A nation divided: What do Israelis want in October’s elections?
Despite a genocide and multiple wars, analysts say the issues determining Israel’s October elections fall far closer to home.
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Analysts, sociologists and pollsters all seem to agree that the forthcoming Israeli general elections, due to be held on October 27, are critical.
In the past, a typical fault line between Israel’s right and liberal wings during the election season was future dealings with the Palestinians. Today, there is near-universal animosity towards the Palestinians and the prospect of a two-state solution.
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Israel’s Jewish voters in this legislative election will likely be confronted with fundamental questions about the nature of Israeli democracy, the legitimacy of governing coalitions and very different visions of what the state represents.
Palestinian citizens of Israel, at least those who are allowed to vote, are left to hope for a coalition that might curb some of the violence and lawlessness that continues to plague their neighbourhoods.
Social-political psychologist Daniel Bar-Tal believes some of the main concerns for Jewish Israeli voters this election will be the far-right coalition government’s attempts to bypass democratic norms and to halt 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.
October 7
Overshadowing all is October 7, 2023, when 1,139 people were killed in Hamas-led raids and an Israeli military counteroffensive.
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Amplified through endless recycling on the country’s television news networks, October 7 continues to dominate the Israeli popular 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 completely sidelined.
Instead, Israelis are calling for an inquiry into how that attack was allowed to happen and, specifically, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s role in the security breach.
Baharav-Miara is the official responsible for policing the legality of the coalition’s conduct, and right-wing National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has made her dismissal a condition of joining any future government coalition after the election.
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“The issues that matter to voters are almost entirely domestic,” Crisis Group’s Mairav Zonszein told Al Jazeera.
“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.
Palestinians voiceless
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.
Thousands of Haredi men blocked thoroughfares in Jerusalem in June to protest attempts to conscript them. This has seen heated rhetoric from secular, but often right-wing, politicians against them.
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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?”
“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,” Israeli political analyst Nimrod Flaschenberg said, about 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.