Palestinian citizens of Israel can vote, but cannot expect change
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For the majority of Israelis, the general election on October 27 is a choice between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the forces that oppose him, led by former general Gadi Eisenkot. But for the Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up 20 percent of the population, the upcoming polls present a different dilemma.
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As the political mainstream in Israel continues to shift to the far right, Palestinian citizens face growing threats to their political and collective rights. Palestinian communities in Israel experience increased violence, while settlers are encroaching on their boundaries. The recent push to expand policing and militarisation of civilian life is another source of growing anxiety within the Palestinian population.
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In this context, the anti-Netanyahu bloc does not seem to offer the prospect of policy reversal or change. Therefore, the question on many Palestinian minds is whether voting in the Israeli elections can make any difference at all.
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Since the Nakba of 1948, the Palestinians who managed to remain in their homes in what was declared as territory of the new State of Israel have had a different fate than the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. In 1952, they were granted Israeli citizenship, and in 1966, the martial law under which they were forced to live was lifted.
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Although Palestinian citizens of Israel have the right to vote and participate in politics, citizenship has not shielded them from the broader system of dispossession and attempts to reshape their Palestinian identity and national belonging.
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Through land confiscation and the regulation of education and culture, the Israeli state has sought to detach Palestinians from their historical roots and collective past, promoting instead a model of the “Arab Israeli” as a citizen whose identity is separate from its Palestinian and Arab national context.
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Formal citizenship has not secured substantive equality for Palestinians as they face discriminatory laws, systemic underfunding of basic services, and political and socioeconomic marginalisation.
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Instead of engaging in direct violence towards Palestinian citizens – as it has done in the West Bank and Gaza – the Israeli state has instead “outsourced” brutality to criminal networks.
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As a result, Palestinian communities have faced killings, shootings, bombings and arson while Israeli law enforcement has largely ignored the problem. More recently, this problem has escalated, as organised crime groups obtained advanced weapons reportedly stolen from Israeli army stockpiles or smuggled across borders. This growing militarisation of organised crime has claimed hundreds of lives.
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In parallel, Israeli settlements next to Palestinian communities have expanded, accompanied by accelerated seizure of land. This process of “recolonisation” began in mixed cities, such as Jaffa and Lydd, where religious-nationalist settler groups started establishing themselves in Palestinian neighbourhoods in 2021.
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Since October 2023, this process has accelerated. In August, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich unveiled his party’s plan to “Judaise” the Naqab and northern Israel. He proposes to add one million Jewish residents to the two regions, establishing 40 new settlements and dozens of farms, expanding existing settlements, and creating hundreds of thousands of new housing units.
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The idea is to extend the model of territorial control from the occupied West Bank into the Naqab and northern Israel, where Palestinian communities are concentrated.
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There are also indications that the policing of Palestinian towns and villages could increasingly fall under the National Guard, established under National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
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The idea of creating the force was prompted by the May 2021 protests, known as the Dignity Uprising, which spread across Palestinian communities in Lydd, Haifa, Umm al-Fahm, and dozens of other towns and villages.
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Ben-Gvir has advocated expanding the state’s capacity to suppress such unrest. Although the National Guard’s precise role and operational framework remain under development, its potential deployment against mass protests raises serious concerns about the right to protest and the protection of democratic freedoms.
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The government has strengthened settler security squads and integrated them into a broader security framework, raising concerns about the growing role of armed civilian groups in enforcing control over Palestinian communities.
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At the same time, Ben-Gvir has widened access to personal firearms, issuing 300,000 gun licences since taking office.
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Together, these measures normalise civilian policing and deepen the militarisation of everyday life, reinforcing the unequal distribution of coercive power in a society structured on the dispossession and subordination of Palestinians.
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Parties seeking to represent Palestinian citizens of Israel, such as the United Arab List (Ra’am), led by Mansour Abbas, have long argued that parliamentary participation and support for the anti-Netanyahu camp can help remove the far right from power and halt its settler-colonial agenda. But the party’s own track record proves this premise wrong.
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Ra’am joined the coalition government formed after the elections in 2021, which excluded Netanyahu, but it failed to bring about fundamental changes in the conditions of Palestinian citizens. The coalition was fragile and often rocked by deep ideological contradictions.
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In 2022, Mazen Ghnaim, a member of Ra’am, publicly acknowledged that he could not push through policies that would benefit the Palestinian population, despite his party being part of the ruling coalition and despite promises being made that such policies would be accepted. He also lamented the heavy criticism he faced whenever he was visiting Palestinian communities.
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Ra’am’s experience in that coalition illustrated the challenge of sustaining Palestinian political participation in a government whose other constituent parties uphold exclusionary nationalist policies.
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The problem, therefore, extends beyond Netanyahu himself: Palestinian support for the anti-Netanyahu camp cannot translate into meaningful policies that challenge the broader structures of discrimination and dispossession Palestinian citizens of Israel face.
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Voting may offer a way to slow down this project, but it cannot reverse the deeper transformation taking place within Israeli society. The cultural shift towards fascism extends beyond the government and its political leadership, becoming increasingly embedded in social attitudes and everyday life.
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That said, I believe another four years of far-right rule would pose an immediate threat to Palestinian communities and their rights. Therefore, I will vote in Tuesday’s election.
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But Palestinians need to recognise that electoral participation must be accompanied by a more radical political response capable of confronting the structures and ideologies driving this transformation. This requires, among other things, reforming the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel and rooting it more firmly in Palestinian society through popular committees and grassroots organising.
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It also demands a broader commitment to democratisation and de-Zionisation across historic Palestine, as part of a larger political project aimed at building a different future through alternative institutions, mechanisms, and forms of collective action.
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Whatever the Israeli state might claim, the fate of the Palestinian citizens of Israel is tied to the fate of the rest of the Palestinian population. That is a realisation that Palestinian political leaders must finally embrace.
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The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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