Israel’s election shows its democracy is a sham, but the West can’t stop buying the lie - Middle East Eye

Israel’s general election last week unmasked beyond question the West’s much-cherished fiction of Israel as a "Jewish and democratic state".

That Israel’s democratic pretensions are taken seriously should in itself be astounding. For decades Israel has been given a free pass - revered even - as the "only democracy in the Middle East". 

Western establishments have agreed to turn a collective blind eye to Israel’s brutal treatment of millions of Palestinians forced to live under an illegal military occupation. 

Those Palestinians have no say in electing the government that rules over them, one that abuses, ethnically cleanses, imprisons, tortures and now subjects them to what every major legal, human rights and expert scholarly body deems to be a genocide. 

In Israel’s defence, supporters contest that its belligerence in the occupied territories is necessitated by security considerations. Supposedly, it is unfair to judge what is going on there as reflective of the robust "Jewish and democratic" state inside Israel’s internationally recognised borders - even as Israel refuses to define those borders. 

And as proof, Israel’s apologists point to the treatment of a Palestinian minority inside Israel. 

They are the survivors of mass expulsions in 1948 that paved the way to the establishment of a "Jewish" state on the Palestinians’ homeland. Uniquely, these Palestinians were declared citizens, and were given the vote soon after Israel’s creation. 

Because Israel has one person, one vote - including for what today are some two million Palestinian "citizens" - it must be considered a western-style liberal democracy, we are told. 

It should have been easy to show how nonsensical that argument is, were there any appetite in western capitals for laying bare the truth about Israel’s sham democracy.

The past week of post-election manoeuvring from Israel’s Jewish parties - whether the governing bloc led by Benjamin Netanyahu or the so-called "opposition" - should finally lay this lie to rest. 

There is uproar across the Israeli Jewish political spectrum that the Palestinian minority - known dismissively by the Jewish majority as "Israeli Arabs" - turned out in unprecedented numbers to vote and elected a record number of legislators. 

The parliament is now evenly split between Netanyahu's camp and the opposition, with the latter unable to oust the prime minister unless it does a deal with the Palestinian parties.

And yet the opposition bloc is already baulking at the prospect. Palestinian legislators, representing a fifth of the Israeli public, are not seen as legitimate political actors. They are Israel’s untouchables. 

As far as Israel’s Jewish parties are concerned, the Palestinian parties must continue to have zero political influence in a "Jewish" state.

Or as columnist Hanin Majadli observed in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper: "Racism toward Arabs is proving to be a more dependable issue than opposition to Netanyahu." 

In fact, this is a pattern of behaviour by Israeli leaders that dates back to the state’s founding. 

Israel’s birth as a so-called "Jewish" state in 1948 was only possible because its military expelled 80 percent of the native population, some 750,000 Palestinians, from their homes to areas outside Israel’s new borders - in what amounted to one of the largest acts of electoral gerrymandering in history. 

Israel was created as a "Jewish" state, with an overwhelming Jewish majority, through an act of mass ethnic cleansing.

Once Israel’s leaders had secured a rock-solid Jewish majority - after rigging their democracy - only then did they consider giving the surviving Palestinian population the right to vote, and call them "citizens".

That was the key factor differentiating Israel from an earlier apartheid state, South Africa. 

South Africa’s white leaders dared not give the black population the vote precisely because it comprised a majority.

In a one-person, one-vote system, black parties would have had more seats than white parties. Giving the black majority the vote would have been suicidal for the apartheid project. 

But in the apartheid state of Israel, the Palestinian minority presented no such electoral threat. In any given elections, the number of seats gained by the political parties representing the Palestinian minority in parliament would always be vastly outnumbered by the legislators representing the Jewish majority. 

That demographic imbalance was set in stone through legislation: the 1950 Law of Return. It gave every Jew in the world the right to gain instant citizenship in Israel while at the same time stripping every Palestinian expelled by Israel - and all their descendants - of any right to ever return home. 

And as a bonus, giving the Palestinian minority the vote served as a propaganda coup.

Unlike the old South Africa, Israel’s apartheid character could be better hidden from outsiders, especially given that western establishments were so ready to conceal what their key militarised client state in the oil-rich Middle East was really up to.

If it still isn’t clear that Israel is only a pretend democracy, consider this. For the first 20 years, Israel’s Palestinian minority were living inside a supposedly "Jewish and democratic" state, and casting their votes in elections, while they were under the most severe form of martial law. 

They were denied any freedom of movement, confined to their segregated communities by Jewish military officials in what amounted to a prototype for Israel’s siege of Gaza imposed in 2006. 

During those two first decades, Palestinian "citizens" had to receive a permit from a military governor before they were allowed to reach their farmland, or attend a place of work outside their community, or travel to a relative’s wedding or funeral. 

The "Jewish" state of Israel used this extended period of confinement to achieve two things. 

First, Israeli officials were able to recruit as collaborators a large number of families desperate for a pass book to maintain their livelihoods. Israel soon presided over a sophisticated network of informers helping it enforce a divide-and-rule policy over the Palestinian minority. 

And second, the young Israeli state was able to steal most of the outlying farmland from Palestinian communities on the pretext that it was not being cultivated. That was hardly surprising given that Palestinian farmers could not get the permits they needed to reach their fields. 

In one notorious example of the military government’s treatment of the minority, dozens of Palestinian "citizens", including 23 children, were gunned down in 1956 by Israeli soldiers as they approached a checkpoint outside their village of Kafr Qassem. 

A military curfew had been imposed on the village at the last minute by the military government. No one had told the inhabitants of Kafr Qassem. They paid with their lives.

Israel would later export the same movement restrictions to the occupied West Bank, thereby allowing settler terrorists to grab land from Palestinian owners to expand their illegal settlements. 

Inside Israel, vast areas of land belonging to the Palestinian minority were fenced off for the exclusive use of new Jewish communities. 

The point is that for 20 years, while Israel was proclaiming itself to be a liberal democracy, and being proclaimed as such by western capitals, a fifth of the population - those from the wrong "racial" group - had no rights to do anything, except for voting, without military approval. 

And even then, their parties were vetted by the security services.

The Palestinian minority was allowed the vote solely because it made no meaningful difference to the outcome of elections and because it helped western capitals sucker their publics into believing Israel was a genuine democracy.

When 80 percent of the electorate vote chiefly to enforce their ethnic privileges as Jewish citizens, and when they vote expressly on the assumption that their fellow Palestinian "citizens" pose a threat to Israel continuing as a Jewish supremacist state, the minority’s vote is irrelevant.

Once the votes have been cast, Jewish Zionist parties squabble over how they will share the spoils between themselves. The Palestinian parties sit on the sidelines, as decoration inside the parliament but always outside the government. 

Nothing meaningful improved for the Palestinian minority with the dismantlement of the military government in 1966. After almost all of their lands had been seized, Palestinian communities inside Israel were tightly confined to less than 3 percent of Israel’s territory, surrounded by new Jewish communities built to contain and surveil them. 

Palestinian "citizens" can vote every few years, but they cannot effect change: they continue to live in racially segregated, overcrowded and underfunded communities, in ghettoes. Nor can they influence government policy when the "Jewish" consensus is that they are an enemy simply by virtue of belonging to the wrong ethnic group.

Which is the missing historical context for understanding the furore provoked by the Palestinian minority's surprise performance in last week’s election, gaining a record 19 seats in the 120-seat parliament. 

For many decades, the Palestinian minority’s vote in Israeli general elections steadily declined as the community understood that voting would make no difference to their own situation or that of the Palestinians under occupation. 

In fact, the more vocal Palestinian parties became in demanding equal rights, or highlighting Israel’s apartheid character - which they have managed to do with greater success in the age of social media - the more Israel’s Jewish parties agreed that the Palestinian minority were a threat to Israel’s image as a "Jewish and democratic" state. 

Over the past 20 years, the right and far-right, particularly Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, have been the chief beneficiaries of that backlash. They have turned the tide in their favour with their racist incitement against the Palestinian minority. 

A 2025 poll showed a majority of Israeli Jews want Palestinian "citizens" forcibly expelled from the state. 

That is not because there is any tangible evidence the Palestinian minority poses a security threat. Rather, Israeli Jews fear that the minority’s higher birth rate will gradually erode the current Jewish majority, reversing 80 years of rigged demographics. 

The minority’s votes could then put it in a position to demand equal rights and launch a campaign to overturn Israel’s apartheid, just as South Africa’s black majority succeeded in doing to apartheid there more than 30 years ago. 

Netanyahu’s politically active son, Yair, made this point last week after the results were announced. He described the Palestinian minority as the "greatest threat to the survival of the State of Israel", aside from a supposed Iranian nuclear threat. 

It was for this reason that Netanyahu and the far-right pushed through the 2018 Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, which formally declared that only the Jewish people have sovereignty in an expansive and undefined "Land of Israel". 

The move was largely in reaction to the increasing outspokenness of the Palestinian parties in challenging Israel’s claim to be a "Jewish and democratic" state. 

The Palestinian minority has long campaigned for Israel to become "a state of all its citizens" - that is, a liberal democracy. Efforts to advance such legislation in the Knesset have faced a fierce backlash from Israeli politicians and the courts.

The main purpose of the Nation State Law is to provide a constitutional block on any attempt by the Palestinian parties to gain equal rights.

From Israel’s creation, the central fault line in its politics has been between the Jewish majority, on the one hand, and the Palestinian minority, on the other.

Jewish parties disagree on individual policies, but they are unified on one thing: that the Palestinian parties, as well as the electorate they represent, are pariahs. They must be deprived of influence at all costs.

But in recent years, as Netanyahu has won election after election, the growing political clout of the Jewish far-right and religious right has opened up an additional fissure - this one within the Jewish majority, and largely unrelated to the Palestinian minority.

After so long in power, the current far-right coalition is deeply corrupt. Netanyahu himself is currently on trial for fraud, bribery and breach of trust.

Meanwhile, his government relies on the support of religious extremists who are intolerant, even contemptuous, of Israel’s secular Jewish public. 

And the far right’s flaunting of its fascist sympathies has, in the eyes of the traditional secular elites, irreparably damaged Israel’s image around the world. 

The Jewish majority is now irreconcilably divided. Although they are largely agreed on matters relating to the treatment of Palestinians - not least on the Gaza genocide - the pro-Netanyahu and anti-Netanyahu blocs can find little other common ground. 

They are especially at odds on the question of which kind of Jew - secular or religious - should be in control of a “Jewish” state. 

In effect, there is a low-level Jewish civil war going on in Israel that would probably have torn the country apart by now were it not for the fact that oppressing and abusing Palestinians - and neighbouring Arab states - serves as the glue holding Israel’s Jewish public together. 

The electoral difficulty for the Jewish majority is that their two hostile internal camps are evenly split. Half are deeply loyal to Netanyahu; the other half deeply opposed to him. 

That has left the Palestinian parties in an invidious position. They now hold the balance of power in parliament - earning them unwelcome kingmaker status. 

There is a reason why so many Palestinian "citizens" turned out to vote at this election, despite their utter disillusionment with the Jewish majority. 

First, although there is an overwhelming consensus among Israeli Jews in support of the Gaza genocide, the Palestinian minority hopes that the opposition parties, unlike Netanyahu and his allies, are more likely to feel constrained in their actions by concerns about Israel’s image abroad.

They also understand that the prime minister has his own personal interests in sustaining and expanding the slaughter in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran and elsewhere - not least because it distracts from his corruption trial and has provided a convenient pretext for endless postponements of court hearings. 

Netanyahu’s dependence on the support of unapologetic fascists in his coalition, such as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, means too that his government is more likely to expand the genocidal logic inherent in Zionism, on full display in Gaza, to the Palestinian minority next. 

Palestinian "citizens" are only too aware that the wide support among Israeli Jews for their forced expulsion could all too quickly be translated into policy. 

The founding ideology of so-called "liberal Zionism" may have fashioned Israel as a Jewish apartheid state, but Netanyahu and the far-right have shown they can push that ideology even further, into the darkest realms of human behaviour.

The Palestinian minority turned out en masse to try to curb these excesses as best it could by lowering the overall proportion of votes for the Netanyahu bloc, keeping him further away from a majority, and thereby bolstering the opposition bloc.

Unusually, the Palestinian parties have taken the difficult course of agreeing from the outset that they are willing to enter talks to support the opposition bloc, most likely from outside the government, even though they know the opposition can be expected to continue advancing Israel’s genocidal conduct in Gaza.

But what the Palestinian parties are learning for the umpteenth time is that the opposition camp, however worried it is by Netanyahu’s continuing rule, fears it would be even more dangerous to allow Palestinian "citizens" even a small degree of influence in the "Jewish" state. 

Netanyahu’s Likud party may have lost votes in the election but the Israeli right is still very much in the ascendant. Of the 120 Knesset seats, 93 went to hardline religious, ultra-nationalistic or militaristic factions.

The leader of the opposition, Gadi Eisenkot, is a military general and father of the infamous Dahiya Doctrine of indiscriminately bombing and levelling the urban spaces of Israel’s neighbours - central to Israel’s strategy both in the Gaza genocide and in its onslaught on southern Lebanon. 

Eisenkot’s allies in the opposition bloc include Avigdor Lieberman, a far-right, secular politician who makes Netanyahu look like a moderate, and Naftali Bennett, who shares the religious Zionist ideology of the West Bank’s illegal settlers and was once a close ally of Netanyahu’s. 

Even the slightly more centrist Democrat party of Yair Golan, which won just eight seats, has equivocated over the creation of a Palestinian state, with Golan calling recent moves to recognise Palestine by Britain, Canada and France “a destructive move for Israel's security”. 

Whatever the eventual ruling coalition, there is no Jewish partner to be found in Israeli politics for the two-state solution that western capitals have been backing ever more frantically, supposedly as their contribution to ending Israel’s dispossession and slaughter of the Palestinian people.

More likely, parts of the opposition may already be considering joining Netanyahu inside a Jewish unity government, setting aside their personal antipathies with him, rather than engage meaningfully with the Palestinian parties. 

Eisenkot is reported to have imposed conditions for what he has called a "broad Zionist government" - conditions he knows the Palestinian parties cannot accept, including recognising Israel as a "Jewish and democratic state" and declaring Hamas a terrorist organisation.

If the opposition bloc spurns the Palestinian parties, as seems all but inevitable, Israel could be plunged into a series of general elections to try to break the deadlock between the Jewish parties - as happened between 2019 and 2022. 

Netanyahu has lost no time preparing the ground for those elections - by yet again engaging in incendiary incitement.

He has alleged, without evidence of course, that the Palestinian parties "stole" the election. 

Israel’s security services - both Israel’s secret police, the Shin Bet, and its main spy agency, the Mossad - have been marshalled to investigate Netanyahu’s preposterous claim that Palestinian "citizens" turned out in such large numbers only because the Gulf state of Qatar bribed them to vote.

A statement from his Likud party last week described the Palestinian parties’ electoral success as "a terror attack on democracy meant to lead to a foreign takeover of the Knesset [and] the Islamization of Israel”. 

Moshe Feiglin, one of Netanyahu’s allies, demanded that Israel hold fresh elections, this time with paramilitary police forces stationed at polling stations that serve Palestinian “citizens”. 

Channel 14 TV dubbed the Palestinian parties’ success the "Ballot Box Terror Affair".

As an editorial in the liberal Haaretz newspaper observed: "Arab citizens have spent four years being treated as enemies by the national security minister [Ben Gvir]. Now, Netanyahu is trying to make their most basic right - the right to vote - into a crime." 

As western media pore over the fallout from the election, it is easy to overlook the big picture. Netanyahu, wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity in starving Gaza’s population, won the largest share of the vote last week. 

He is still Israel’s most popular politician.

Any government that might emerge from the current post-election talks - even were it to be supported by the Palestinian parties - would be dominated by the extreme right. An opposition-led coalition will be no less hawkish and vehemently hostile to the Palestinians, whether those under occupation or those with Israeli “citizenship”, than a Netanyahu-led one. 

Although this was the first election since Israel launched its genocidal rampage through Gaza in late 2023, debate about the genocide was absent from the campaign trail - as was talk of the intensifying pogroms by settler terrorists on Palestinian communities in the West Bank.

These are non-issues. There is an absolute Jewish consensus that Israel should be a Middle East Sparta, terrorising and slaughtering its neighbours.

And if Netanyahu senses he may lose his grip on power, he has every incentive to step up the bombing of Gaza and restart his war of aggression on Iran. This master politician understands how well that will play with most Israeli Jews.

Meanwhile, a poll earlier this year showed that Israel’s young are more fanatically rightwing and fervently religious than ever. Only 5 percent identify as leftwing. 

Channel 12 invited into its studios a representative sample of these 18- to 21-year-olds. Out of 12, 11 answered that they were against Palestinian parties being allowed to sit in the parliament – let alone join a government.

These new voters are gradually shifting Israeli politics ever further to the far right. 

This election was stark confirmation that Britain’s Green party was decisively right to adopt a new policy last month at its conference that declared Zionism - the political ideology underpinning Israel as a Jewish state - to be racist. 

It was the warped logic of Zionism, not some need for security, that propelled Israel into levelling Gaza and killing and maiming many tens of thousands of Palestinian children. 

And it is the same racist logic that makes it impossible for Israel’s Jewish parties to reach a compromise with the Palestinian minority to oust Netanyahu.

The overwhelming majority in Israel is bent on the eradication of the Palestinians. Western politicians and media stubbornly cling to the idea that Israel’s racist, genocidal behaviour is peculiar to Netanyahu, and can be fixed by an election.

The next weeks will prove, once again, how wrong they are.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.