Only Israel’s Palestinians Vote Against Genocide

It was heralded by many as “the most consequential election in Israeli history,” and by rights it should have been. Under Benjamin Netanyahu’s outgoing far-right government, Israel plunged into a severe constitutional crisis, suffered the worst military setback in its history, carried out a genocide in Gaza and two failed wars in Iran, and become the most hated country in the world.

And yet, as Haaretz editor Aluf Benn noted in his postmortem, Israeli Jewish voters proved themselves imperturbable. Support for aggression throughout the region remains nearly universal among Jewish voters, who have once again sorted themselves again into pro- and anti-Netanyahu blocs on a basis that, while reflecting real class divisions, is expressed in familiar culture-war terms, producing yet another frustrating stalemate.

There is, however, one dramatic exception to this uncanny stasis: Israel’s Palestinian minority, which responded to unprecedented levels of racist incitement with the highest turnout on record.

Of over eight hundred thousand votes cast by Palestinian citizens, 37 percent went to the Islamist United Arab List (UAL, also known as Ra’am), and 51 percent to the Joint List, which unites communists, left-liberals and independents. As a result, nineteen out of 120 seats in the Knesset, which are allocated proportionally, have gone to Israel’s only two non-Zionist parties, each of which also has one Jewish representative. (Support for these parties among Jews is numerically insignificant, though hundreds of Jewish academics signed a petition in support of the Joint List.)

In stark contrast to the violence and malaise that have gripped Israel’s Palestinian community following the rise of state-tolerated organized crime, the contest between the two parties was peaceful and restrained. This is all the more remarkable given the clear ideological divide between them.

The Joint List couples the demand for civic equality for Palestinian citizens with a clear rejection of Israel’s annihilationist policy in Gaza and its ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. Meanwhile, the UAL — a prominent member of the original Joint List — has turned to a sectoral strategy modeled on that of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties. Following his 2021 split from the Joint List, UAL leader Mansour Abbas courted Netanyahu and then served as a junior partner in the government that briefly ousted him in 2021–22.

This time around, the anti-Netanyahu bloc has drawn the bar for cooperation at a level meant to exclude even the UAL. Its leader du jour, Lieutenant General Gadi Eisenkot, clarified that any party seeking to join him in government would have to declare Hamas — which still is hanging onto power in Gaza — a “terrorist organization which must be annihilated.”

As Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, Eisenkot elaborated the infamous “Dahiya doctrine,” which recommends mass killing of civilians in areas dominated by hostile forces. In the current context, his shibboleth cannot be read as anything but a demand for active consent to ongoing genocide.

The hostility of the Zionist opposition to any form of solidarity with Gaza was driven home when all its parties, including the liberal Democrats, backed an election board decision to bar Joint List candidate Sami Abu-Shehadeh from running on the basis of a vaguely celebratory article written on October 7 and subsequently repudiated. (Genocidal expressions by right-wing candidates, it goes without saying, were not censured in the same way.)

Against Abstention

Given the depth of the racist rejectionism Palestinian citizens have suffered from both Zionist blocs and the eager complicity of both in colonial violence, a turn to abstention would not be unexpected. But Israel’s Palestinian citizens do not have the luxury of ignoring the differences between these blocs, small as they may be.

Thus, Netanyahu’s finance minister and West Bank Viceroy Bezalel Smotrich has empowered settler militias to carry out a campaign of ethnic cleansing that might be halted, if not reversed, under an Eisenkot administration. His ghoulish national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has made a fetish out of torturing and executing Palestinian prisoners.

High Palestinian turnout has severely weakened extreme-right parties led by the two and prevented two others from crossing the representation threshold, depriving Netanyahu’s coalition of its majority. Voters are justified in hoping a new government will dial back its ferocity on both fronts as well as tackling organized crime more seriously. For Palestinians, these are questions of life and death, if not of imminent decolonization.

Under these complex circumstances, voters have rewarded the Joint List for striking a balance between principle and pragmatism. Sociologist Maha Sabbah-Karkabi, who will be joining the Knesset as a Joint List representative, stressed the importance of Palestinians’ show of collective power. “By fully utilizing their electoral potential,” she told me, they “have repositioned themselves at the center of Israel’s political landscape.”

However, Sabbah-Karkabi added, the Joint List now confronts a “climate of delegitimization of Arab political participation coming from different parts of the political spectrum,” rendering the question of influencing government policy “much more complicated.”

Delegitimization has come swiftly from Netanyahu’s propaganda organs, which quickly coined the felicitous oxymoron “ballot box terrorism” while weakly claiming Qatari interference on the Joint List’s behalf. (Netanyahu’s advisers, of course, are the ones who have worked for Qatar.) But while Eisenkot and most of his allies obstinately continue to refuse any alliance with Palestinian parties, the Democrats are finally beginning to peel away from this boneheaded consensus.

For the Joint List, the situation presents opportunities as well as risks. Sabbah-Karkabi and Amjad Shbita, general secretary of the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (the largest of the Joint List’s components), agree that seeing Netanyahu and his far-right government replaced is an urgent priority. Unlike the UAL’s deputies, however, they are also committed to Palestinian national solidarity across borders. The electorate has endorsed this commitment in no uncertain terms.

The ball is now in the court of Eisenkot’s anti-Netanyahu bloc. To avoid a return election, he will have to break one of two campaign promises: not to enter a coalition with Netanyahu, and to avoid relying on “Arab votes.” If he reneges on the former vow — perhaps under cover of a new war with Iran, conveniently started by Donald Trump and Netanyahu in the coming weeks — he will gift the latter with a renewed sheen of invincibility and the international legitimacy he has done so much to lose.

To end Netanyahu’s rule, Eisenkot would have to break the racist taboo on negotiation with the Palestinian public’s representatives. Though it will not join an Eisenkot government, Shbita told me, the Joint List would be willing to provide it with a parliamentary safety net, preventing Netanyahu from getting another shot at power by bringing the government down with a vote of no confidence.

Even if Eisenkot lacks the courage to negotiate such an agreement, Shbita added, “we would consider enabling a minority government by not voting it down “until Netanyahu’s departure from the political scene becomes a certainty.”

Following the “most consequential election in its history,” the political scene in Israel continues to look unbearably bleak. Progressives elsewhere have no reason to let up the pressure for broad sanctions and a total arms embargo. Nevertheless, they can take inspiration from the many Palestinian (and a few Jewish) citizens of Israel, who by voting for the Joint List have expressed their steadfastness — sumoud — in the struggle for democracy, justice, and peace.

This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.