East Jerusalem - Israel's general election on 27 October, which will fill all 120 seats in the Knesset, is widely seen as a referendum on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But it is also a contest over the political standing of Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up about a fifth of the population, the descendants of those who stayed on their land during the 1948 Nakba.
Their votes may decide which coalition bloc eventually governs, yet nearly every major Israeli party is working to keep them out of any future government.
“In the dominant political discourse, Israelis often address Arab citizens as subjects, not as equal citizens,” Raafat al-Jawabra, a researcher on Israeli affairs, tells The New Arab.
Most Israeli parties, he argues, do not see Palestinian citizens as a natural political partner, instead using them in their campaigns as a subject for fear and mobilisation.
Ahmad al-Safadi, a Jerusalem-based analyst of Israeli politics, says the problem goes beyond the Israeli right and far-right parties and their electoral campaigns.
Israeli parties, including those on the left, treat the Palestinian vote as a way to strengthen their own electoral base rather than as the voice of a community whose crises of crime, poverty, unemployment, and discrimination need clear policy answers.
The numbers explain why their vote matters. A recent poll by local Channel 12 puts the bloc led by former army chief Gadi Eisenkot and Netanyahu's coalition level at 52 seats each, with Palestinian parties on 12.
Salim Brik, a political scientist who researches Israeli parliamentary and party politics, argues that if Palestinian turnout rises above 65 percent, it could reshape the distribution of seats, possibly to the point where a list allied with Netanyahu fails to cross the electoral threshold.
That arithmetic has shaped the campaign. Netanyahu's Likud and Bezalel Smotrich's Religious Zionism have largely dropped conventional persuasion on the economy, the cost of living, and post-war reconstruction.
They are instead campaigning on the fear of Palestinian citizens and a promise of territorial "Judaisation" in the Galilee and the Negev (Naqab).
If Palestinian participation could decide the outcome, then delegitimising Palestinian citizens and casting any government that relies on them as a security risk serve the same goal.
An election built on exclusion
The clearest expression of this logic was the attempt to remove Palestinian parties from the ballot. In September, the Central Elections Committee, made up of lawmakers, voted to disqualify the United Arab List (Ra'am) and the Joint List.
Likud and its far-right allies backed the move, accusing both parties of supporting armed struggle and rejecting Israel's status as a Jewish state.
Last week, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the decision, as it has done with similar disqualifications before. But the campaign still produced a result.
Sami Abu Shehadeh, leader of Balad, withdrew his candidacy after justices signalled they were ready to disqualify him over an article he wrote on 8 October 2023. He denied supporting Hamas or the attack.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, who led the case against him, called the withdrawal a victory. Adalah, the legal centre for Palestinian citizens, called the whole effort an attempt to delegitimise Palestinian citizens and their representatives.
According to al-Safadi, the attempts by Netanyahu and his religious right allies to push Palestinian parties out of politics have failed. He also sees a risk for the right. Continuing this rhetoric may lead Palestinian citizens to see the election as a direct confrontation with policies aimed at their political presence.
“Anti-Arab rhetoric could end up increasing turnout among people who now believe their exclusion will affect their daily lives and their place in their own towns,” he argues.
This would reverse a recent trend. Al-Safadi says the racism that followed 7 October, the war on Gaza and military operations in the West Bank depressed Palestinian participation in earlier votes. The same pressures, now accumulated, may push voters the other way.
This is where the right's strategy becomes risky. Recent polling has shown Smotrich's party struggling to clear the threshold, and he has moved further to the fringe by announcing a joint slate with Zehut (Identity) chairman Moshe Feiglin. Netanyahu has warned that a divided right in 1992 led to "the Oslo disaster", Yasser Arafat, and Hamas.
Brik's analysis shows why these warnings matter. In a race this close, a far-right list falling just below the threshold would remove a block of seats from Netanyahu's camp. Higher Palestinian turnout is one of the few factors that could cause that.
“Influencing which lists survive,” Brik says, “is one of the main electoral tools available to Arab parties”.
Al-Safadi adds in this regard that “Arab parties have also strengthened their position through joint electoral frameworks and surplus-vote agreements, which can give them more weight when seats are allocated”.
The fear campaign is therefore aimed at two audiences. To Jewish-Israeli voters, it presents Palestinian citizens as a threat to be contained. Its effect on Palestinian voters is less certain: it could discourage them from voting, or it could mobilise them.
The demographic battle for land inside Israel
The second pillar of the campaign turns long-standing state policy into a campaign pledge. Judaisation programmes, land allocation to Jewish communities, and demolitions in unrecognised villages have a long institutional history, and since 7 October they have been recast as security measures.
With Smotrich in control of settlement-related portfolios, the line between ministerial policy and campaign promise has largely disappeared. The rhetoric of settling "inside the Green Line" brings the logic of West Bank settlement into Israel proper.
The Green Line refers to the 1949 armistice demarcation line drawn after the Arab-Israeli War.
Brik places these issues at the centre of Palestinian citizens' concerns, especially in the Negev, where unrecognised Bedouin villages face problems of planning, land, and demolitions.
He points to the positions of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, tensions in Palestinian towns such as Majd al-Kurum, and rhetoric about strengthening the Jewish presence in the Galilee and taking control of land owned or used by Palestinian citizens.
These issues, he says, will be on the agenda of any government that includes Netanyahu, Smotrich, and Ben-Gvir.
Al-Safadi ranks land as “the issue gaining the most importance among Arab voters”. Many Palestinians, he says, see what is happening inside Israel, in Jerusalem and in the West Bank as part of the same struggle over land, presence and control.
He argues that the targeting of Palestinian homes and continued planning restrictions and demolitions may strengthen collective action within the community to hold on to the land.
In this framing, land stops being a matter of planning and becomes a question about the limits of citizenship.
How different is Israel's opposition?
The Israeli opposition offers no real alternative. Ra'am made history in 2021 as the first independent Palestinian party to join an Israeli governing coalition, in the government that briefly removed Netanyahu.
Al-Jawabra's reading of the current field suggests the alternative is narrow. Most Jewish-Israeli parties, he says, still reject a government that depends on Palestinian parties, and 7 October marked a turning point in rhetoric that delegitimises Palestinian political participation.
Netanyahu's camp is the most hostile, but al-Jawabra sees no fundamental difference between Avigdor Lieberman and Netanyahu, Smotrich or Ben-Gvir on alliances with Palestinian parties.
Eisenkot has said he does not want such an alliance, though his tone is softer. He has also not ruled out working with Ra'am, while denying reports that he promised it a place in government.
Al-Jawabra names only Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats, as a prominent Israeli politician openly willing to cooperate and ally with Palestinian parties.
The result is that one camp campaigns against Palestinian citizens, and the other campaigns around them.
Votes without power
Even a strong Palestinian result may not translate into power. Brik argues that Palestinian parties have so far failed to turn their parliamentary weight into real bargaining power on land, settlements, and civil rights.
With most Jewish parties refusing to rely on them as direct coalition partners, they may end up as "a partner from outside" rather than a central part of government.
Al-Safadi warns of a return to marginalisation if competing Jewish parties can build coalitions that do not need Arab support, however many seats Palestinian parties win.
That is the central contradiction of this election. Palestinian votes may be needed to block one camp from reaching 61, while the government that forms keeps Palestinian parties at a distance.
Higher Arab turnout increases the community's potential influence, but it does not ensure that Jewish parties will treat it as a coalition partner.
For Palestinian citizens, the vote is a test of their position inside Israel's political system: whether their electoral weight becomes political influence, or whether their votes remain a number in the calculations of Jewish parties.
For residents of the Galilee, the Negev, and Jerusalem, the answer will depend less on the results than on what the next government does about land, demolitions, and planning, and on whether issues of rights and equality reach its agenda or are again postponed behind security and demography.
Monjed Jadou is a Palestinian journalist and founder of Palestine News Network (PNN), an independent Palestinian media network. He has contributed to international and regional media outlets. His work focuses on Palestinian affairs, independent journalism, media freedom, and promoting the principles of editorial independence and professional journalism in Palestine
This story was produced in collaboration with Egab
Edited by Charlie Hoyle