Israeli Elections and the Palestinians

Hello everyone and welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Danal Kurd and I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics. Today I wanted to talk about the Israeli elections that are coming up. International Crisis Group published a Q & A on the topic, which I found useful and will link in the show notes.

At the top of that Q & A, there's a photo of a Palestinian farmer in Rantis, a village outside of Raballah. walking past his olive groves. And hanging over him are two giant campaign banners. One is Benjamin Netanyahu, and the other is for Gaddy Eisenkant, the former army chief who wants Netanyahu's job. That Palestinian farmer can't vote for either of them. He can't vote in this election at all. But whoever wins will help decide whether settlers come for his olive groves this harvest, whether the army stands there and watches, and whether there's a road outside of his village next year. That's the Israeli election in one picture. It's coming up on October 27th, and for Palestinians, the options range from bad to catastrophic. Now let me

explain why without burying the lead. Every serious contender in the Israeli election supports the occupation, and nobody is promising to end the war on Gaza. Jewish Currents also published an explainer on the Israeli elections that I'll link in the show notes. And the news editor at Jewish Currents writes in that piece that he almost ran the election guide under the headline, the vote doesn't matter. But he says when he talked to Palestinians, he changed his mind.

Although the Israeli political landscape is abysmal, Palestinians will suffer different impacts based on who wins. And so, obviously, they're watching this closely. It comes down to two names. Itzman Ben-Kavir and Bezabit Asmotrich. Ben-Kavir runs the national security right now, which means the police and the prisons. and he's responsible for a lot of the abuses that have happened. And Bezalel Smotrich, which is the head of the religious Zionist party, he's the finance minister, and he has enormous sway over the West Bank. Netanyahu losing doesn't end the occupation, but it almost certainly takes those two out of their ministries.

If you're a political prisoner or a farmer in some of the rural areas in the West Bank, that isn't abstract. An organizer in Jaffa, Abdel Bashada, told Jewish Currents, that nobody is talking about change anymore. People are just asking, how do we just survive this point in history? That's very bleak, and it's also realistic. Crisis Group frames this as a contest between different right-wing ways of running a country that already controls everything from the river to the sea.

The occupation isn't on the ballot, but I think its intensity is. The next government that will take over in Israel starts from a very different baseline than four years ago. Israel has taken more land Gaza and the West Bank have been squeezed into smaller and smaller areas. Cities and refugee camps have been razed. And at least 74,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by crisis groups count, but we know that this is an undercount. The settler movement will stay active no matter who wins. So the question isn't whether things get better, but the question is how much worse and how fast. Now, let me explain some basics for those of us who don't follow Israeli politics closely.

The Knesset, the Israeli legislature, has 120 seats and you need 61 to govern. A party basically needs 3.25% of the vote to get into the Knesset, which is about four seats. Fall short of that and your votes are essentially burned. They simply vanish. And about a dozen political lists are expected to clear that bar. And there are basically two teams or two-ish. Team one is Netanyahu's bloc, Likud, and Ben-Kavir's party. which is openly Kahanist, and Smotrich's religious-idist party, running this time with another one. Moshe Feiglin has said on camera, the head of Zahut, that he wants Gaza emptied of Palestinians. And that's who the religious-idist party is running with. And then the two Haredi parties, Shas and

United Torah Judaism. So that's the coalition that has governed since December 2022, one that Crisis Group says is widely seen as the most extreme in Israel's history. Their shared agenda, as the past few years have made clear, I think, is to expand settlements, push towards formal annexation of the West Bank, stay in southern Lebanon, and push the Palestinians entirely out of Gaza. Likud's slogan this year translates to the right or Palestine. Basically that either you're voting for the right wing or you're voting for Palestinians. The message is that any other government would hand Palestinians a state.

This brings us to team two. and maybe you'll see why this slogan is funny. The second team, so to speak, the opposition, is led by Gadi Eizenkot and his new party, Yashar. Eizenkot is a former army chief. In 2006, he formulated the Lahya Doctrine, basically the idea that Israel wins by using overwhelming force against civilian infrastructure. After October 7th, he sat as an observer in the war cabinet, and he lost his son in Gaza, which earned him real public sympathy.

On Palestine, Eisencott has called the two-state solution delusional. And he says he very much believes in settling the West Bank. But he has criticized settler violence and the E1 project, and says he'd clear outposts that are illegal under Israeli law. Now, to be clear, under international law, all of them are illegal.

But they like to split hairs, these Israeli politicians. Alongside him is Naftali Bennett. He's a former prime minister and former head of the Yerushalayim Settler Council. He's running on a slate with Yair Lapid. And Bennett openly supports annexing Area C of the West Bank. Then there's Abigdor Lieberman, who's far right, but he's personally done with Netanyahu and has floated the idea of handing Palestinians in a shrunken territory over to Jordan. So again, not give them their own state, just hand them over to someone else. The Jordanians, I'm sure, have not been consulted on this. And then there's the quote-unquote central left, the Democrats, the Labour-Maritz merger led by Yair Golan. They're the only Jewish party that

even nominally backs two states. But it's two states with long-term Israeli security control over all of it. And they're not talking about now or in the medium-term future. They're basically saying maybe a Palestinian state someday policed by the Israeli army. Now look at what the opposition actually attacks Netanyahu on. They're attacking him on October 7th. And who's to blame? They're attacking him on the cost of living and the draft exemptions for haredi Israeli citizens. When they criticize his wars, it's not because he's overseen war crimes or genocide, but because he's too soft. Lapid said, for example, that Israel should have bombed Iran's oil and gas facilities.

And Bennett wants Qatar listed as an enemy state. Here's how I would put it. The Palestinian question isn't contested in this election because it's been settled within Jewish-Israeli public opinion. There's near consensus on keeping security control over the Palestinians. The actual debate is about the style of control. Do we want something managed, quiet, out of sight, or do we want something extreme and turbocharged? Now, at this point, you might be asking, well, isn't 20% of the country Palestinian?

These are Palestinian citizens of Israel. Where do they fit? Sami Abushada, who heads Balad, the Palestinian Nationalist Party, is running with two other parties on the joint list. But Sami Abushadza himself is not on the ballot anymore. And I think what happened to him reflects the condition of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Right after October 7th, he wrote an article analyzing what had just happened, calling the attack a significant historical event. And Ben-Gavir's camp then moved to disqualify him under a basic law amendment that bars candidates who support armed struggle, incite racism, or reject Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Now, Abushadza denied supporting armed struggle. He said he was analyzing the events and

explaining their significance. He's a lawyer who works on human rights and has decades of experience attempting to work within the system in Israel to represent Palestinian citizens of the state. I'll link in the show notes an interview he did with Peter Beinart for the podcast Occupied Thoughts. You can hear the outrage in his voice over the accusations he was faced with. And by Ben Kavir, no less. Someone with a criminal record with multiple convictions for offenses including incitement to terrorism and racism and supporting a terrorist organization. Well, as you might expect, the attorney general backed the ban anyway.

And here's where it gets really bad. This wasn't just the far right instigating a campaign against one of the few Arab Palestinian politicians and getting away with it. This was a situation where the whole Zionist spectrum got behind the ban, including Yair Golan of the Democrats. So the supposed left. And of course, here's where the Israeli left and right agree, oppressing Palestinians. And I want to note here, apparently there is a law in Israel that bars incitement to racism. But apply that law evenly and half or maybe more of the current governing coalition would be in trouble.

But of course, the difference between them and Abu Shahada is that he's Palestinian. And I'm not even saying he did incite to racism. I'm just saying this is their accusation of him. Now, the Supreme Court was clearly going to uphold the ban. Sami Abu Shahada mentions how the judges felt threatened themselves. And then they also threatened him with more severe legal action if he tried to oppose this.

So earlier this month, he withdrew, and he was trying to avoid a precedent that would make it easier to knock out Palestinian candidates later. The far right has tried this for decades, and this is one of the times it's worked. Orly Noy, a candidate for the joint list and a Balad member, told Jewish Currents that many supporters wanted him to stay in and basically make the court own this decision. Abed Abushada, the Palestinian organizer of Femi Afa that I mentioned earlier, he's Sami's relative. He described people waking up sad and humiliated on top of frightened.

I moderated a panel with Abed for Jewish Currents Live recently where he reiterated the sentiment, how heartbroken he was over Sami's decision. And this has ignited the debate again among Palestinians about whether there's any point in participating in the Israeli system if you're a citizen. Because if you stay in, you lend legitimacy to a rigged game. Or you exit and you lose the one lever you might have.

Palestinian citizens are being asked to keep voting in a system that basically doesn't want them and showed them where the line is. Now, there's a parallel attempt to disqualify the entire joint list, the number of Arab parties and Rom, which is an Islamist party. as whole parties, and that attempt failed. So they're still on the ballot. But after election day, they'll be negotiating with the same parties that helped push their leader out. So which of the Jewish-Israeli teams in this election will win the upcoming election? Probably nobody at first. Rough numbers from the latest polling show that Netanyahu's bloc will likely get around 50 seats. And then the opposition will also likely get around 50 seats.

Then the joint list, the Arab parties and Ram, the Islamist party together, will get around 14. And then there's a new right-wing anti-Haredi slate, the reservists. They might get maybe four, and they're leaning towards Isingkot. So let's do the math. Nobody gets to 61 without the Palestinian parties.

Crisis Group puts the odds of either bloc winning an outright majority well under 10%. On paper, that would make the Palestinian parties extremely important. They're kingmakers in this election. But in practice, Eisenkot, Bennett, Lieberman, all of them have said they won't govern with them. Jewish Currents compares it to the riddle of the wolf, the goat, and the cabbage.

If you bring in the Haredim, you lose Lieberman. You bring in the Islamist party, you lose Yashar. Every boat sinks. So here are the four scenarios that Crisis Group lays out might happen. Number one is a hung parliament. Nobody forms a government. Israel votes again early next year. Netanyahu stays on with Ben-Gavir and Smotrich still in their ministries until that next election. He doesn't have to win. He just has to make sure nobody else does. Number two, Eisenhower forms a minority government with Palestinian parties backing it from the outside. Now, there's precedent for this. Arab parties in the past have, for example, propped up Yitzhak Rabin from outside his coalition in the early 90s. Under Israeli law,

a government just needs more yes votes than no votes. So Ram, the Islamist party, wants in. They want to be included. The head of that party, Mansour Abbas's attitude is basically we're here to govern. Furthermore, the joint list leader, Yusuf Jabarin, has offered to be a safety net for any anti-Netanyahu government. The catch is Lieberman. He says he won't sit in a minority government and he won't be on the side of any Arab party. If you take him out, Then Jewish Current's math puts that coalition at around 49, outvoted by Netanyahu's bloc. So this only happens if Eisenkant decides losing is worse than breaking his promise.

Then the third scenario is defections. In this scenario, one of the parties or a few lawmakers switch sides. Now, Yashar's list, for example, is full of political newcomers, makes them targets. And another party, Shas, has hinted it could back Eisenkant because they're angry that Netanyahu never delivered their draft exemption. Or maybe there's a unity government with Likud minus the Kahanists, which Netanyahu has floated. A number of different ways that that could happen. And finally, the fourth scenario is that someone wins outright. This is possible if several small parties fall under the threshold and burn their votes.

But it would mean months of polling were wrong. So we're not sure how likely this is. Now, after the vote, Israeli President Herzog picks someone to try. And they get 28 days, plus up to two weeks more, to try to form a government. And if that fails, two more people get a shot than new elections. And there's one more wild card. Axios reported that Netanyahu and Trump discussed restarting the war with Iran before both countries vote.

The U.S.

Defense Secretary was in Israel this week to talk about Iran. And Crisis Group notes some Israelis worry a strike could be used to delay the election. So if something big happens before the election, All of this is basically up in the air. Now, what does this mean for Palestinians? Obviously, for me, the top concern. Let's go place by place, because Palestinians here means people living under very different rules.

So first, Palestinian citizens of Israel. They're about a fifth of the population, and their most urgent issue is surviving an increasingly oppressive and racist society and government, and also dealing with a record wave of organized crime and gun violence in Arab towns. that they feel is being allowed to happen under Ben-Gavir's watch over the police. And behind that is a deeper fear. Orly Noy, again, Bennett member, told Jewish Currents that Palestinian citizens increasingly feel they're next in line, that forced expulsion could come for them too.

Crisis Group says Netanyahu's opponents worry he may try to discourage or intimidate Arab voters, as in past campaigns. And turnout in Arab towns is quite variable in this race. If it's high, then the anti-Netanyahu math gets easier. And obviously it makes sense why he would want to depress their vote. Now, for Palestinians in the West Bank, the situation is different. Remember that settler violence is the one occupation issue Israel's actually arguing about a little bit. Even Netanyahu has, you know, pretended to condemn what he calls fringe groups while making every excuse for them, of course.

But Crisis Group points out that the worry is mostly about the strain on the army and Israel's image globally. No one in Israeli politics actually cares about the Palestinians being attacked by settlers. And little has been done to stop it. I argued in an op-ed beginning of this month for Prospect magazine that the settlers in the state are symbiotic. They work together to achieve objectives using tactics the other side can't use. So the state can continue pretending these are fringe groups while achieving their goal of ethnic cleansing. For Israeli politics, the issues of economic strangulation, home demolitions, land expropriation, they barely come up outside the Arab parties. So an Eisencott government might rein in vigilantes

and evict some of the smaller outposts. And of course, that might mean the difference for a Palestinian villager who faces expulsion. The joint list's baseline ask is basically that you need to stop the daily terror. But actually annexing Area C and doing something about permanent security control and doing something about the fact that Palestinians have no state, that's not on the table. This has brought support across both blocks. Now, let's turn to what the election means for Palestinians in Gaza. Here, the blocs mostly argue about who should govern Gaza and whether to prop up the Palestinian Authority. The Crisis Group Report calls these peripheral disagreements.

The far right still talks about expelling Gaza's population and rebuilding settlements there. The opposition doesn't say that, but it also doesn't say anything else. Then there's international pressure. In September, the UK led a ban on trade with settlements. And crisis groups read is that it won't really shift Israeli views much in the short run, because Israelis tend to dismiss outside criticism. But they're also not oblivious to isolation.

And maybe that'll matter a little bit after election day, whoever wins. Okay, one last statistic. An Israel Democracy Institute poll in September found that 51% of Jewish citizens are optimistic about the future of democracy in Israel. But among Palestinian citizens, that number falls to 20%. So it's pretty obvious to everyone that the system is working as designed for one group of voters. Which brings us back to the photo I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, the farmer in Runtis walking under the banner of two candidates who both agree he doesn't get a state, but they just disagree about how hard to squeeze him in the meantime. That disagreement is small, but it's also the difference between the next harvest and a burned olive grove,

between a prisoner who gets visits and a prisoner who doesn't. So yes, let's watch the Israeli elections, but we can't confuse a change of management with a change of the system. That is really not on the table. And if Eisenhower really would rather hand the country back to Netanyahu than lean on Palestinian votes, you know, the audacity of actually including some of your citizens. We'll learn exactly what Jewish and democratic means in practice.

Thanks for listening, everyone. Take care and stay safe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions.

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Israeli Elections and the Palestinians

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