Open any of Israel’s liberal newspapers, or the Financial Times, or the New York Times, and one finds the same thing: the commentary on Israel’s elections arranges itself into a narrative of possible redemption. When the interpretive community that shapes opinion in the metropolitan centers speaks of the ‘struggle for Israel’s soul’ and the possibility of a new Israel arriving through the ballot box, the elections become an occasion to push a frame that attempts to ‘redeem’ the irredeemable. How is one to concede the crimes and still make room for the persistence of the settler colonial slaughter in Palestine?
Since the outset of this year, a politics of ‘redemption’ has been pushed with vigor. Many of you will have read The New Yorker (one of the worst liberal magazines in its treatment of Palestine, though the others are hardly better), which lent its pages to officials in the Biden administration who salvaged themselves through a formula of ‘good intentions, bad decisions, and missed opportunities’. It is a non-apology of a very familiar kind in the Palestinian experience: the only apology we have heard from the mouths of Zionist leaders is ‘We are sorry you forced us to kill you’. Intentions are pure, a site from which innocence can be retained even when Biden and his administration labored overtime to provision all the equipment, diplomatic cover, bombs, and financial aid necessary for a genocidal campaign in Gaza to proceed for roughly a year and a half, during which he was in a position to leverage American power to stop it.
The non-apology arrives on the condition that it costs nothing: when those who backed genocide and made it possible are no longer in a position either to be held accountable or to stop the killing machine. The Israeli version follows the same logic. The ‘anti-Netanyahu change bloc’ is presented to us as a reasonable alternative, more fluent in the idiom of Western capitals, and better equipped to draw over Israel’s persistent cruelty the veil of ignorance on which the smooth operation of Western liberal support has historically depended. Seen through the prism of the liberal intelligentsia in the West, this is a necessary change: one that might wean Israel from perpetual war and return it to diplomatic and political arrangements, restoring it to the community of ‘legitimate’ states as a country guilty of nothing worse than questionable moral decisions. Decisions that remain redeemable and ultimately can secure Israel’s long-term future if it is willing to return to its old pragmatism, expand and withdraw, kill and bank in concessions.
Indeed, much is granted to the loose collection of parties in Israel’s opposition that agree on three things. First, a push against the right-wing religious takeover of the state’s bureaucracy and its attempt to remake the legal order that has been one of the salient features of Israel’s religious Zionist right-wing. Second, a vigorous hatred of Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has outsmarted them and held onto power for the past twenty years, pulling one trick after another to sustain his hold over Israeli politics. Third, the need to redefine the relation to Haredi and Orthodox community in a manner that would integrate them into Israel military machine and economy. As for the Palestinians, they can look forward to the same policies, the same day-to-day crimes, and the same massacres in Gaza, but now under a government granted a renewed license for its effort to bury Palestine because it is simply not Netanyahu’s.
What the change bloc offers is better management of the same system. It will lean more on the courts and the army to do the same job that the settlers have taken up with a sense of super-impunity in the West Bank. It is also more likely to renew the fighting in Gaza and to push the U.S. toward another round of war with Iran. It will present itself as a more credible partner for ‘normalization’ agreements that can rescue Israel from itself and from its doctrinal tilt toward embracing ‘pariah status,’ at least at the level of rhetoric. It will also offer an excuse to Western capitals that do not really want to sanction Israel and are looking for any ‘fig leaf’ to rationalize the persistence of their failure to act.
Israel’s so-called liberals, no less implicated in the structures of power, have always preferred the idiom of moderation to the blunt vocabulary of their rivals on the right. The liberals kill and perform the theatre of moral complexity. They massacre and take pleasure in possessing the capacity to utter words of guilt. They chuckle at the crimes they committed in closed rooms and in archives that only open up decades later. The substance is the same, and for all the talk of a struggle for Israel’s soul, it has been, and will remain, rotten to its core. They differ only in rhetorical strategy, and the right’s candid avowal of what the state actually does is seen by the Eisenkots as stupidity, a failure in the management of appearances.
The entire media complex around Israeli political centrism predicted a sweeping victory for its center, a narrative that wove together an infalted spin on the extent of animosity towards Netanyahu (way more popular than Haaretz would have you believe), the credentialism of the opposition leader as former chief of staff of Israel’s military with a son killed in Gaza, and the brains behind Israel’s deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure as a means to pressure and defeat resistance movements (The Dahiya Doctrine). This was the man who would unseat the Prime Minister and dethrone the king of a state so accustomed to Netanyahu that its politics has shrunk to the person himself, the polity mistaken politics for a personality. The results have produced a stalemate, with Netanyahu’s coalition coming out first with about 53 seats to around 48 for Gadi Eisenkot’s coalition. Netanyahu, declared defeated the day before, rose once again to sustain a fighting chance.
Elections and the illusion of rescue
One of the most talked-about shifts in this round of elections is the extent to which Palestinian citizens of Israel participated in the vote. Turnout among Palestinians was estimated at 80 percent, which broke the 1999 record. The Palestinian community, which makes up around 21 percent of the population and whose participation is a matter of political contestation, voted at much lower rates in previous rounds, somewhere between 40 and 60 percent. The jump in turnout should be read principally as a desperate attempt both to unseat the right-wing government and to return to a semblance of normalcy in everyday life between the river and the sea. In a tragically ironic twist, it is a desperate attempt to secure a colonial reality that is less invested in obscene forms of violence and more capable of masking it through a slow-grinding process. As a tactical intervention, it is also meant to offer Israel’s opposition a clear path towards securing a government, one in which they would have to grant some concessions to Palestinian citizens of Israel, largely on issues pertaining to everyday life and on the issue that has exhausted Palestinian political communities: the willful lack of policing that has permitted the rise of organized crime in Palestinian towns and villages inside Israel, with strong indications of Israeli intelligence sanctioning it.
Both the Joint List and Ra’am are projected to win a record number of seats, around 19. That showing compounds a problem that has already produced repeated political stalemates. Israeli politics has become so polarized around the figure of Netanyahu, and has shifted so far to the right through demographic and ideological change, that the two dominant blocs can neither govern together nor secure a majority on their own. The opposition, a largely weak collection of forces, is also incapable of truly embracing an overt political coalition with Arab parties. It is caught between its hatred of Netanyahu and its utter disdain for any political embrace of Arab parties, both in principle and out of fear that such an embrace would entail a tacit empowerment that might also push Israel towards compromises on national grounds. So the things Israelis casually fear are a Palestinian state or equal political, economic, and civic rights.
It is not a shock, then, that one of the first cynical moves by the Netanyahu-led coalition has been to invoke foreign interference in the elections, and the role of Qatar, Turkey, and the “Muslim Brotherhood” in shaping the outcome through “bribes” and influence operations, which, it claims, explain the strong showing of the Arab vote in the current electoral round. Right-wing Israeli media already call it “Ra’amgate,” a reference to Ra’am, the list led by Mansour Abbas and affiliated with the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement. Abbas, in recent years, moved to break many of the political taboos around Palestinian participation in Israeli elections, situating himself as a pragmatic leader, devoid of nationalist sentiment and interested in full civic and economic rights within the horizon of the Israeli state as it stands. Despite the many concessions, both symbolic and material, he is still treated as a “suspect” and as having a hidden agenda by many pundits and Israeli political operatives. What motivated Netanyahu, who is himself implicated in a Qatar bribery scandal through assistants who worked in his office, was to muddy the waters of any possible coalition that would see Abbas working with the opposition to unseat the Prime Minister.
But the Arab vote in Israel and its strong showing at the polls tell a different story. They speak to the sense of brokenness that has defined politics outside Gaza, and indeed in Gaza itself. The incapacity to muster an active form of resistance, and the daily assault on Palestinian life in the West Bank, in Jerusalem, and within Israel itself, have propelled a cruel push towards a protest vote built on the hope both of ousting the “Kahanist” forces from Israeli politics and of returning to a pre-October 7 sense of normalcy. It is cruel because it comes on the heels of symbolic concessions and amid the weakness of Arab political movements, which have been left wrecked as political forces and without a material and political social base. It is also cruel because it carries a sense of “cruel optimism,” in which voters know all too well that the Zionist forces on the ballot disagree on much but agree on who is on the menu – the Palestinians. But it is the desperation of the “at least” logic that stands out: at least a new government will curtail some settler excess, show more pragmatism in economic relief, and take more steps towards fighting crime. In other words, it is a symptom of a society that has lost much of its capacity to solve its own problems and is hanging its wager on forces that share the same desire to eliminate.
It is also cruel because the rise of Israeli opposition will only help whitewash Israel, sanction diplomatic relief, postpone sanctions, and open a window for the deepening of Arab normalization. It is cruel because, in the moment, it is also one of the few avenues of a cruel form of hope.
