On Tuesday, large numbers of Palestinian citizens of Israel are expected to vote in the Israeli election.
According to the last two opinion polls, voter turnout among Palestinians is expected to range between 64 and 68 percent.
The turnout, says analyst Ameer Fakhoury, could even exceed the record numbers seen in 2020, when the Joint List alliance of parties representing Palestinian citizens won 15 seats in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset.
The last time Israelis went to the polls, in 2022, just 54 percent of Palestinians in Israel voted.
Since then, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has waged genocide in Gaza and violent apartheid in the occupied West Bank, and allowed crime to run rampant in Palestinian communities in Israel.
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Clearly, Israel’s Palestinian citizens - 20 percent of the overall population - are responding to the horror that has played out in front of their eyes over the past four years.
“There is genuine hope, and seemingly well-founded expectations, that turnout could approach 70 percent, or even exceed it,” Fakhoury, an analyst at Israel’s Vanleer Institute think tank, tells Middle East Eye.
“The information I have suggests that we are already at around 69 percent. However, there is a reluctance to publicise this figure because it might create a sense of complacency.”
Haifa-born Fakhoury is an expert in the politics of Palestinians inside Israel. He heads Vanleer’s Nisan Center for a Shared Society, which is described as “an intellectual hub for Jewish–Arab Palestinian partnership in Israel”.
Speaking to Middle East Eye in a wide-ranging interview, Fakhoury delves into the reasons underpinning the surge in Palestinian interest in this election when life for Palestinians everywhere is at a nadir and Israeli society is more hostile than ever.
“I believe people instinctively understand that the Israel they once knew has changed,” he says.
No more security
According to Fakhoury, many Palestinians previously abstained from voting in Israeli elections because of ideological and socioeconomic reasons.
“Marginalised communities and oppressed social classes often lack a sense of political agency,” he notes.
“However, there was also a degree of reassurance, or perhaps a sense of security, that Israel possessed some rationality or internal restraints,” he continues.
“We believed that Israel might act against us politically, or prioritise Jewish national interests over ours, but that it would not necessarily threaten our very existence. People now understand that this space, these internal restraints, has disappeared.”
Fakhoury believes that one of those guardrails was that Israel cared about its international image. The genocide in Gaza proves that is no longer the case.
“Previously, Israel wanted to maintain at least a degree of plausible deniability. It wanted to present itself as part of the family of nations, as a state possessing some rationality, some commitment to international norms, and a measure of soft power and diplomatic legitimacy,” he says.
'Opinion polls have shown that around 80 percent of Jewish Israelis support the destruction being inflicted on Palestinians'
- Ameer Fakhoury
“That has changed. Israel has committed the crime of crimes and has not been punished. It has not merely committed genocide; it has escaped punishment for genocide. Once that happens, it becomes easier for the state to repress, persecute, delegitimise and strip people of their citizenship.”
Israel’s Palestinian community, Fakhoury says, understands this instinctively, “as any politically conscious and living society would”.
“They understand that the institutions have changed, and that the Jewish majority within Israeli society has changed. Opinion polls have shown that around 80 percent of Jewish Israelis support the destruction being inflicted on Palestinians.”
Fakhoury believes that, historically, the Palestinians inside Israel have had three major lines of defence that have shielded them from meeting the same fate as the 750,000 Palestinians expelled during the 1948 Nakba.
The first was a degree of self-restraint within Israeli society and its institutions.
“Israel's Jewish majority had adopted certain restraints, at least partly because Israel wanted to belong to the international community and the liberal international order established after the Second World War. Of course, there was always hypocrisy in this arrangement. Nevertheless, even as a hypocritical system, it existed and provided some limitations on what the state could do.”
The second line of defence was Israel's relationship with the liberal international order itself.
“That restraint has also disappeared. Look at Israel's conduct towards international institutions, the International Criminal Court, international courts, Iran and even the United States. Israel is no longer simply operating within the international system. It is actively leading a process that undermines and dismantles that system.”
The third line of defence was the Israeli Supreme Court.
“Historically, the court distinguished between Palestinians living under Israeli rule as subjects and Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship. Although the court often failed, or was complicit in failing, to protect Palestinians, there was a limited compensatory mechanism,” he says.
“Israel sought to maintain its liberal image internationally by offering some degree of protection to Palestinian citizens internally. This was always limited, but it existed. That, too, has disappeared.”
Fakhoury points to the case of Sami Abu Shehada, the head of the Balad party, who was banned from running in this year’s election because of an article he wrote three years ago contextualising the 7 October Hamas-led attack.
“There was no genuine legal debate. The proceedings were directed towards the instincts of the majority, offering the public what amounted to a litre of Palestinian blood. This is the most dangerous development: a populist court appealing to the instincts of the majority rather than applying legal principles.”
These three lines of defence, Fakhoury says, have effectively collapsed.
“Some people argue that the existence of a Palestinian middle class provides an additional safeguard. I consider that argument meaningless. We have seen how quickly Palestinians can be accused of treachery. It can happen within an hour and a half. When these protections collapse, voting for the executive authority begins to serve a very different purpose. It becomes a potential lifeline.”
Voting to protect existence
Ordinarily, minority participation in elections expresses confidence in the democratic system.
Fakhoury believes that, for perhaps the first time, Palestinian electoral participation in Israel expresses the opposite: “a lack of confidence in state institutions and an attempt to cling to the political forces or government arrangements that might offer some protection”.
“That is the background to the current rise in turnout.”
Palestinians are not going to the polls simply seeking to repeal the Nation-State Law that enshrined Jewish supremacy over Palestinian citizens, nor to secure additional budgets or obtain further rights.
“We are voting to prevent displacement and protect the most basic conditions of our existence. Even the issue of organised crime, which Arab Knesset members discuss in terms of security and a safety net, concerns rights that should be taken for granted in any ordinary, reasonably functioning state.”
Fakhoury and colleagues at the University of Haifa are currently conducting research examining three principal motivations behind Palestinian political participation in Israeli elections.
'A citizen, in the substantive sense, should not have to engage in politics simply to avoid death. This is not how citizenship is supposed to function'
- Ameer Fakhoury
The first is solidarity with the Palestinian people. The second is self-preservation: the desire to protect one's immediate community and secure one's own interests.
The third is simply survival.
“Today, survival has become the dominant motivation. We are conducting a survey involving approximately 1,500 Palestinians inside Israel, and I am still analysing the findings. What is becoming clear is that when the survival instinct enters the political equation, it overwhelms other motivations,” Fakhoury says.
“You cannot meaningfully place existential survival alongside ordinary civic demands as though they were equivalent considerations. When your existence is at stake, everything else becomes secondary. You cannot say that you are voting to protect your existence and, at the same time, treat municipal services or ordinary civil rights as equally important motivations,” he continues.
“The moment your existence becomes the central concern, the very meaning of citizenship changes. A citizen, in the substantive sense, should not have to engage in politics simply to avoid death. This is not how citizenship is supposed to function. When survival becomes the dominant motivation, the boundaries of ordinary political participation collapse. The symbolic and substantive meaning of citizenship is fundamentally undermined.”
Three Israeli political parties are running on platforms that openly support the deportation, displacement and expulsion of Palestinians - even those with Israeli citizenship.
Bezalel Smotrich, finance minister and head of the Religious Zionism party, has made “Judaising” the Galilee and Negev regions of Israel, where many Palestinians live, a key tenant of his election campaign.
“If you are lying awake at night fearing an attack, your primary concerns are protecting your children, securing food and ensuring that nobody will harm your family. You cannot meaningfully participate in political life under those conditions,” Fakhoury says.
“There is no genuine space for politics.”
Palestinians, he notes, are often the overwhelmingly weaker party, subjected to violence rather than possessing the means to defend themselves.
“This is why the recognition that our existence is threatened is so politically significant. When Palestinians inside Israel say they are voting to prevent what happened in Gaza or the West Bank from happening to them, consider what that actually means,” he says.
“They are saying they want to prevent ethnic cleansing or genocide. And from whom? From their own state. From the state of which they are supposedly citizens.”
Essentially, Fakhoury says, such a dynamic means that citizenship has lost its substantive meaning.
A Palestinian may possess citizenship legally, but they do not have it in any meaningful sense if there is genuine fear that their own state might turn against them and destroy them.
The rise of Mansour Abbas
For Fakhoury, it is in this broader context that the rise of Mansour Abbas, head of the Raam party, can be understood.
Raam is one of the four major parties traditionally representing Palestinian citizens, and has a conservative Islamic background.
It has participated as part of the Joint List in several elections, but more recently split from that alliance and in 2021 even entered the governing coalition when Netanyahu was briefly ousted from power.
Fakhoury notes that in the 1990s, there was concern that Palestinian citizens of Israel would assume an Israeli-Arab identity that decoupled them from the broader Palestinian people and cause.
Abbas’ electoral and political success, he says, suggests that this has now happened to some extent.
“A major division has emerged within Palestinian society, particularly in how Palestinians politically identify and categorise themselves. To understand its significance, we need to examine the exceptional position of Palestinians inside Israel,” he says.
“We are a trapped minority, a post-partition minority, although the partition itself was never fully realised. Typically, such minorities look to their parent nation for protection and assistance. But Palestinians inside Israel represent an exceptional historical case. Rather than simply seeking rescue from the wider Palestinian people, we have developed a political responsibility towards rescuing and supporting that wider nation. This is one of our most distinctive characteristics.”
Fakhoury asks us to imagine what would happen if Palestinians in Israel decided to ignore the plight of those in the West Bank and Gaza, and to concentrate on their own issues and improving their own situation.
“If we adopted that approach, we could participate much more freely in Israeli politics. We could negotiate with Netanyahu, Eisenkot or almost anyone else. Political parties would compete for our support,” he says.
“But we cannot do that. Our Palestinian national minority possesses a remarkably high moral threshold. Even if someone adopted the most extreme position and said, 'I have nothing to do with the West Bank or Gaza. I only want to look after myself and obtain whatever benefits I can,' that would fundamentally contradict the political and moral position we have maintained. We cannot simply abandon our people. That is what distinguishes us.”
Mansour Abbas has challenged this principle, Fakhoury says.
'We have consistently insisted that we are an inseparable part of a larger Palestinian people, politically, morally and through our shared circumstances and destiny'
- Ameer Fakhoury
“He has not necessarily done so by declaring that he is no longer part of the Palestinian people. Instead, his argument is effectively that Palestinians inside Israel are too weak to help the wider Palestinian nation. He suggests that our situation is so difficult that we must dilute, suspend or even abandon that responsibility in order to protect ourselves.”
But this argument, Fakhoury argues, contains a deeper assumption: that the capacity to assist the wider Palestinian people depends on the meaningfulness of Israeli citizenship.
“There is a dual process taking place. On the one hand, our citizenship is being stripped of meaning. On the other, our political responsibility towards the wider Palestinian people is being undermined. The message becomes: do not imagine that you can rescue your people; save yourselves first,” he says.
“This process operates on two levels simultaneously. Abbas represents a political expression of this condition. His position is effectively: my citizenship has been emptied of substance, and because of that, I cannot protect anyone else. I can barely protect myself. In my view, this amounts to submitting to the political conditions imposed upon us.”
Crime as a way to break society
One of the most pressing issues for Israel’s Palestinian community is organised crime.
Israeli authorities have allowed it to spiral out of control, with youths killed in Palestinian towns and villages routinely and little to no law enforcement or justice.
Fakoury suggests organised crime within Palestinian society inside Israel should not be understood merely as a criminal phenomenon, but rather as a form of proxy governance, an alternative system of control operating alongside the central state.
“This is not simply about individual crimes,” he says. “It is a broader mechanism through which Palestinian society is governed and weakened. Allowing organised crime to proliferate serves more than one purpose. It does not merely push us towards dependence on the authorities. It also undermines our belief that we possess a political responsibility, and the capacity, to contribute to the survival of the wider Palestinian people.”
Abbas, Fakhoury says, has internalised this reality and transformed it into a political programme.
“The issue is therefore not simply whether he has emotionally, politically or historically abandoned the Palestinian people. It is that he has abandoned the theory of rescue: the political principle that Palestinians inside Israel have a responsibility towards the wider Palestinian nation,” he says.
“This principle is central to our collective political identity. Had we abandoned Gaza and the West Bank and concentrated exclusively on our own interests, we could have participated in Israeli politics with far greater freedom. The competing Israeli political blocs would have sought our support. But we have consistently insisted that we are an inseparable part of a larger Palestinian people, politically, morally and through our shared circumstances and destiny.”
Coalition building
Fakhoury believes this election is also distinctive because of the positions adopted by Israeli political parties towards Arab participation in government.
Historically, parties frequently campaigned on promises not to govern with Arab parties. This time, the situation is more complicated.
Almost all the major parties, with the exception of the centre-left Democrats, have maintained their stance that the Palestinian parties will be boycotted in coalition talks.
However, some politicians have left room for possible arrangements involving Mansour Abbas.
“The Palestinian vote could play a decisive role, particularly if Arab parties secure around 15 seats,” Fakhoury says.
“Such a result could deprive the Israeli right of the parliamentary numbers needed to form a government. Our greatest influence would therefore lie in preventing the continuation of what we describe as the colonial, genocidal right-wing government.”
There is nonetheless a severe discrepancy between the Palestinian community’s ability to prevent a hard-right government from forming and its ability to establish an alternative one.
Fakhoury sees three possible scenarios after polls close and coalition-building negotiations between the parties begin.
The first is a national unity government that includes Netanyhau and his chief rival, former military leader Gabi Eisenkott.
“At present, this appears to have the strongest prospects, particularly because of American pressure for an arrangement involving Eisenkot and Netanyahu. Nevertheless, even though it is the most likely of the three scenarios, its overall prospects remain limited.
The second possibility is a minority government.
“This would be a government that could command sufficient parliamentary support to survive without possessing an outright majority of its own. In such a scenario, Arab parties might abstain rather than provide an explicit parliamentary safety net.”
The third possibility, which could prove more likely than many expect, involves Mansour Abbas.
“Consider Eisenkot's language carefully. He has not simply said that Abbas cannot participate in government. He has said that the government would consist only of Zionist parties. That distinction is important. It leaves open the possibility that Abbas's political positions could be interpreted as sufficiently compatible with Zionism to allow some form of cooperation.”
Abbas has expressed acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state, and Jewish Israeli MP Yoav Segalovitz has swapped the centrist Together slate for Raam, running second on the party’s electoral list.
“From Eisenkot's perspective, this could be interpreted as acceptance of a minimum component of the Zionist political project. When Eisenkot says that only Zionist parties will participate in government, he may be deliberately leaving room to present Abbas as someone who has accepted that project, at least in its most basic formulation,” Fakhoury says.
“In my assessment, Abbas's statements about accepting the Jewish character of the state were not accidental. They may form part of an ongoing political exchange between the two sides, preparing the ground for possible arrangements after the election.”
The impact of Ben Gvir and Smotrich
It is no surprise that figures such as Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, Jewish supremacists who repeatedly make genocidal statements and work towards the expulsion and subjugation of Palestinians, have spurred the Palestinian vote.
“In that sense, they have done more to mobilise Palestinian voters than any conventional election campaign could have achieved,” Fakhoury notes.
“We have government ministers whose political activity centres on humiliating us, degrading our citizenship and attacking our very existence. These politicians have sought to capitalise politically on degrading Palestinians and stripping their citizenship of its fundamental meaning. That is why I believe they deserve much of the credit for the increased determination to vote.”
The task for the Palestinian community, Fakhoury says, is to organise effectively on election day. “I believe turnout could reach 72 percent or 73 percent. God willing, perhaps even higher. Election day may bring many surprises.”
But there is a deeper political challenge here.
'Turnout could reach 72 percent or 73 percent. God willing, perhaps even higher. Election day may bring many surprises'
- Ameer Fakhoury
The Palestinian community is giving the Joint List and Raam political oxygen and another opportunity to survive and remain relevant.
If they fail, and fail to represent or tackle the underlying conditions of Palestinian politics in Israel, which Fakhoury notes have changed fundamentally since the 1993 Oslo Accords, they will squander a huge opportunity and may be punished for it.
“The entire environment in which they developed their political language, vocabulary, alliances and strategies has changed almost completely. If they continue to operate using the same assumptions, without recognising this transformation, they will fail,” he says.
“The greatest danger does not necessarily lie in the immediate election result. It lies in what comes afterwards.”
The next Israeli government is unlikely to be stable. If, as with other elections over the past decade, there is no clear outcome, another round of polls will take place. These could be even more difficult and dangerous for the Palestinian community, Fakhoury warns.
“This is why our political work must begin immediately after the election. We cannot simply congratulate ourselves for preventing the continuation of a genocidal government.”
Fakhoury says he has contemplated some worst-case post-election scenarios, “and some of them are deeply alarming”.
“One involves Mansour Abbas continuing to provide political support to a government that represses his own people. That is entirely possible. Once he enters such an arrangement, he may find it extremely difficult to withdraw his support or bring down the government. This could produce a major rupture within Palestinian society.”
Another scenario involves the Arab parties providing a parliamentary safety net to an Israeli government, only to find themselves implicated in policies that become increasingly indefensible.
“We could reach a deeply shameful position. But withdrawing that safety net would create another problem. Our entire political calculation has been based on the principle of preventing the greater evil.
"We have told our people that political participation allows us to distinguish between a bad outcome and a worse one. But what happens if that distinction collapses? What do we tell our people then?”
Another factor is that Israel is likely entering a period of increasing international isolation. Such isolation could produce a siege mentality. And a siege mentality could generate greater hatred and greater violence directed against Palestinians.
In recent days, Netanyahu has been speaking about preparing for an increasingly self-reliant, isolated economy. He has suggested an end to US support for Israel is on the horizon and that the country may be placed under international sanctions.
“Israel is preparing for a different political and economic era. We are witnessing its transformation into what might be described as a pariah state, increasingly organised around a Spartan model,” Fakhoury says, referring to a hawkish, isolationist mentality.
“The competing schools of thought and political traditions that once existed are being overtaken by a new consensus. We are all becoming Sparta. And that is the reality we must prepare for.”
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