Israel’s Ugly Election Aftermath: Netanyahu’s War Against Israeli Palestinians
Netanyahu’s response to the October 27 election has been extraordinary, even by his increasingly incendiary standards. Having failed to secure a governing majority, he and Likud have moved from contesting political opponents to questioning the legitimacy of the electorate itself.
Israeli Palestinian voters turned out in unprecedented numbers, helping the two “Arab-led parties”, as the Israeli government refers to them, win 19 seats. Netanyahu responded with allegations of widespread fraud, bribery and foreign interference, without producing a shred of evidence of systematic electoral manipulation.
The distinction matters. Israel’s Central Elections Committee said there was no basis for claims that the integrity of the vote had been systematically compromised. The Shin Bet likewise stressed that its narrowly focused investigation into possible foreign interference did not implicate Israeli-Arab voters collectively. President Isaac Herzog warned against tarnishing an entire community. Yet Netanyahu’s political machinery continued to portray the result as a “stolen election” and an “assault on Israel.”
It was a new low to a shrewd veteran politician who has sustained his career on incendiary campaigns. But this is not simply a sore loser refusing to leave the political stage. It is an attempt to redefine legitimate democratic participation according to ethnic and ideological criteria – and to pre-tarnish those Israeli parties willing to cooperate with the “Arab parties” and perhaps to set the stage for a new attack against Iran, to foster domestic support.
An Israeli Palestinian citizen’s vote is constitutionally valid when it supports Netanyahu’s political survival; apparently, it becomes suspect when it threatens it.
Qatar: Another convenient scapegoat
Netanyahu’s latest accusation introduces a familiar foreign villain: Qatar. Likud alleged that Doha, possibly alongside Turkey, financed organizations mobilizing Palestinian voters, thereby helping manufacture the electoral defeat of the Israeli right.
Like most calculated nonsense, the accusation is politically convenient. Qatar hosts Hamas’s political leadership, has mediated negotiations over Gaza, and has become an established target of Israeli nationalist rhetoric. Yet the evidence presented so far does not establish that Qatar financed electoral fraud or manipulated the Israeli vote.
Qatar categorically denied interference, describing the allegations as a disinformation campaign. More damaging to Netanyahu’s narrative, the Central Elections Committee’s acting director-general, Dean Livne, rejected claims of widespread electoral fraud as baseless. The committee stated that there was no basis for alleging systematic damage to the election’s integrity.
The Shin Bet confirmed that, while its foreign-interference investigation was limited, originated in its own intelligence rather than information supplied by political parties, it did not implicate an entire community of Palestinian voters.
Investigating possible foreign interference is legitimate; converting an unfinished intelligence inquiry into proof that its “Arab citizens” stole an election is political manipulation. Netanyahu has transformed a narrowly defined security investigation into an expansive political indictment.
Qatar may be a convenient suspect, but it cannot substitute for evidence. And foreign interference, even if established in individual cases, cannot invalidate the lawful votes of hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens, which is what Palestinians are.
The coalition arithmetic behind the incitement
The numbers explain the desperation. Likud emerged as the largest party, with 27 seats, but Netanyahu’s nationalist-religious bloc secured only 53 in the 120-seat Knesset, eight short of a majority. Gadi Eisenkot’s opposition bloc won 48, while Israeli Palestinians’ Joint List and Ra’am together secured 19. The arithmetic is devastating for Netanyahu. The Palestinian parties could help an alternative government reach 67 seats.
Netanyahu therefore has two problems. He must find eight additional seats or prevent his opponents from assembling the 61 required to replace him. The second problem is potentially easier to address through political intimidation than parliamentary negotiation.
His campaign against Palestinian participation serves precisely this purpose. By depicting “Arab parties” as illegitimate, Islamist, foreign-influenced or sympathetic to Israel’s enemies, he raises the political price of cooperation with them. He is effectively demanding that the opposition disqualify a substantial portion of the electorate before it can exercise its parliamentary mandate.
There is an additional irony: Likud had already sought to disqualify both Arab-led electoral lists. The Central Elections Committee initially accepted the petitions in September, but the Supreme Court overturned those decisions on October 2, allowing both lists to contest the election. The voters subsequently delivered their answer.
Netanyahu is now attempting to contest that answer by other means.
Three possible governments, three different political outcomes
Scenario 1: A Netanyahu-led reconstruction. Netanyahu attempts to attract defectors from the opposition, exploiting disagreements between his main rival Gadi Eisenkot, the new-right Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Liberman promoting Russian Jews’ interests. He needs eight additional seats. This is difficult but cannot be discounted: political survival has always been one of his strongest negotiating skills.
Scenario 2: An Eisenkot-led minority government. Eisenkot’s Yashar bloc, Bennett’s B’Yachad, the Democrats representing the left and labor and Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu would need external Arab support to reach 67 seats. The principal obstacle is not parliamentary arithmetic but political cowardice and ideological resistance. Several opposition leaders have already ruled out cooperation with Palestinian parties, even as their support could end Netanyahu’s tenure.
Scenario 3: A national-unity government or renewed elections. A Likud-centered unity arrangement with centrist and right-wing opposition figures could command approximately 66 seats, but would require Netanyahu to abandon or marginalize his far-right partners. Alternatively, prolonged deadlock could lead to another election. Neither outcome is assured.
The essential question is whether Israel’s opposition can translate its electoral rejection of Netanyahu into a governing alternative without reproducing the very exclusionary politics it claims to oppose.
The mainstream media’s election story misses the larger story
Much of the mainstream coverage concentrates on dark election techniques: alleged bribery, suspicious cash, foreign interference, voter mobilization and the counting of absentee ballots. These matters deserve investigation.
But they risk obscuring the far more consequential political development: the systematic marginalization of Palestinians, both inside and outside Israel’s internationally recognized borders.
The effort to exclude Palestinian parties from the election was not an isolated incident. Likud petitioned to disqualify them; the Central Elections Committee initially complied; and only Supreme Court intervention restored their right to participate. Netanyahu’s subsequent attacks on Arab turnout are part of the same political continuum.
Meanwhile, the destruction of Gaza has been accompanied by an accelerating campaign of displacement in the West Bank. In February 2026, the UN Human Rights Office warned of ethnic-cleansing concerns in both territories. More recently, Human Rights Watch documented the displacement of 107 West Bank communities since January 2023, attributing the pattern to settler violence enabled by the Israeli state.
The election controversy is therefore unfolding against a much larger struggle over who has the right to inhabit, govern and politically represent this land. The attempt to delegitimize Israel’s Palestinian voters and the displacement of Palestinians from their homes in Gaza and the West Bank are different instruments, but they belong to an increasingly coherent political environment.
De-legitimizers, conditionalists and partners
There is a useful rule of thumb for mapping Israel’s political parties against the question of Arab representation. Three categories emerge: outright de-legitimizers, conditional gatekeepers and advocates of political partnership.
The de-legitimizers include Netanyahu’s Likud, and the two far-right Messianic parties, Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism. Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu belongs politically in this category when it comes to coalition exclusion: Liberman has explicitly ruled out a government with the Joint List, declaring that he would sit neither with Netanyahu nor with Ayman Odeh’s “Arab-led alliance.” These parties differ in ideology and intensity, but their political positions help institutionalize the principle that Palestinian representation may be tolerated in parliament without being accepted as an equal partner in government.
The conditional gatekeepers feature Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar and the Bennett-Lapid Yachad alliance. They oppose Netanyahu and are prepared to negotiate among themselves, but most resist relying on “Arab parties” to establish a government. Revealingly, they may welcome Palestinian votes when those votes weaken Netanyahu, yet hesitate to recognize the parliamentary legitimacy of the parties and constituencies providing them. This is not equivalent to Likud’s direct campaign of delegitimization, but it preserves much of the same exclusionary political arithmetic.
The partners are principally Yair Golan’s Democrats and the Jewish-Palestinian Hadash-Ta’al alliance, alongside the Palestinian-led Ra’am and Joint List. Golan has distinguished himself as the only Jewish-led opposition leader openly advocating a government that includes Arab parties. Following the election, he met Mansour Abbas of Ra’am, as well as Eisenkot and Lapid, and called for cooperation to establish an alternative government. Eisenkot, meanwhile, met Bennett and Golan, while Golan’s meetings with the Arab leadership represented a more consequential political opening. As of October 29, there was no comparable public commitment from Bennett, Lapid or Liberman to include “Arab parties” in a governing coalition.
The distinction matters. Political coordination among Jewish opposition leaders is not the same as political partnership with Palestinian citizens. Nor should conditional parliamentary support be mistaken for acceptance of equal political representation. The 2021 Bennett-Lapid government, which included Ra’am, demonstrated that such cooperation is institutionally possible. The current opposition’s reluctance to repeat that precedent reveals how far the political center has shifted toward far-right.
Ultimately, the Democrats and Hadash-Ta’al represent the clearest Jewish-Palestinian political alternatives to ethnonationalist exclusion. Even here, however, cooperation with Palestinian parties should not automatically be equated with a shared commitment to Palestinian statehood. A durable two-state settlement demands more than parliamentary arithmetic. It requires recognition of Palestinian national rights, territorial self-determination and political equality.
As Israeli observer Gideon Levy argued before the election, “If you want change, vote Arab parties.” He is right. The deeper challenge is whether Jewish Israeli parties are prepared to accept the democratic consequences of that choice. It would seem that the alternative, the Netanyahu government’s current course, is far worse.
The bitter debate on national identity
Netanyahu’s far-right partners, particularly Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, have made little secret of their territorial ambitions. Their political project goes well beyond conventional Israeli nationalism or security policy.
It seeks to consolidate Jewish sovereignty over the entire territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, while denying Palestinians an equivalent right to national self-determination.
The 2018 Nation-State Basic Law already established that national self-determination within Israel is exclusive to the Jewish people and designated Jewish settlement a national value. The present coalition’s settlement and displacement policies have given this ideological principle an increasingly territorial expression.
The controversy did not begin with Netanyahu’s latest government. For more than a decade, Israel has been engaged in an increasingly bitter debate over its constitutional identity: is it a Jewish nation-state that guarantees equal citizenship, or a state in which Jewish national supremacy takes precedence over universal democratic principles? Do Israelis live in a democratic state that’s Jewish, or a not-so-democratic Jewish state?
The 2018 Nation-State Basic Law brought this contradiction into constitutional law. Passed by 62 votes to 55, it established that national self-determination in Israel is unique to the Jewish people, designated Jewish settlement a national value and downgraded Arabic from its previous official-language standing to a language of special status. Most controversially, it omitted any explicit commitment to equality among citizens. Critics argued – and rightly so – that it set the stage for an apartheid state.
The Supreme Court upheld the law in 2021, arguing that its provisions did not extinguish the constitutional principle of equality or Israel’s democratic character. But the political controversy never disappeared. The judicial overhaul initiated in 2023 intensified the struggle over the courts, constitutional safeguards and the limits of majority power – sparking huge mass demonstrations against the Netanyahu government.
As I argued in The Fall of Israel, the danger is not simply religious extremism or Netanyahu’s personal ambitions. It is the gradual institutionalization of an ethnonationalist conception of democracy in which political equality is increasingly subordinated to Jewish collective supremacy.
Messianic project: Judaizing the territory, marginalizing its people
I described that conception as the danger of Herrenvolk democracy: a political system in which democratic institutions and electoral competition remain operational, but their substantive benefits accrue disproportionately to the dominant national community: the Jews only.
The October election illustrates the contradiction. Palestinian citizens retain the formal right to vote, yet their political representatives are increasingly treated as illegitimate partners in government. Beyond Israel’s borders, Palestinians face an even more extreme denial of political self-determination. The constitutional question and the territorial question are therefore inseparable: who is entitled to vote, who is entitled to govern, and who is entitled to belong?
The implications extend beyond the West Bank and Gaza. Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, its territorial ambitions in the occupied Palestinian territories and its expanding security footprint in Lebanon and Syria raise the prospect of a regional strategy built around territorial control, strategic buffer zones and demographic engineering.
This is not to suggest that every Israeli security deployment is evidence of a predetermined annexation plan. But the cumulative direction is unmistakable: territorial expansion and the fragmentation of Palestinian political and geographical continuity.
The ultimate contradiction is glaring. A state claiming democratic legitimacy while consolidating exclusive national sovereignty for one people over a territory inhabited by two peoples is not a liberal democracy. The destination is a unitary, Jewish-dominated political order from river to sea, with Palestinians denied equal collective rights.
The politics of scapegoating and the threat ahead
There is a particularly disturbing symmetry between Netanyahu’s domestic and territorial strategies. At home, Arabs, Palestinians, the peace movement and the Israeli left are portrayed as threats to national survival.
Abroad, Palestinians are increasingly treated as obstacles to territorial consolidation. In both cases, political opposition becomes an existential enemy rather than a legitimate participant in public life.
This politics of permanent emergency has several functions. It mobilizes Netanyahu’s electorate, divides his opponents, intimidates potential Jewish-Palestinian cooperation and diverts attention from the government’s failures, including the October 7 security catastrophe and the consequences of its subsequent wars. It also gives the far-right ideological cover to pursue policies that would otherwise face much greater domestic and international resistance.
The threat is not another Netanyahu government. It is the possibility that a new coalition, however constituted, will inherit a political system increasingly conditioned to accept the exclusion of Palestinian citizens, the dispossession of Palestinians and the normalization of permanent territorial domination.
There is a reason to be very wary of the language of national survival. Historically, projects of exclusion have rarely presented themselves as projects of exclusion. From Nazi Germany and Italian fascism to apartheid South Africa, they invoke security, demographic balance, historical entitlement and national redemption. The list includes Netanyahu’s pursuit of a territorial and demographic order in which Israeli Palestinians have no meaningful place.
Israel’s election has exposed a profound democratic crisis. The question is no longer simply who will govern the country. It is whether democracy can survive when a substantial part of its electorate is treated as illegitimate, and when an entire people is treated as an obstacle to the state’s territorial ambitions.
Netanyahu may yet lose office. The toxic project he has helped unleash is considerably harder to defeat.
The original commentary was published by the Informed Comment (US) on November 1, 2026
The Two Faces of Gadi Eisenkot, Who Could Be Israel’s PM
As expected, the early Israeli exit polls indicate that Prime Minister Netanyahu and his prime adversary former chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot face deadlock.
In the past 10-15 years, the country’s political center of gravity has shifted sharply toward security and military power, documented in my The Fall of Israel (2024).
Unsurprisingly, the election aftermath set the stage for coalition-building and wheeling-and-dealing because in the 120-member Israeli parliament the Knesset, neither Netanyahu nor Eisenkot has an absolute majority.
What was also expected is the ongoing white-washing of Eisenkot’s military record. In the mainstream media, Netanyahu’s rival is portrayed as a centrist, security-oriented but moderate. Typically, both CNN and TIME, which now offer features on Eisenkot, tend to depict his role in Netanyahu’s war cabinet as a voice of reason. Yet, the fact that he remained in the cabinet through the worst obliteration of Gaza is effectively sidelined.
Neither mentions the word genocide even once in the context of their features. The neutral language is the norm, not an exception.
Complicity in war crimes
Though born in Israel, Eizenkot is of Jewish Moroccan descent. He grew of age in Tiberias and Eilat, outside the country’s centers of political power. His story contrasts sharply with Netanyahu’s deep U.S. roots and elite Jerusalem upbringing in the circles of power. And unlike Netanyahu, Eisenkot doesn’t have an Eastern European Ashkenazi background. With his family history in Casablanca, he would be Israel’s first Mizrahi prime minister.
After high school, Eisenkot was drafted to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and served in the legendary Golani Brigade. As the chief of staff, he prepared Israel for forever wars with the formalization of the Campaigns Between the Wars (CBW) doctrine: covert operations designed to weaken enemies, degrade capabilities, and postpone future conflicts between major engagements.
Eisenkot’s tenure saw numerous clashes with the Palestinians. At the same time, he contributed significantly to US-Israel strategic cooperation.
Eizenkot made his name as Israeli general, politician, and leader of the Yashar party. He served from 2015 to 2019 as the chief of staff of the IDF. Five days after October 7, 2023, he was sworn in as a minister without portfolio after his party joined the government following the outbreak of the Gaza war.
Eisenkot left the government in June 2024. While he served as an observer in Israel’s emergency war cabinet for the first eight months of Gaza’s genocidal atrocities, the official actions of the International Criminal Court (ICC) initially primarily focused on other senior figures.
But in July 2024, an advocacy group called the March 30 Movement officially submitted a comprehensive complaint to the ICC prosecutor. The petition requested that the court expand its investigation and issue warrants for former war cabinet members, including Gadi Eisenkot. Various Palestinian human rights organizations have similarly sent letters to the ICC Prosecutor urging for the prosecution of all decision-makers within the war cabinet
Even as a minister without portfolio, Eisenkot shares complicity for the genocidal atrocities that Netanyahu and his defense minister Gallant initiated in late fall 2023.
Militarizing genocidal atrocities
In a recent book on the Gaza genocide (and the West’s reluctance to prevent them), I concluded that Israeli military actions were fueled by the Obliteration Doctrine, which was first outlined in 2005 by Gadi Eizenkot.
Interestingly, he is no extremist. Officially, he supported Israeli democracy and a two-state solution, which he downplayed during the election campaign.
Eisenkot was appointed head of the Northern Command following Maj. Gen. Udi Adam’s resignation amid criticism over the latter’s conduct in the 2006 Lebanon War. At the time, many Israelis were frustrated that the military had failed to secure a comprehensive victory over the Hezbollah militia or retrieve the two soldiers whose capture had triggered the conflict. It was this popular frustration that set the stage for “tougher measures.”
Eisenkot’s strategy was based on the idea that to create effective deterrence against Hezbollah, the IDF would have to severely damage Dahiya, a densely populated Shia southern suburb of Beirut that served as a Hezbollah stronghold and was heavily bombed by Israel in 2006.
After all, his predecessor had been compelled to quit for having been “too cautious.” Hence, Eisenkot’s new strategy of disproportion. It was this strategy that paved the way to Gaza’s inferno in 2023:
With an outbreak of hostilities [with Hezbollah], the IDF will need to act immediately, decisively, and with force that is disproportionate to the enemy’s actions and the threat it poses. Such a response aims at inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes.
… Israel again will not be able to limit its response to actions whose severity is seemingly proportionate to an isolated incident. Rather, it will have to respond disproportionately in order to make it abundantly clear that the State of Israel will accept no attempt to disrupt the calm currently prevailing along its borders.
A gross violation of international law
UN Emergency Relief authorities called Israel’s offensive “disproportionate” referring to the “horrific” leveling of “block after block” of buildings in Beirut. They regarded it as a violation of international humanitarian law. A third of the killed were children, while 900,000 Lebanese were displaced.
When the IDF embraced the nascent Obliteration Doctrine, the Genocide Convention was in the ICC’s Rome Statute, ad hoc tribunals had been set up, UN organizations had many references to it and the UN even had its special adviser with a mandate for warning the UN on the prevention of Genocide.
So, ostensibly, things were in place to deal with a military doctrine that explicitly targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure. Yet, when Eisenkot stated publicly that Israel would embrace the military doctrine in the future, there was no consequential international outcry, not to speak of intervention.
Following the 2006 Lebanese War, the same doctrine was deployed in the 2008-09 Gaza War, or Operation Cast Lead, as Israel called it. This was a three-week armed conflict between the Gazan Palestinian groups and the IDF. It caused 1,200-1,400 Palestinian and a dozen Israeli deaths, over 46,000 homes were destroyed, making more than 100,000 people homeless.
As Eisenkot saw it,
What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which shots will be fired in the direction of Israel. We will wield disproportionate power and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective, these are military bases…
The Obliteration Doctrine had been developed by Israel’s military leaders in close cooperation with the country’s cabinet and political leaders. Civilian devastation was no longer unfortunate collateral damage, but the very focus of a new military doctrine.
“In the next clash with Hezbollah, we won’t bother to hunt for tens of thousands of rocket launchers and we won’t spill our soldiers’ blood in attempts to overtake fortified Hezbollah positions,” Eisenkot warned. “Rather, we shall destroy Lebanon and won’t be deterred by the protests of the ‘world.’”
Replace the terms “Hezbollah” with “Hamas” and “Lebanon” with “Gaza,” and the implications are unambiguous.
Obliteration as legacy
Subsequently Eisenkot co-authored the Guidelines for Israel’s National Security Strategy (2019) – barely four years before October 7 – urging Israel’s security establishment to ensure effective deterrence because “once deterrence collapses, it is imperative to stop the threat as rapidly and clearly as possible to renew deterrence, return to routine life, and allow an extended period of calm based on security strength.”
That was the objective of the Netanyahu war cabinet in 2023; one that thoroughly failed. After just one month of the Gaza War, Eisenkot charged the Netanyahu cabinet for “near-criminal behavior” as the PM tried to hide protocols, leak lies to media and sway war goals to appease the Messianic far-right.
During the Israeli obliteration of Gaza, Eisenkot lost his own son and two nephews in a war he now opposed. Yet, the doctrine that was foundational for Gaza’s obliteration was to a great extent his own handiwork.
There is abundant irony in the fact that Eisenkot is now portrayed as a moderate alternative to Netanyahu, and a reasonable champion of change. As a politician, he doesn’t have far-right background. But as a military leader, he perfected the Obliteration Doctrine.
The commentary was first released by the Informed Comment (US) on October 28, 2026 https://www.juancole.com/2026/10/faces-eisenkot-israels.html
Beyond Netanyahu: What Israel’s Election Means for Palestinians
In the past, many Palestinians and Arabs followed Israeli elections closely.
They did so not because they entertained illusions that a Zionist leader would deliver peace and justice, dismantle the occupation or remove illegal settlements. Rather, they feared that some Israeli leaders were worse than others. They hoped to avert the worst-case scenario.
Over time, however, that distinction gave way to the belief that all Israeli leaders were essentially the same. This is not pessimism. It is experience.
Consider, for example, the expansion of illegal Jewish settlements during the Oslo peace process under Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Between 1992 and 1995, the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, increased from 111,673 to 140,235 – a rise of more than 25 percent, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, drawing on Israeli statistical records.
The same pattern continued under the Labor government of Ehud Barak.
Within his first six months, Barak’s government issued tenders for 3,196 settlement housing units, exceeding the annual average under his right-wing predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu.
When Naftali Bennett formed a coalition government in June 2021 that included the Arab party Ra’am, settlement expansion continued unabated.
According to Peace Now, the Bennett–Lapid government advanced plans for 7,292 settlement housing units during its first year, a 26-percent increase over the annual average recorded under previous Netanyahu governments.
The settlements are themselves a driving force behind the occupation. They require land, and therefore land confiscation; protection, and therefore an expanded military presence; water, roads and infrastructure, and therefore the appropriation of Palestinian resources. Together, these elements deepen dispossession and generate further Israeli violence.
According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the West Bank contained 645 Israeli settlement sites, outposts and other occupation installations by the end of 2025, including 350 settlement outposts.
The Palestinian Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission reported that Israeli authorities targeted approximately 29,335 dunums of Palestinian land through declarations of so-called “state land” between October 2023 and August 2026—one of the largest waves of such land appropriation since Oslo.
By September 2026, the Commission had also documented the advancement or consideration of plans for more than 18,000 additional settlement housing units across the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem.
Alongside this expansion is the violence unfolding across the West Bank.
By the end of 2023, the West Bank had experienced its deadliest year for Palestinians since the UN began systematically recording casualties in 2005.
The Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission documented 23,827 attacks by Israeli forces and settlers against Palestinians and their property during 2025 alone. In the first seven months of 2026, settler attacks increased by 63 percent compared with the corresponding period of the previous year.
Typically, this violence, carried out by the Israeli occupation army and armed illegal settlers, is contextualized within the ongoing genocide in Gaza. But violence in the West Bank also serves another purpose beyond collective punishment: the confiscation of Palestinian orchards, the annexation of land, the expansion of settlements and the crushing of Palestinian resistance, including nonviolent opposition to this colonial enterprise.
Any Israeli candidate in the October 27 elections who supports settlement expansion does so with full knowledge of its consequences: further dispossession, military occupation, annexation and violence.
The difference between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and politicians presented as less extreme, is often one of language, strategy and timing.
Former Israeli military chief and Yashar party leader Gadi Eisenkot, for example, openly supports the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, despite his reputation as a more ‘moderate’ alternative to Netanyahu.
What, then, about Gaza?
Who among Israel’s leading political figures is promising to end the genocide, lift the siege, ensure unrestricted humanitarian aid, restrain the army or investigate violations of international law? None.
Israeli media have spent the past three years reporting on major disagreements between the government, military establishment, intelligence agencies and political opposition over what should happen in Gaza.
Yet, Eisenkot has pledged to end Hamas’ rule in Gaza within 18 months of taking office, whether through the Trump framework or through continued war.
For his part, opposition leader and former Prime Minister Yair Lapid has proposed placing Gaza under Egyptian administration for 15 years, effectively shifting responsibility for Israel’s actions onto Arab states.
Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, meanwhile, supports continued Israeli military control until Palestinian groups are disarmed.
The disagreement, therefore, is often over how Israel should achieve its objectives, rather than whether those objectives should change.
Other major disagreements primarily concern Israeli society: the conscription of ultra-Orthodox Jews, judicial reform, accountability for the failures of October 7.
But these disputes should not be confused with the questions that matter most to Palestinians.
If Netanyahu succeeds in forming another right-wing coalition, the policies of occupation, settlement expansion and military confrontation will continue, potentially with renewed momentum.
If Israel produces a broader coalition, its members may reach compromises over judicial reform, conscription and other domestic disputes. The occupation, however, is unlikely to become the central point of disagreement.
More troubling still, even a government leaning toward the center-left might succeed in presenting Israel to the international community as a country ready to move beyond the image it acquired during three years of genocide, without fundamentally changing its conduct on the ground.
The international community must therefore remain vigilant. It cannot allow a future Israeli government to present itself as a peacemaker, or sell the illusion of a newly reformed Israel, while continuing to invest in settlements, occupation, war and genocide.
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