In Israel election, Palestinian citizens weigh fear against disillusionment

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.

“She thinks it feeds into the idea that Israel is a democracy and Palestinians have the same rights here – only to get extremely humiliated, and then get one of the worst governments ever, and be surrounded by fascists,” said Atamneh, who hails from the neighbourhood of Beit Hanina.

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.

“I feel like I have to be these people’s voice,” said Atamneh. “Not that one person is really capable of that much – but if this gives them one percent hope, then I will do it.”

But Atamneh, who speaks Arabic, said she struggles to follow election coverage in Hebrew. “I personally feel excluded from everything, that we’re not even a part of the discussion,” she added. “It feels like none of the parties really address our generation of first-time Palestinian voters.”

Her mixed feelings capture the mood among Palestinian citizens of Israel – about a fifth of its population – ahead of the election. 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.

Voting in the shadow of genocide

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.

“This election comes in the context of the genocide and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and the harsh state policies towards Palestinians in Israel,” said As’ad Ghanem, a political scientist at the University of Haifa. “Palestinian citizens are really afraid. 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”.

“Acts like these make me more afraid that the settlers will get worse and try to take more Palestinian land,” said Hanan. “This makes me want to vote more, and want to encourage other people to vote.”

‘We are under a real danger’

On September 23, Israel’s Central Elections Committee voted to disqualify  Ra’am and the Joint List – an alliance of the Hadash, Balad and Ta’al parties – before the Supreme Court overturned the decisions. 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. “We feel that we are under attack,” said Thabet Abu Rass, an expert on Arab-Jewish relations. “This is why we will cast our vote in a higher percentage.”

Voter turnout among Palestinian citizens of Israel ranged from roughly 45 to 65 percent over the past five elections, reaching about 53 percent in the last polls in 2022. 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.

“We want to take it there,” he said, noting that a high turnout could keep smaller right-wing parties like Amcha Yisrael and The Reservists from clearing the 3.25 percent electoral threshold, shifting the entire balance of power.

The potential voter surge comes despite Palestinians’ limited, ossified choices.

“Every election, I tell myself that this year I’m not going to vote, because in reality we don’t feel that the Arab members do much,” said Hanan, bemoaning the lack of female representation or new political voices. “But in the end, I always go and vote, because I feel that maybe this time it will help.”

Despite people’s misgivings, Ghanem, the political scientist, dismissed the potential for a mass boycott as “a small point of view” by now. “We are under a real danger,” he said, “and we can contribute to ending this government’s term.”

Hanan said, “I know that voting is like admitting that there is an Israeli country, but it’s here. 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.”

Kingmakers without a seat at the table

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 the difference.

On paper, that should make the Joint List and Ra’am kingmakers in the election. Yet opposition leader Naftali Bennett has said “The Arab parties are not Zionist, and therefore we will not rely on them.” Former army chief and potential prime ministerial candidate for the opposition Gadi Eisenkot has also expressed refusal to partner with the Arab parties, batting back attempts by Netanyahu to link him to them: “There is no Gadi [Eisenkot] without [Ahmad] Tibi” has become a frequent campaign slogan for Netanyahu, referring to the leader of Ta’al.

With the election at a knife’s edge, Palestinian voters must weigh principle against strategic voting in a system stacked against them. Initially, Atamneh said she considered voting tactically for Ra’am, a religiously conservative party with a Bedouin base in the Naqab, or even the Democrats, the liberal Zionist party – both likelier than the Joint List to join an anti-Netanyahu coalition. But she decided to vote for the Joint List on principle.

“While I can give in to a few things,” she said, “at the end of the day, I have to abide by morals and values I can’t let go of that easily. As Palestinians, we have to support Palestinians.”

In 2021, Ra’am made history by becoming the first Arab party to join an Israeli government when it entered a broad coalition that briefly unseated Netanyahu. But its pitch – that real gains and protections for Palestinian citizens come from sitting in a coalition government – has failed to persuade everyone.

Ghanem argued Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas “gives everything almost in order to get a little bit of budget … but we’re still Palestinians.”

However, Bedouin citizens are expected to largely support Ra’am, hoping it will join the ruling coalition like it did in 2021-2022. “Bedouin political discourse is a civic discourse rather than anything else,” said Abu Rass, with Bedouins focused on “daily survival” – hoping inclusion into the government can bring about “recognising their unrecognised villages, investing in education, and employment”.

‘Before ending the occupation, I want to save my people’

As Ghanem put it, Palestinian politics in Israel is “very weak because we don’t have consolidated political power internally in our community”.

But the political scientist believes the Joint List can make a serious impact on Israeli coalition building like in 1993, when Palestinian parties supported Yitzhak Rabin’s government from outside the cabinet. Wanting to replace Netanyahu, he said, “doesn’t mean that we have to be part of the coalition” – only part of “the whole bloc that wants to replace this racist government”.

Last week, Joint List leader Yousef Jabareen expressed a willingness to do just that under agreed-upon terms, including a path to Palestinian statehood and fighting organised crime and violence in Israel’s Palestinian communities.

Despite the campaign rhetoric saying otherwise, Abu Rass is optimistic the Eisenkot-led opposition will ultimately accept Arab parties as partners in some fashion.

“If the Arabs get 15, 16, 17 MKs [members of the Knesset], everybody will knock on the doors of the Arabs,” he said. “Publicly, they are not willing to say that … [but] I’m sure after the election, they will talk differently.”

An anti-Netanyahu coalition would not bring peace, said Abu Rass, who lost 38 relatives to Israeli attacks on Gaza, but it could be a brake on the worsening atrocities of the current government. “Before ending the occupation,” he added, “I want to save my people.”

Warning of another far-right government, Atamneh believes she has finally convinced her mother to vote.

“There’s bad, and then there’s extremely bad. We’d much rather have bad than extremely bad,” she said. “Even if I can prevent one death or one demolition order or anything like that, then it’s better than nothing.”

After a brief pause, she added: “But then you’re like – well, I’m just helping Israel reshape its image [as a democracy]. It feels like a dead end.”