Palestinian citizens of Israel are weighing fear of another far-right government against deep disillusionment with the political system as Israel prepares for its general election on October 27. Among them is Laila Atamneh, 19, from the Beit Hanina neighbourhood of occupied East Jerusalem, who will vote for the first time. She said her parents used to argue over the dinner table about whether to take part in Israeli elections, with her father favouring an Arab-led list and her mother always staying away from the polls.
Palestinian citizens make up about a fifth of Israel’s population, and their mood ahead of the vote is mixed. Few believe the system will serve them, yet many fear a return of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. Opinion polls suggest that neither his far-right-led bloc nor the self-styled Zionist opposition alliance can govern without Ra’am or the Joint List, the two Arab-led parties, which makes the outcome a test of how Palestinian voters respond.
Fear of a far-right government shapes Palestinian votes
Atamneh said she feels a duty to the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, who cannot vote in the Israeli election but, she believes, live with the consequences of its government’s policies. She described those policies in terms of occupation, ethnic cleansing and genocide. “There’s bad, and then there’s extremely bad. We’d much rather have bad than extremely bad,” she said, adding that even preventing a single death or demolition order would be better than nothing.
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Her hesitation is also practical. She speaks Arabic and 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 said, adding that none of the parties appear to speak to her generation of first-time Palestinian voters.
For others, the pressure feels closer to home. Hanan, a 36-year-old Palestinian Christian living in a Druze village in the Galilee, said the danger seems to be moving nearer to her. Settlers living in illegal West Bank settlements tried last month to build an outpost near Majd al-Krum, a Palestinian community in the Galilee. Israel’s far-right Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, also released an AI-generated campaign video that showed a Palestinian from the West Bank calling a relative in the Galilee to warn that “the Jews are coming”.
Hanan said such acts made her more worried that settlers would expand further into Palestinian land. “This makes me want to vote more, and want to encourage other people to vote,” she said. As’ad Ghanem, a political scientist at the University of Haifa, linked the election to what he described as a hard-right assault on Palestinian rights, livelihoods and land in recent years. “Palestinian citizens are really afraid,” he said. “Their leadership is afraid, and this is real.”
Disqualification bids and hopes for a higher turnout
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. The Supreme Court later overturned those decisions. Balad’s Sami Abu Shehadeh withdrew his candidacy after the court indicated that a majority of justices supported upholding his disqualification.
Many Palestinians read the episode as proof that the system is illegitimate, although some said it gave them more reason to turn out. “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.”
Turnout among Palestinian citizens of Israel ranged from roughly 45 to 65 percent across the past five elections, reaching about 53 percent in the last polls, in 2022. A Palestinian campaign operative cited surveys estimating that about 62 percent of Palestinian citizens plan to vote next week. He said the goal is 70 to 75 percent, a level last reached in 1999, when a 75 percent Palestinian turnout helped Ehud Barak defeat Netanyahu.
The operative said a high turnout could also keep smaller right-wing parties, including Amcha Yisrael and The Reservists, from passing the 3.25 percent electoral threshold, which he said could shift the balance of power. “We want to take it there,” he said. Even so, the enthusiasm is tempered by a sense that the choices on offer are limited. Hanan said she often tells herself she will stay home, because Arab members of parliament do not seem to achieve much, but she usually ends up voting anyway. She also pointed to the lack of women and new political voices in the lists.
Arab-led parties and the question of coalitions
Opinion polls have consistently left both Zionist blocs short of the 61 seats needed to form a government in the 120-seat Knesset, with Arab parties likely to decide the outcome. Opposition leader Naftali Bennett has said, “The Arab parties are not Zionist, and therefore we will not rely on them.” Former army chief Gadi Eisenkot, a potential prime ministerial candidate for the opposition, has also ruled out partnering with the Arab parties. Netanyahu has repeatedly tried to link Eisenkot to them, using the campaign slogan “There is no Gadi [Eisenkot] without [Ahmad] Tibi”, a reference to the leader of Ta’al.
Atamneh said she first considered voting tactically for Ra’am, a religiously conservative party with a Bedouin base in the Naqab, or for the Democrats, a liberal Zionist party. Both are seen as more likely than the Joint List to join an anti-Netanyahu coalition. In the end, she chose the Joint List on principle. “As Palestinians, we have to support Palestinians,” she said.
Ra’am made history in 2021 when it became the first Arab party to join an Israeli government, a broad coalition that briefly unseated Netanyahu. Its argument that real gains for Palestinian citizens come from sitting in government has not convinced everyone. Ghanem said Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas “gives everything almost in order to get a little bit of budget”. Bedouin citizens are nonetheless expected to back Ra’am largely, and Abu Rass said their focus is on “daily survival”, including recognition of unrecognised villages, investment in education and employment.
Joint List leader Yousef Jabareen said last week that his alliance was willing to support an anti-Netanyahu government on agreed terms, including a path to Palestinian statehood and action against organised crime and violence in Palestinian communities in Israel. Ghanem said the Joint List could still have a serious impact without entering the cabinet, pointing to 1993, when Palestinian parties backed Yitzhak Rabin’s government from outside it. Abu Rass, for his part, expects the opposition to change its tone after the vote. “If the Arabs get 15, 16, 17 MKs, everybody will knock on the doors of the Arabs,” he said.
Atamneh, who has been trying to persuade her mother to vote, put the dilemma plainly. “But then you’re like – well, I’m just helping Israel reshape its image [as a democracy]. It feels like a dead end.”
