Jamie Dettmer is associate editor and a foreign affairs columnist for POLITICO. The war in Gaza hasn’t figured much in campaigning for Israel’s upcoming election — despite the likelihood that Israel’s Arab minority, Palestinian by heritage, might well decide who gets to be prime minister. Israel’s Arabs make up around 20% of the electorate that will be casting ballots in the Oct. 27 parliamentary election.
And thanks to complex coalition math, Arab parties might well be the ones to crown Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s main rival, former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, who leads a center-right opposition bloc. But campaigns by both the Arab parties and Jewish politicians have avoided talking about what the outcome might actually mean for Jewish-Arab relations in the region, for the possibility of a two-state solution and even for U.S. President Donald Trump’s vision for a comprehensive peace-through-prosperity deal between Israelis and the Palestinians.
But outside of Israel there’s alarm — especially among Arab leaders — over the absence of any serious debate about how to end the multi-front conflicts Israel is engaged in and what that might foretell, said HA Hellyer, a geopolitical scholar specializing in the region. But when you look at what they’re actually saying, they’re not arguing with the policies when it comes to Gaza. They support the overall settlement project in the West Bank.
They support the incursion in Southern Lebanon. Their proposition is that they could have done things in a better way,” said Hellyer, who’s a fellow at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute. Mentions of the Gaza conflict in election campaigns have been largely limited to clashes over who was to blame for failing to prevent the Hamas attack on southern Israel, which killed more than 1,200 people.The Eisenkot-led Change bloc has focused on Netanyahu’s role in the lead-up to the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre, pointing to the failures of his government and arguing he ignored warnings of a likely big Hamas attack.
But the bloc has done little to flesh out its governing policy platform. Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s campaign has sought to frame Eisenkot as an appeaser and puppet of Arab party leaders — such as Mansour Abbas, leader of the Islamist Ra’am party, and Ahmad Tibi, leader of Ta’al party — arguing he would compromise on core security issues to persuade them to join or vote with his coalition bloc after the election to give him a Knesset majority. Few see any chance of a negotiated peace or a two-state solution any time soon.
Israelis largely view international condemnation as biased, and say critics of Israel’s conduct in Gaza fail to understand what the country has to do to survive. But at some stage or another, Israelis will have to have conversations about peace, and delaying them isn’t going to help the country reduce its deepening isolation or help repair strained ties with traditional allies, including Europeans, who are starting to impose sanctions and considering arms embargoes. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a fierce Netanyahu critic, said that while there has been election debate about how successful the Gaza war has been in degrading Hamas, “it’s true that the main issue of our future with the Palestinians has been ignored.” He added: “Had I been running, I would have talked about it the whole time.” As Olmert sees it, the root lies in “the huge trauma of Oct. 7, along with the perception that public opinion, the mainstream, has shifted from where it was before the massacre and moved further rightward politically.” That isn’t uncommon: When Israel suffers a severe psychological blow, the political center-of-gravity habitually moves sharply to the right, favoring hawkish and nationalist positions and marginalizing more conciliatory perspectives.
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