Tuesday’s vote comes against the backdrop of volatile events in the occupied West Bank and wider region. It will also be a referendum on Netanyahu’s leadership, writes Foreign Editor David Pratt
If there’s one thing everyone agrees on about Tuesday’s election in Israel, it’s just how momentous it is. There is an almost universal consensus that it will be the most consequential in the country’s history. To put it quite simply, the fundamental choice is as stark as any ever put before Israel’s 7.3 million eligible voters.
At stake is the frequently reiterated claim that there is an alternative, or “another” Israel as some put it. That claim will simply fall flat if voters choose to keep the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in power.
For that reason, what happens on Tuesday will be watched closely not just by countries in the Middle East, but across the world.
Some election watchers argue, of course, that it matters little what the political complexion is of the 120 politicians who will win places in the Knesset as far as Palestinian aspirations towards statehood are concerned
As Esther Solomon, the prominent British-Israeli journalist and senior analyst at Haaretz, Israel’s oldest daily newspaper put it the other day, they will simply see it as “different government, same genocide”.
Such critics perhaps have a point if one recent poll is anything to by.
That poll, carried out by Agam Labs at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, showed a boost for far-right ultranationalist Israeli national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and his Jewish Power party.
This is the same man who marked his 50th birthday with a cake decorated with a noose and says he plans to surround jailed Palestinians with crocodiles.
The cake’s decoration referenced a March 2026 Knesset law, pushed by Ben-Gvir, instituting the death penalty by hanging specifically for Palestinians convicted of terror offences against Israelis.
Once stuck on the political fringe, Ben-Gvir’s party today – say some election analysts – has now reached beyond its core of ultranationalist settlers in the occupied West Bank, to younger, urban Israeli voters who might once have considered him beyond the pale.
In what some political commentators have dubbed “generation right”, this election – the first in four years – has also brought with it a record number of first-time voters, most of whom are keen to make their voices count.
First-time voters
AROUND three-quarters of these Jewish first-time voters polled identified as “right or centre-right”, according to a recent poll for Israel’s Channel 12.
That figure is significantly higher than the rest of the Israeli population, which has already been shifting to the right for years.Ben-Gvir’s far-right Jewish Power party is, of course, widely considered a key element in keeping Netanyahu in power and forms a vital component of the current ruling coalition.
This is just one example of the difficulty many outsiders have in trying to follow Israel’s politics and this week’s election.
Over the years, the system involved in creating a government has often been complex and involving protracted political horse-trading in order for any working coalition to be established. Israel is known for drawn-out election coalition negotiations, and there is no reason to believe that this election will be any different. Small parties could emerge as major players in certain circumstances.
Read more
- DAVID PRATT IN UKRAINE: Escape from Mariupol: One woman’s story of survival from ‘hell on Earth’
- DAVID PRATT ON THE WORLD: Sickening murders are a stark reminder of the hostile heart of the Amazon
- David Pratt in Lviv: A Ukrainian soldier is laid to rest
- David Pratt: Gaza is every soldier's nightmare scenario of urban war
One group that could make a difference to the outcome are Arab voters. A high turnout by the 21% Arab minority, who are Palestinian by heritage but Israeli by citizenship, could nudge Israel’s complex coalition arithmetic in favour of the anti-Netanyahu bloc led by Yashar party leader and former Israel Defence Forces (IDF) general, Gadi Eisenkot
With Arab parties poised to capture more than a dozen seats, their support could theoretically push one side over the finish line.
Accepting that help, though, is politically unpopular. An early October survey by Israeli pollster Lazar Research found that 59% of Israelis opposed including Arab parties in the government. Some Jewish voters argue Arabs can’t be trusted to serve in the government of a Jewish state, especially since the October 7 Hamas attack.
Arab citizens, in turn, fear they will never be treated equally and for some time there has been mounting anger within Arab communities with the government.
Netanyahu’s coalition has drummed up Jewish nationalism, accelerated controversial demolitions of tribal Arab villages that lack government recognition, and overseen a rise in Jewish settler violence towards Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
Already all these electoral complexities are reflected in Israeli media coverage of Tuesday’s vote, which is also falling in behind its own usual camps.
In much of the mainstream press – that sits in the political centre – Eisenkot is heading for a first-place finish, while Netanyahu is depicted as struggling to retain power and another political deadlock is a serious possibility.
Religious allies
MEANWHILE, that section of the press in support of Netanyahu and the right maintain that the prime minister has what it takes to win and his right-wing and religious allies may already have enough support to form another government.
But as The Media line (TML), a news agency specialising in Middle East coverage pointed out last week, beneath those conflicting headlines lies one other important point of agreement: the election is exceptionally difficult to predict, and winning the largest number of seats does not necessarily mean winning the Israeli premiership.
Further adding to the uncertainty, Tuesday’s vote also comes as Netanyahu’s government orders the Israeli army to prepare for a full closure of the occupied West Bank following a shooting near Hebron which killed two soldiers and two Palestinian gunmen.
As a reporter who, in the past, has covered such closures including the infamous 2002 Operation Defensive Shield launched by then prime minister Ariel Sharon, the scale and impact of what Netanyahu is proposing this time is a terrifying prospect for Palestinians in the West Bank.
It comes, too, as West Bank Jewish settler violence hits an “all-time high”, according to the UN. All of which could play well for the election fortunes of Netanyahu, the man often dubbed “Mr Security”.
Predictably, he has sought to cast the election as a choice between his bloc that stands up for Israeli interests and those of his rivals who he claims would succumb to international pressure over Gaza, the occupied West Bank and war on Iran.
While it should come as no surprise perhaps that none of the opposition parties is proposing the establishment of a Palestinian state, Netanyahu’s Likud party presents voters with a stark choice epitomised by its campaigning slogan: Yamin o Falestin – the right – or Palestine.
In Israel, polls are not allowed to be published until the exit polls are published the moment that voting stations close on Tuesday at 10pm.
Those final polls that did appear on Friday, however, showed continued gridlock, with neither Netanyahu’s current coalition nor the so-called change bloc predicted to be able to form a government following the vote. Some small parties were also shown to have mostly fallen below the electoral threshold.
The polls, published by Israel’s three main television channels, showed Eisenkot’s bloc holding a lead of two to six Knesset seats over Netanyahu’s governing coalition.
Channel 12’s poll projected the Eisenkot bloc winning 56 seats compared with 50 for the Netanyahu bloc, while Channel 13’s poll puts the blocs at 54 and 50 seats respectively. Kan public television showed the Eisenkot bloc with 52 seats, compared with 50 for the Netanyahu bloc. None of the polls projected either bloc winning the 61 seats needed for a majority in the 120-seat Knesset.
Majority coalition?
WHILE concerns remain that no majority coalition will emerge after the vote, the key issues on which the election is being fought are much more clear cut.
For starters, this election is seen by many as a referendum on Netanyahu himself, especially given that his government was in office at the time of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Accountability, then, is a big issue here, a point made by a number of analysts and monitoring organisations, among them the International Crisis Group (ICG).
“Many Israelis blame him for a policy of accommodating Hamas’s rule in Gaza in the years leading up to the lethal attack, including the facilitation of Qatari financing; for reportedly ignoring warnings of an impending Hamas operation; for allegedly relegating Israeli hostages to the back burner among war priorities in Gaza; and for refusing to name an independent commission of inquiry into the intelligence and other failures that helped make the Hamas assault so deadly,” noted ICG.
Accountability over events of the October 7 attack aside, two other issues are also impacting on this election.
The first is the Netanyahu coalition’s intention, if re-elected, to return to its judicial overhaul and the second is the oppositions’ pledge to end the ultra-orthodox exemption from military service.
The former was, of course, seen by many Israelis as threatening their country’s “democracy” and in turn triggered the 2023 mass judicial reform protests that brought immense pressure on Netanyahu’s government. The latter issue on conscription comes at a time when the Israeli military is facing personnel shortages.
This means that the debate over exemptions from military service for ultra-Orthodox Jews has evolved into a broader argument over Israel’s identity.
Ultra-Orthodox parties want to preserve exemptions that allow religious students to avoid military service. They are backed by Netanyahu’s Likud party and, by and large, by its far-right coalition partners.
Opposition leader Eisenkot – who lost a son in the Gaza war – has also taken aim at the exemptions, characterising Netanyahu’s government as one that “promotes evasion of duty without shame”.
Opposition parties support ending the exemptions and have said they would refuse to join any government that includes ultra-Orthodox parties.
For his part, Netanyahu has struggled to strike a balance on the issue and there has been a rise in protests by ultra-Orthodox demonstrators, including one in which they stormed the home of Israel’s military police chief.
While Netanyahu’s standing and conscription dominate election questions, so too does Israel’s economy, with Israelis facing one of the highest costs of living.
All these problems have been compounded by the numerous wars that Israel has engaged in these past years.
For the moment, most opposition hope are pinned on Eisenkot.
Only a few years ago, few would have imagined him having the remotest possibility of being prime minister but as Tuesday’s vote looms the odds on that happening have shortened.
Eisenkot, the military chief of staff turned chief rival of Netanyahu, is heralded as Israel’s centre-left figure of hope, but the reality, say some observers, is very different.
Writing recently in the UK-based news portal Middle East Eye, Israeli investigative journalist Meron Rapoport highlighted how Eisenkot is still a politician who has “promised to develop existing settlements and has several settlers, ex-settlers and right-wingers on his electoral list, including people who supported Netanyahu’s highly controversial judicial reforms.”
As for the political right, Rapoport reminded that while Netanyahu might be in a weak position
individually, “the right-wing mentality of Israeli voters remains very strong”.
“There are at least three far-right parties that have the deportation of Palestinians as part of their agenda. Polls suggest that together these parties will win around 20 seats next week – a sixth of the total,” Rapoport warned.
Turbulent backdrop
ISRAEL’S crucial election is also taking place against a wider, turbulent Middle East backdrop. In many diplomatic quarters there is the sense that an escalation of the US-Israeli war on Iran is coming once the dust of Israel’s vote and the US midterm elections settle.
Already US diplomats are said to be preparing for embassy evacuations and Israeli fighter jets are conducting sorties on the Iranian border.
The prevailing mood, it would seem, is that it’s a question of when, not if, the US and Israel resume attacking Iran.
It’s hardly surprising then that the stakes are so high over Tuesday’s vote. As Esther Solomon summed it up in last Thursday’s edition of Haaretz, rarely has an Israeli election garnered such attention.
“From the Arab and Muslim worlds to Jewish diaspora communities to the streets of Western capitals, international civil society is engaged with Israel’s elections to an unprecedented degree,” observed Solomon.
“Accordingly, the stakes are immense: Between Netanyahu’s trajectory of international pariahdom, annexation and authoritarianism and a disparate opposition which could put the brakes on the race to the abyss. The world is watching which route Israel chooses to take.”
Tuesday then will be a day of reckoning in more ways than one. But perhaps only the most optimistic would imagine it making things any better in the region – especially for Palestinians.
Share