genocidal slogans. In October 2023, as Israel began its military campaign in Gaza, the slogan "Together We Will Succeed" was plastered across the country. It was never clear what "together" meant for Palestinians and the wider world opposed to genocide. Of course, success only meant "erasing Gaza" and any chance at a future Palestinian state. Using these same words, Lapid and Bennett have called their party "Together" while Eisenkot chose "Israel Will Succeed" as his slogan.
Neither party, of course, has articulated how their version of "together" or "success" differs from Netanyahu's slogan, let alone his platform.
Indeed, instead of functioning like a real political opposition, these candidates represent a change in face and name only. Israel's political opposition focuses on the usual navel-gazing issues, such as the judicial overhaul process, Orthodox (Haredi) enlistment in the army and the economy. The term "opposition" is a stretch at best.
Absent, of course, are Palestinians. When they are mentioned, it is to drum up fear or to depict Israeli power. The occupation, apartheid and genocide are not subjects open to debate in Israeli political discourse, and to the point of arbitrary arrest. Yet as it stands, the opposition can only form a coalition if they partner with the non-Zionist Arab parties. Of course, their stances against the occupation, apartheid and genocide conflict with Zionist opposition platforms.
Netanyahu, never one to miss an opportunity to engage in racist fearmongering and aware of Israeli society's drastic rightward swing into even more virulent anti-Palestinian bigotry, has taken to posting memes of Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett in bed with "the Arabs." In turn, some opposition candidates have proclaimed that they will never form a coalition with "those Arabs."
Palestinians, who ultimately pay the greatest price for Israel's electoral choices, are only factored into the country's political equation insofar as how each candidate can better harm them while sustaining the system. The same goes for Lebanese, Iranians and anyone else deemed to be standing in the way of Jewish supremacy. Each political party vows to hit Lebanon harder, hit Iran harder, build settlements in Gaza, annex the West Bank and so on.
It is within this context that we begin the race to Oct. 27. Yet the primary issue at play is not whether Israel's policies will change but rather which war advocate, which Palestinian hater, wins on the most outrageous warmongering and genocidal platform.