Palestinian citizens of Israel — 20 percent of the population — head into the October 27 general election facing a question fundamentally different from the Jewish majority's. For most Israelis, the vote is Netanyahu or not-Netanyahu. For Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, it is whether voting can alter a trajectory of deepening dispossession that both sides of the mainstream political divide have failed to reverse. The structural picture is stark. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has published plans to settle one million Jewish residents in the Naqab and northern Israel, establishing 40 new settlements and dozens of farms. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has issued 300,000 gun licences since taking office and is building a National Guard whose likely deployment against Palestinian protests raises direct questions about democratic freedoms. Settler security squads have been integrated into a broader security framework, normalising armed civilian policing of Palestinian communities. The violence is not hypothetical. Palestinian towns face killings, shootings, bombings, and arson from criminal networks that Israeli law enforcement has largely ignored. These networks have obtained advanced weapons reportedly stolen from Israeli army stockpiles or smuggled across borders. The author describes this as the Israeli state having "outsourced" brutality — maintaining formal legal equality while allowing organized crime to function as a proxy enforcement mechanism. The anti-Netanyahu camp offers no structural alternative. Ra'am, the United Arab List led by Mansour Abbas, joined the coalition government formed after the 2021 elections that excluded Netanyahu. The experiment failed. Ra'am member Mazen Ghnaim publicly acknowledged in 2022 that he could not push through policies benefiting Palestinians despite being part of the ruling coalition. The other constituent parties upheld exclusionary nationalist policies regardless of who sat in the prime minister's chair. The settler-colonial expansion has accelerated since October 2023. In mixed cities like Jaffa and Lydd, religious-nationalist settler groups began establishing themselves in Palestinian neighbourhoods during the 2021 Dignity Uprising. Smotrich's plan extends the West Bank model of territorial control into sovereign Israeli territory. The process is not incidental to governance — it is the governance. The author — a Palestinian citizen of Israel — arrives at a paradox: he will vote on Tuesday because four more years of far-right rule poses an immediate threat, while simultaneously arguing that electoral participation cannot reverse the deeper transformation. The cultural shift toward what he calls fascism extends beyond government into social attitudes and everyday life. Voting may slow the project; it cannot stop it. The prescription is extra-parliamentary: reforming the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel, building popular committees and grassroots organizing, and committing to democratisation and de-Zionisation across historic Palestine. The author insists that the fate of Palestinian citizens of Israel is bound to the fate of all Palestinians — a political reality that Palestinian leaders inside Israel must finally accept as the foundation of any strategy.
