Occupied East Jerusalem – Laila Atamneh, 19, remembers her parents arguing at the dinner table every time Israel would hold an election. Among the rare Palestinian Jerusalemites who are Israeli citizens and eligible to vote, her father would make the case for casting a ballot for an Arab-led electoral list. Her mother, by contrast, always abstained.
On October 27, the 19-year-old will vote for the first time in Israel’s general election. She sees it as a responsibility to the millions of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, who will have no say in the next Israeli government but, she believes, bear the brunt of its occupation, ethnic cleansing and genocide. Few believe the system will serve them, but many fear another government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, who has overseen Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since 2023.
Whether fear outweighs disillusion may decide a contest in which opinion polls suggest neither Netanyahu’s far-right-led bloc nor the self-styled Zionist opposition alliance will be able to govern without Ra’am and the Joint List, the two Arab-led parties. And if no one can form a majority in the 120-seat Knesset, new elections will be called – keeping the current Netanyahu government, the most hard right in Israel’s history, in place until then. For Palestinian citizens of Israel, the animating force of the election is the acceleration of the hard-right assault on Palestinian rights, livelihoods and land in recent years.
Their leadership is afraid, and this is real.” For Hanan, a 36-year-old Palestinian Christian in a Druze village in the Galilee, it feels like the danger keeps coming closer to her doorstep. Israeli settlers residing in illegal settlements in the West Bank last month tried to build an illegal outpost near Majd al-Krum, a Palestinian community in the Galilee. Then, Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich released an AI-generated campaign video, in which a Palestinian from the West Bank frantically calls his relative in the Galilee to tell him that “the Jews are coming” to “do to you what they did to us”.
However, Balad’s Sami Abu Shehadeh withdrew his candidacy after the court indicated that a majority of justices supported upholding his disqualification. Many Palestinians saw this as confirmation that the system is illegitimate; some said the attempt to disqualify the parties was further reason to mobilise either way. A Palestinian campaign operative cited surveys estimating about 62 percent of Palestinian citizens plan to vote next week; he said the aim is 70 to 75 percent, last reached in 1999, when a 75 percent Palestinian turnout helped PM Ehud Barak beat Netanyahu.
The potential voter surge comes despite Palestinians’ limited, ossified choices. We can’t be all dreamy.” The campaign operative added: “The only day that we have the right to be equal with the Jews … is the day of elections.” The question is what Jewish Israeli parties in the anti-Netanyahu camp will do with the Arab-led lists. Opinion polls have consistently left both Zionist blocs short of the 61 seats needed to form a government – with the Arab parties making t
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