The Israeli elections have become a fight over October 7, but only Zionist opinions are allowed

The elections in the apartheid, genocidal state of Israel are nearing on October 27, 2026, but it is October 7 of three years ago that continues to dominate the political conversation. In fact, it can be said that these elections are about the very question of what lessons Zionist society should take from October 7. But what this means for Israeli politics is that the voters are solely deciding who can best manage Israel’s expansion and massacre of the Palestinians. What this means for the rest of the world is that any change to Israeli society will need to be enforced from outside. The Zionist fight over October 7 I recently returned from a visit to Israel, and here are a few small snapshots that help illustrate the overall atmosphere: The kibbutz I grew up in, where most of my close family lives, aligns with the Labor-Zionist movement like most other kibbutzim and is generally associated with the Zionist left-wing. The entrance to the communal dining hall has a big sticker on it, with an Israeli flag, saying ‘Elections 27.10. We will not forget’. The digits 7.10 are marked in bold. At the airport electronic passport control, an ad has been put on the screen, which normally just contains instructions for placing your passport on the scanner. It now says: “7.10 – REMEMBERING EVERYONE.” My exit date was October 18. This will apparently be running the whole month. Israeli society is obsessed with the fight over how to ‘remember’ October 7, 2023, and this question is now appearing to be a critical issue in the elections. Any analysis of that day in any way that explains its logic other than “terror” is considered subversive. This is the precise background for the disqualification of Palestinian Knesset member Sami Abu Shehadeh of the Balad party (part of the Joint List). This fight over how to remember October 7 has extended to all Zionist parties during this election. The kibbutz society, which is representative of the Zionist left, bore the brunt of the attack on October 7, and has become increasingly and explicitly genocidal in the last three years. For them, the purpose of remembering October 7 is to blame Netanyahu for the security failure that day and for putting Jews at risk. Before October 7, this same sector was leading the protests against the government’s judicial reform/overhaul, which reduced democratic trappings of the “Jewish and democratic” state. But now, October 7 overshadows all that. Even back then, the protests featured a sea of Israeli flags while generally excluding Palestinians in an effort to preserve Israeli ‘Democracy,’ which in liberal Israeli terms is synonymous and compatible with Jewish supremacy and apartheid. As Palestinian lawmaker Ahmad Tibi, who holds Israeli citizenship, quipped in 2009, and remains blatantly true today, what the “Jewish and democratic” state means in practice is that it is “democratic toward Jews, and Jewish toward Arabs.” The Zionist right-wing, on the other hand, just wants to use October 7 as a means of further dehumanization of Palestinians. It is the supposed cause, backdrop, and rationale for all of Israel’s expansions and aggression since, for the sake of Israel’s security. Across Zionist society, the general thinking about October 7 has become the justification for rampant militarism, and the agreed upon solution to Israel’s own settler-colonialist problems. Thus, even in the kibbutz society, it is now common to see more right-wing banners than Labor-Zionist ones at election time. The liberals have responded by trying to one-up the right at its own game. The Labor party merged with slightly more left-Zionist Meretz to create The Democrats, led by Yair Golan, the general who advocated the starvation of Gaza, and expressed that “we’d all like to wake up one spring morning and find that 7 million Palestinians who live between the sea and the river have simply disappeared.” And during my visit, there are just as many banners at the kibbutz promoting Gadi Eisenkot, the mastermind of the genocidal Dahiya Doctrine, and his centrist party Yashar (meaning ‘straight’ and ‘honest’), as there are anyone further to his left. While the debate over October 7 has played a central role in this election, none of that discourse has focused on the Palestinians who have been the victims of Israeli genocide for the last three years. They are a topic that doesn’t even bear mentioning, as there are no meaningful differences to discuss. Apartheid above all In the final days of the election, Eisenkot and his party appear to be potential winners and are leading in many polls with a plurality of about 22 seats (out of 120), above Netanyahu’s Likud, which in most polls is around 20. A recent poll (Oct. 18) of the public broadcaster Kan11, appears quite representative, where the current governing coalition polls at about 51 (with Likud at 21 seats) and opposition stands at 69 (with Yashar at 23 seats). It would thus appear that the opposition easily clears the 61-seat majority threshold. But one must not be fooled by the number 69, which would seem to indicate an opposition win. This is because that number includes 13 seats representing Palestinian parties, 8 from the Joint List (Hadash, Ta’al, Balad) and 5 from Ra’am. And as we know in the Jewish apartheid state of Israel, Palestinian political representation is never a clear-cut issue. In fact, several opposition parties that would be central to this potential new governing coalition have already said partnering with ‘non-Zionist’ parties like the ‘Arab parties’ is out of the question. This is the case for the Together party (polling at 12 seats), led by religious-nationalist Naftali Bennett and centrist (opposition leader) Yair Lapid, as well as for Avigdor Lieberman and his Jewish Home right-wing party (polling at 8 seats). Lieberman wrote on social media on October 19 that: “at the principle level, it is not possible to lean upon MK’s (Members of Knesset] from Ra’am and the Joint List, who after the massacre of October 7, the worst catastrophe since the establishment of the state, define Hamas as a charity organization and accuse IDF soldiers of genocide and crimes against humanity.” Netanyahu’s Likud have long sought to exploit the racism of Israeli society and use the political reality as a cudgel to beat opposition parties. Likud has chided the opposition bloc for potentially depending upon Ra’am and its leader Mansour Abbas, like in the mocking AI video featuring Abbas driving Bennet and Lapid who appear as children seated in the back of a car. Bennett and Lapid did in fact have Ra’am and Abbas in their short-lived government in 2021 and 2022, and the idea for doing so was actually first pitched by Netanyahu himself in 2019 (and again in 2021), but the whole issue of involving Palestinians remains politically contentious among Jewish Israelis, and it’s only become worse since 2023. If anything, there is one issue that Lieberman and the rest of the Zionist opposition have been uniting around, and that is increasing militarism: more conscription into the Israeli military. Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition is largely based on the Jewish ultra-Orthodox parties Shas (8 seats) and United Torah Judaism (7 seats), which demand maintaining military exemption for Yeshiva (religious academy) students. The Zionist opposition bloc agrees that this exemption should be canceled. Thus, Lieberman, who constantly chides Netanyahu for allowing the exemption to continue, proceeds in his tweet: “In order to win in the elections, 4-5 mandates must be moved from the draft-dodgers’ bloc to the bloc of those who serve [in the military]. All the talks about a minority government are transmitting weakness and defeat”. Another issue at the center of the opposition bloc’s concerns again relates to October 7: an investigation into the day’s events. Such a committee will no doubt paint Netanyahu badly, but it is doubtful that Eisenkot would have handled the event differently. And it is clear that matters other than “military intelligence failure” are of no great interest. The Hannibal Directive enacted by Israel, which entailed indiscriminate fire also at its own soldiers and civilians, is ostensibly claimed by the Israeli army to be subject to a later investigation. “Questions of this kind will be looked into at a later stage”, the Israeli military told Australia’s ABC News, because “the IDF is currently focused on eliminating the threat from the terrorist organization Hamas.” But probes have already cleared soldiers of wrongdoing, and the IDF previously said that “it would not be morally sound to investigate these incidents.” “Morally sound” means that it could implicate Israeli soldiers in killing a considerable amount of Israelis, soldiers as well as civilians. So everything in this election seems to circle back to October 7, although there are several realities around that day you are not allowed to confront. Within Israeli society, October 7 has become a way to engulf oneself in a national narrative of victimhood, which serves as a means to deny the genocide that Israel continues to carry out. This ethos is serving to create a nationalist Zionist sense of unity where the political competition among the parties is solely about how to be more Zionist and more militaristic. Everything else has become ancillary. Stopping the genocide in Gaza is not even in question – over three out of four Jewish Israelis believe there are “no innocents in Gaza,” while they deny the genocide. So there is no horizon indicating substantial change, with or without Netanyahu. If one is looking for change, its agency is to be found outside Israel, in external pressure through Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions.