The Palestinians vote opened a path to ousting Netanyahu. Where does it lead?

Israel might be coming closer to resolving its political impasse following last month’s elections, as Israeli President Yitzhak Herzog officially tasked Gadi Eisenkot, the main rival of Benjamin Netanyahu, with forming a government. Netanyahu, who ran with the hopes of staying in power, lost seven of the 54 seats won by the camp under his leadership. On Thursday, the Ashkenazi Haredi ultra-Orthodox party, Yehodot HaTorah, announced that it would no longer support Netanyahu, effectively reducing his camp to 46 seats in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Yehodot HaTorah decided not to nominate any candidate for prime minister during the consultations that the Israeli president concluded on Thursday with different parties, before deciding to tap Eisenkot to form a government. The Haredi party’s decision came as a response to Netanyahu not delivering on his promise to the Haredi community to put their exemption from the military draft into law. On the other hand, Arab-Palestinian parties allied in the Joint List have stated that they will nominate Gadi Eisenkot, thereby contributing to the majority needed to form a government, provided that Eisenkot’s other allies, especially Avigdor Liberman, who refuses to ally with Arab parties, maintain their support. Netanyahu might be in his final days as head of the Israeli government, after 18 years and six governments in office. He might also be facing an investigation by a commission over the security failure on October 7, and charges in Israeli courts for his ongoing corruption cases. However, although significant for Israeli politics, how much difference would such a change mean for the Palestinian people, and for the region? The drive behind the Arab turnout The scene could have looked very different, as it did after the 2015 and 2022 elections, with Netanyahu easily achieving a majority and staying in power. The difference, this time, is the massive turnout of Palestinian citizens of Israel, descendants of the minority who weren’t expelled in 1948, who represent around 2 million people today, and a fifth of Israel’s population. Two weeks ago, for the first time in Israel’s history, their 80% turnout gave the two main Arab lists 19 seats in the Knesset, blocking both Netanyahu and Eisenkot from reaching the 61-seat majority required to form a government. This development didn’t come in a vacuum. In the past three years, the world witnessed an unrestrained display of what has been Israel’s policy towards the Palestinian people since 1948. But what Palestinians witnessed was even more crude. In Gaza, Palestinians lived the genocide in their own flesh. Outside of Gaza, Palestinians were forced to watch what the Israeli war machine did to their own people in Gaza, with threats of unprecedented repression if they spoke out. In other words, they were forced to normalize these new levels of brutality and accept them as the new norm. For Palestinian citizens of Israel, this was particularly consequential. In the years before October 2023, Palestinian mobilization within Israel was on the rise, with citizens protesting home demolitions, the expulsion of Bedouin communities in the Negev, the state’s indifference towards organized crime in Arab communities, the events of Sheik Jarrah and Jerusalem, and also in Gaza. That mobilization was forced into silence. The past three years also saw a very aggressive and explicit affirmation of the most anti-Arab racist tendencies. This included resolutions voted on in the Knesset, such as the resolution rejecting any Palestinian statehood west of the Jordan River, passed in July 2024, and the rhetoric of politicians and the media calling for the expulsion and extermination of Gaza, or calling for the “transfer” of Arabs in Israel by ministers like Bezalel Smotrich. The Palestinian community needed some kind of response to remind Israel that they are present and part of the country. This is, in part, what their massive turnout in the recent Israeli elections was about. But it was also more than just making a point or sending a message. After all, the Palestinian vote put its weight behind the immediate project of ousting Netanyahu, which could only come through a government headed by Gadi Eisenkot, which makes it imperative to ask: what do Palestinians in general, and Palestinian citizens of Israel more specifically, expect from an Eisenkot government? The unexpected change Palestinian leaders in Israel have made it clear, time and time again, that they don’t expect an Eisenkot government to be one of peace. Palestinians don’t expect a new government in Israel to end the occupation, allow the reconstruction of Gaza, or reverse the annexation of the West Bank. This conclusion is based on Palestinians’ knowledge of the components of the Eisenkot camp. Eisenkot himself is the former chief of staff of the Israeli army between 2015 and 2019, during which years he directed the occupation and the blockade of Gaza. Before that, he built a career in the military and left his mark on the Israeli army’s doctrine. In 2008, Eisenkot articulated and theorized the Israeli army’s strategy followed in the 2006 war on Lebanon, and the subsequent wars on Gaza, which became known as the ‘Dahiya Doctrine,’ named after the southern suburb of Lebanon’s capital, Beirut. In an interview, Eisenkot explained that the destruction and harm caused to civilian infrastructure in Dahiya would be replicated in future conflicts. He stated that villages that were used to fire missiles at Israel would be treated as military targets with disproportionate force, and revealed that this was an approved plan, rather than a mere recommendation. Eisenkot’s first ally is Naftali Bennet, a far-right politician who emerged from the ranks of the Likud before forming his own party. It was Bennet who brought Smotrich to the Knesset on the ‘Jewish Home’ party’s list in 2015. In 2013, he declared, “I’ve already killed a lot of Arabs in my life – and there is no problem with that,” and later said that he had meant only “Arab terrorists”. He stated that captured “terrorists” should be killed rather than imprisoned. Bennet also supported the “shoot-to-kill” policy against Palestinian protesters crossing the fence into Israel during the Great March of Return. The other ally is Avigdor Lieberman, who leads the Yisrael Beiteinu far-right party representing Russian-origin Jewish Israelis. Lieberman has been known for his extremist positions, notably against Palestinian citizens of Israel. Since 2004, he has been calling for “transferring” the Arab population to the Palestinian Authority’s jurisdiction as part of a territory and population swap, which would allow Israel to have more land with fewer Arabs. Most recently, he has been the major obstacle in Eisenkot’s camp to forming a government with Arab support, even if Arab parties didn’t join the government itself. The third ally in Eisenkot’s camp is Yair Golan, leading The Democrats party. A remnant of the old Israeli left, Golan opposes uncontrolled settlement expansion in the West Bank and has pledged to dismantle illegal settler outposts. He remains, however, supportive of state-led settlements in the West Bank through the established settlement blocs, which he has considered “part of Israel”. Golan represents the old school approach to Palestinian governance as a partner in controlling Palestinians, while maintaining strategic elements of the occupation, like control over the borders, natural resources, and all of Jerusalem, while allowing Palestinians to have limited autonomy over civil affairs. All the leaders of the opposition to Netanyahu have rejected a Palestinian state and, therefore, by consequence, the internationally celebrated two-state solution. The allies in the Eisenkot camp have two things in common: they are all opposed to Netanyahu as a person, and they are for strong state institutions, as opposed to ideologically driven fanaticism taking the lead on the state’s policy and agenda. This is, in part, because the extremist takeover means a destabilization of Israel’s old, established system and society, as religious fanaticism can only rise through an escalation of internal social divisions. Internal Israeli frictions Netanyahu’s power has relied on the rise of the religious, disenfranchised sectors of Israeli society. This includes West Bank settlers, particularly those who settle in the West Bank for ideological reasons, while accepting the least comfortable living conditions, and spearheading the expansion movement through rogue outposts and violent attacks on Palestinians. This Netanyahu support base also includes the large parts of the religious Sephardic, eastern Jewish population, who has been mostly kept out of key roles in state institutions for decades. Altogether this fusion of social groups has created a kind of sub-identity in Israel that no longer identifies with the traditional, secular, state-centered, modern model of Israel which has been led by Ashkenazi, secular, middle to upper class elites. Netanyahu empowered fanatic settlers, providing them with unlimited protection and support. He also enabled them to control key institutions like the Israeli army’s ‘civil administration’ of the West Bank by placing Smotrich in a key position in the Ministry of Defense to control the entire occupation policy. But the controversial aspect of this change in Israel is not the fact that new people have control in institutions, but that their policy is based on ideological agendas developed outside of the state framework. In other words, ideological groups that have operated outside of the state were now given access to state institutions. These fanatic sectors, carrying a messianic agenda, overlap with the parts of Israeli society that have felt marginalized for most of Israel’s history by centers of power, particularly the Supreme Court. Netanyahu’s push to make the Supreme Court unable to check the government’s decisions and to allow the government to name members of the court represented the peak of these changes, as the Supreme Court has been seen as a stronghold of the secular, Ashkenazi establishment. Netanyahu played on these divisions, jeopardizing the established institutional rules of Israel’s political, legal, and social life. The other side of Israeli politics aims to restore institutional order and stability while avoiding social divisions rather than exploiting them, which means adopting a pragmatic approach, even in deciding when to go to war. In general, this means managing the so-called ‘conflict’ with the Palestinian people, but before anything else, it means ousting Netanyahu and his populist allies What did the Palestinian vote achieve? Arab turnout in massive numbers impacted the way the vote-to-seat ratio is calculated, taking away seats from both main camps and thus blocking Netanyahu’s usual way, as in past elections, to form a new government again and stay in power. This means the Arab vote made it possible to oust Netanyahu for the first time in nearly two decades. Netanyahu’s main allies would also be ousted in this scenario, like Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who have pioneered some of the cruelest policies against Palestinians everywhere. However, the opposition’s reluctance to ally with Arab parties, which should be the obvious choice for an alliance running on ousting Netanyahu, indicates that, despite its more pragmatic tone, the alternative to Netanyahu shares the same anti-Palestinian tendency. The most hardline anti-Palestinian ally of Eisenkot has been Lieberman, who expressed his willingness to negotiate with Haredis as an alternative to accepting support from Arab parties. Although this is a show of Liberman’s hostility to Arabs, it also means that the reforms promised by the opposition would also depend on the issue of drafting, or not drafting, Haredis into the Israeli army. Then what’s the big deal with Palestinians? If Israel is going to make any de-escalation on all its fronts, it would do so on its own terms, without the influence of any party that identifies as Arab or Palestinian. This means that the general direction of Israeli policy wouldn’t change. Palestinians expect that a new Israeli government would allow some or all of the Palestinian Authority’s customs and restore some of the Palestinian workers’ permits. For Gaza, the new Israeli government is expected to allow more humanitarian aid in and, at most, stop the daily strikes. This being said, Eisenkot has promised to “dismantle Hamas” in the first 18 months of his government, which could indicate a new round of bombing. In Lebanon, a new Israeli government might lower its military presence, and it could even stop trying to get the US to resume war with Iran. In general, the highest hopes are that an Israeli government without Netanyahu and his allies would seek to lower the divisions and restore some stability in Israel, which means that it would need to de-escalate on all fronts, without ending or changing its policy of occupation, which it maintained even in the most optimistic years of the Oslo peace talks. Was it worth it? Seen from the outside, it seems that the change is not substantial, and that’s because it isn’t, even when the changes are entirely hypothetical and uncertain. Palestinians are aware of it, and Palestinian citizens of Israel were aware of it going into elections last week, deciding to bet on a change in the leadership of the Israeli government. However, in the immediate context, given the time and place, this decision makes sense for many reasons. First, after the horrors of the last three years, and the crackdown on Palestinians in Israel who had been outspoken in the years prior to October 2023, the Palestinian community in Israel had to rally a collective response. A response both to the genocide and to the overwhelming rise of anti-Palestinian and racist sentiment in Israeli society. A way to remind Israelis that two million Arab Palestinians are part of the country and must be taken into account. The opposition is still Zionist, and occupation is the core of its security doctrine. But the Arab turnout made possible the ousting of a specific trend of Zionism, which has been, for many years, on a mission to decisively and brutally destroy Palestine as a political and social entity, and destroy and control Israel’s surroundings as much as possible. For Palestinians within and outside of Israel proper, especially in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem, this means that the priority is to oust the government with such an agenda. For them, it means they could, though not certainly, have a chance of not being directly expelled and exterminated over the coming four years. A chance that they would go back to some kind of long-term, structural oppression. And even though it remains only a probability, for those sitting under the immediate threat of bombs, bulldozers, and settlers’ guns, with the rest of the world showing an uneasy indifference, such a small chance can make a big difference.