Israel votes Tuesday in what analysts call one of its most consequential elections, the first since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023 and the subsequent war in Gaza that has killed more than 74,000 people. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's longest-serving prime minister, faces a closely fought contest while wanted by the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges and standing trial domestically for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. The election is being framed as a referendum on Netanyahu's leadership — his competence, his alleged security failures preceding October 7, and his government's attempts to strip the Supreme Court of review powers. It is not, by any serious reading, a referendum on the war itself. As former Israeli government adviser Daniel Levy put it: "You would have to have one side arguing it was a good thing and the other arguing it was a bad thing, let alone acknowledging that it was a genocide. So, no, obviously none of that is on the ballot." The opposition bloc challenging Netanyahu is itself firmly right-wing and Zionist. No mainstream candidate has proposed including Arab-led parties in a governing coalition. References to Ra'am or the Joint List leaders are used as political attacks — accusations hurled between rival candidates, not coalition-building overtures. Palestinian citizens of Israel constitute one-fifth of the population; their political representatives remain structurally excluded. Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani described the exclusion as systemic: "The distinction is not between democratic and anti-democratic forces, but between Jews and Palestinians. As long as there is no genuine binational political vision, racism and the systematic restriction of Palestinian rights will remain fundamental features of Israeli society." The ultra-Orthodox parties, by contrast, remain welcome coalition partners for either side. The rightward shift predates this government. The collapse of the peace process, repeated security crises, the 2018 Nation-State Law formally enshrining Jewish supremacy, and unchecked settlement expansion all laid the groundwork. But the pace has accelerated dramatically under Netanyahu's 2022 coalition, which included far-right ultranationalists Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich — both of whom provided crucial support for the judicial overhaul and political cover for intensified West Bank violence. Analyst Ahron Bregman of King's College London noted that an opposition win would shift atmosphere more than substance: "Don't be mistaken. Israel, particularly after 7 October, turned sharply to the right, and any new government will reflect and mirror this reality." Chatham House fellow Yossi Mekelberg framed the stakes as a choice between "a functioning democracy or a democracy in name only" — but even he acknowledged the binary is about institutional norms, not Palestinian rights. The campaign has unfolded against ongoing violence: daily attacks in Gaza despite a yearlong ceasefire, settler pogroms and army raids in the occupied West Bank, and a wider regional conflict involving strikes on Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Qatar. The question the election answers is who manages the apparatus, not whether the apparatus changes direction.
