During the October 27 parliamentary elections in Israel, Palestinian citizens — who make up about 22% of the country’s population — turned out in record numbers. They, and a small number of other Israelis, voted overwhelmingly for two Arab parties — the Joint List and the United Arab List — which nearly doubled their seats in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, from 10 to 19.
This was the most important outcome of the Israeli elections.
“Tuesday’s Arab voter turnout was unprecedented,” Israeli Palestinian journalist Jack Khoury noted in a news analysis in the October 28 Haaretz, an Israeli daily.
“Anyone who traveled through Arab towns and villages on Tuesday witnessed a rare vision: elderly people, people in wheelchairs and entire families standing in line, waiting to cast their ballots,” Khoury continued.
“Arab citizens are not giving up their right to influence the political process, even as they know how many in Israel would prefer to see them as second-class citizens or accept them as partners only so long as they do not demand genuine partnership,” Khoury emphasized.
Khoury said the vote showed that Palestinians in Israel want change — an end to racist discrimination and equal rights. They also have other expectations: “The Gaza war needs to end, and reconstruction needs to begin. In the West Bank, they expect a halt in Israeli settler violence and the takeover of land,” Khoury noted. “These are not secondary demands; they are the expectations of citizens seeking security, equality and a say in their future.”
“Arab citizens want to be a part of Israel,” concluded the lead editorial in the October 30 Haaretz. “After four years of persecution by the government and (Itamar) Ben-Gvir (Israel’s ultra-rightist national security minister), which turned a blind eye to hundreds of murders and other crimes, carried out home demolitions, and pursued deliberate state abandonment, Arab citizens voted not only out of protest, but also out of a desire to change the face of the country. Arab citizens have spent four years being treated as enemies by the national security minister. Now, Netanyahu is trying to make their most basic right — the right to vote — into a crime. This cannot be allowed.”
The Haaretz editors were referring to the campaign Netanyahu launched, after his bloc lost its previous Knesset majority, to declare that Palestinians “stole the election” because so many of them turned out to vote.
This is the familiar playbook of a would-be autocrat.
Netanyahu has a history using such threats to get his way. On election day during Israel’s parliamentary vote on March 17, 2015, Netanyahu warned his supporters through a Facebook video that “right-wing rule is in danger” because “Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves.”
It is also what Trump did in 2020 after losing that election, and what his administration tried to orchestrate leading up to the 2026 US midterms in which the GOP was soundly trounced.
On October 29 Standing Together sent an email message to its supporters making similar points. The group is one of the most prominent organizations in Israel made up of Jews, Palestinians, and others that have campaigned for equal rights of all Israeli citizens and for an end to Israel’s war in Gaza and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.
“The far right is trying to delegitimize the huge turnout of Arab-Palestinian voters and the possibility of political partnership with their representatives,” Standing Together said.
“Last night (October 28) we were already in the streets calling for a Jewish-Palestinian government, and this Saturday night (October 31) we’re organizing major protests across the country,” Standing Together continued.
“We’re building public pressure to call on the politicians of the Jewish opposition parties to partner with the Arab parties and form a coalition for change. This is just the start. We’re launching a major pressure campaign in the streets and online, and we need you with us.”
Rebuke of Palestinian Authority and Hamas
The record turnout by Palestinians in Israel and their vote for the two Arab parties was also a rebuke of the discredited strategy of the main political organizations in the Palestinian national movement.
The Fatah-led Palestinian Authority has largely functioned as Israel’s police in the West Bank.
Hamas and its allies, for decades, have substituted armed actions for any strategy of mass political struggle by the Palestinian people. That is the course that led to the October 7, 2023, “Al Aqsa Flood” attack. That action, which did not distinguish between military and civilian targets, provided a pretext for the genocidal Israeli response that followed. The result has been the biggest setback for Palestinians in Gaza since the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe), which resulted in Israel’s creation as a colonial settler state based on the expulsion and dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
World-Outlook recently published an article by Lebanese socialist Gilbert Achcar that points to a different course. The perspective for Palestinian liberation “should necessarily involve a strategy of popular struggle aimed at dividing Israeli society and changing Israeli politics,” he argued. “Were about two-fifths of Jewish Israelis to be convinced of the need to end the occupation of the 1967 territories and accept Palestinian rights, this would be enough to provoke a major rupture of the Zionist consensus.”
This perspective is similar to that outlined by Palestinian American scholar Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine and other books, and by Edward Said, another Palestinian leader, in his 1999 essay on The One-State Solution.
“Among many Palestinians, especially young Palestinians, there is a resistance to what they call ‘normalization,’” Khalidi explained in a November 2024 interview. “And that, to some extent, blinds some people to the need to find allies on the other side. In the end, you’re not going to win without that happening. It’s harder than any other liberation struggle, because it’s not a colonial project in which people can go home. There is no home.
“They (the Jews) have been in Israel for three or four generations. They’re not going anywhere. It’s not like you appeal to the French and they bring their colons home. It’s more like Ireland and South Africa, where you have to come to terms with what you see as a separate population, but which has now become enraciné, rooted, and which has developed a collective identity.”
In another 2024 interview, the Palestinian American leader added: “There’s no sense of how Palestinians want to live in the future and relate to the Israelis in Palestine in the future. Nor is there a sense of how they intend to get there. Those are strategic questions that are not being asked or answered by the people who currently claim to lead the Palestinian national movement, whether in Hamas or in what is laughably called the Palestinian Authority — an institution with no sovereignty, no authority, and no legitimacy among its own people,” Khalidi explained.
“I don’t think those leaderships have answers to the questions that I’ve just asked, so the Palestinians are rudderless as a people in terms of political leadership.”
Achieving equal rights for all citizens
The Israeli elections revealed that at least a quarter of the country is asking such questions and seeking Jewish-Palestinian alliances to push for major change: democracy with equal rights for all Israeli citizens, instead of a state based on Jewish supremacy and apartheid control of the occupied territories with the ultimate goal of expelling Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza altogether.
How could that change be achieved?
As Khalidi suggested, any viable perspective for Palestinian national liberation today needs to be connected to a programmatic clarity.
“Ending Israeli control over Palestinians and forging a society in which everyone is free and equal between the river and the sea is in the interest of both Palestinians and Jewish Israelis,” read a January 30, 2024, statement by the Palestinian members of Standing Together’s national leadership — pointing to some of the key tenets of such programmatic clarity. “Our long-term goal is to create a new majority in Israeli society, composed of both Palestinian and Jewish citizens, who are united in the fight to end the occupation and advance equality and justice, and ultimately, liberation — a sustainable and just peace.”
Like the non-racialism of the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, such a program would leave no doubt about the ultimate goal of the struggle.
The lessons about the relationship between political program, strategy, and tactics from the decades-long fight to overthrow apartheid in South Africa are deeply relevant to Palestinian aspirations for equality and national self-determination today. Only with a program such as the one the ANC fought for, and a strategy that mobilizes the masses of the people themselves to fight for their own liberation, can the oppressed hope to wage effective resistance.
Even if Gadi Eisenkot, the leader of Israel’s main opposition bloc, is able to form a government — for which he will need the support of the Israeli Arab parties — that coalition will likely be unstable and its leaders will undoubtedly demand compromises from Israeli Palestinians and their parties and the watering down of their demands.
As the anti-apartheid struggle showed, only a mass, popular movement with a clear strategy can wage an effective fight for equal rights of all Israeli citizens and self-determination for Palestinians in the occupied territories — whatever form the latter may end up taking.
“Victory in the national liberation struggle,” ANC leader Nelson Mandela explained, “is dependent upon the active and conscious participation of the masses of the oppressed people, determining their own destiny through struggle.”
The facts described in the materials quoted above show that the prospects for such a mass popular movement for equal rights in Israel are not unrealistic, even if the authors seem focused on how to shape the immediate electoral landscape.
For these reasons we publish below for the information of our readers the Haaretz editorial and Khoury’s news analysis, as well as Standing Together’s message, which were referenced above. The headlines, subheadings, and photos that follow are from the originals.
— World-Outlook editors
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Netanyahu’s Scare Campaign Against Arab Voters Ended up Pushing Them to the Polls
Tuesday’s defining image was the record-breaking number of Arab Israelis waiting to cast their ballots, in the face of the right-wing scare campaigns trying to deter them — refusing to give up their right to influence the political process
By Jack Khoury
News Analysis, Haaretz, October 28, 2026
Regardless of the final results, one thing is already clear: Tuesday’s Arab voter turnout was unprecedented.
Ballots are still being counted, and the distribution of Knesset seats could still change, but one thing is certain about this Election Day: the right’s campaigns, aimed at deterring voters, failed to keep them away. If anything, they had the exact opposite effect.
Throughout the day, Benjamin Netanyahu’s warnings about “Arabs flocking to the polls,” Itamar Ben-Gvir’s visit to Kafr Qassem and the presence of right-wing activists at polling stations, some of them armed, did not drive Arab citizens back into their homes. Instead, they just made the act of voting a form of retaliation.
Anyone who traveled through Arab towns and villages on Tuesday witnessed a rare vision: elderly people, people in wheelchairs and entire families standing in line, waiting to cast their ballots.
At times, it felt more like a local election, where turnout in Arab communities is generally high. That was the defining image of the day, and it carried a clear message: Arab citizens are not giving up their right to influence the political process, even as they know how many in Israel would prefer to see them as second-class citizens, or accept them as partners only so long as they do not demand genuine partnership.
This vote should not be interpreted as a detailed endorsement of any one party’s platform. First and foremost, it is an expression of confidence in Arab representatives and a reflection of the desire to keep the Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir government out of power.
Arab voters cast their ballots mainly for the two Arab parties, the Joint List and the United Arab List, and the balance of power between the two will become clear only after the votes are counted. Ten or 11 seats for the Joint List would be a significant achievement; seven or eight for the United Arab List would be an unprecedented result for the party. Even if UAL falls short of its target of eight seats, it has already demonstrated its strength. In any case, the question of which party emerges as the largest in Arab society is not the most crucial matter.
This round, what matters is what the Jewish coalition parties seeking to replace the government will do with these votes.
Arab voters also took to the polls to say: enough racism, enough fascism, enough of a government that deepens their suffocation.
Personal security has eroded amid violence and crime; the threat of home demolitions has become part of daily life; job security can no longer be taken for granted; and the status of Arab citizens and their right to equality are under repeated attack.
The vote was not a commitment by every voter to a single political platform, nor was it a decision on the fundamental questions of the conflict. It was a desperate attempt to avert immediate danger and open the door to tangible change that people could sense in their everyday lives: fighting crime, protecting communities, securing rights in housing and employment, and creating the possibility of once again discussing a sensible political process.
This is where the test for the change bloc begins. Will it recognize the legitimacy of Arab representatives and give their voters a political voice, to the point of including the United Arab List in the government, or will it back down when the moment of truth arrives, even after Arab citizens turned out in large numbers at the polls?
The options are clear: a government formed with the support of United Arab List and the Joint List, or a return to the political deadlock that would leave Netanyahu at the head of a caretaker government and could lead Israel to another election.
Another round of elections won’t guarantee Arab voters would repeat Tuesday’s achievement. Those who have turned out in the past, given the Joint List 15 Knesset seats and then watched Benny Gantz turn his back on it, may not offer the same support again if the change bloc ignores the results or settles for relying on outside support. Arab voters may see this as further proof that their votes are needed to win, but unwelcome when it comes to sharing power and influence.
The cost of such a retreat would not be measured only by the next government’s composition. It would be measured in trust. Arab citizens do not expect full equality overnight, nor do they delude themselves about the obstacles and the forces that will oppose change. But they expect to be engaged in dialogue, to have their hardships acknowledged and not to have their legitimacy questioned every time they seek to become partners. They expect protection against a wave of racism, relief from the housing crisis, improved personal security and concrete action against crime.
They also have clear expectations: the Gaza war needs to end, and reconstruction needs to begin. In the West Bank, they expect a halt in Israeli settler violence and the takeover of land.
These are not secondary demands; they are the expectations of citizens seeking security, equality and a say in their future.
On Election Day, Arab citizens stepped onto the national playing field and threw down a broad challenge to the forces promising a more sane and legitimate state.
Now it is their turn to prove that these words are more than a slogan. They will have to stand up to Netanyahu’s poison machine, which is already at work to delegitimize any prospect of partnership with Arab parties, and decide whether they are willing to pay the political price of such a move.
Arab citizens have made their voices heard. If the change bloc chooses to ignore them, it will not be able to claim it was never given a chance. It will have made a choice — and it will bear responsibility for the consequences.
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Netanyahu Is Making Arab Israelis’ Right to Vote a Crime
After four years of persecution, home demolitions and state abandonment, Arab citizens went to the polls to demand change. Now Netanyahu is seeking to discredit their vote and block a government reliant on Arab parties
02:05 PM • October 30, 2026, IST
On Thursday (October 29) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayhu’s plan to undermine the legitimacy of the election results by vilifying Israel’s Arab citizens reached its culmination.
He laid the groundwork for the plan on the eve of the election, when the prime minister and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir held a baffling meeting with police chief Danny Levy to discuss election integrity on Sunday (October 25). This was despite an explicit order barring such a meeting from Justice Noam Sohlberg, the Central Elections Committee chairman.
That meeting was then followed by a racist campaign targeting Arab citizens on Election Day: The public was bombarded with dozens of phone calls and text messages demanding a redo of the election, a salvo that has continued into Thursday.
And then, an unexpected player entered the fray. Sohlberg sent a rare letter to Shin Bet security service chief David Zini, instructing him to investigate suspicions of what he described as election bribery and foreign interference by Qatar.
Zini wasted no time amplifying the allegations, although it remains unclear what they are based on or whether they are even admissible. That was enough, however, for Netanyahu’s “poison machine” — Channel 14 — to launch special coverage devoted entirely to racism against Arab citizens. Its segment was called “Ballot Box Terrorism.”
Netanyahu’s coalition of parties, which lost 11 seats and its majority, are seeking to undermine the protest vote cast by Israel’s Arab citizens. They are doing so deliberately, even though the details of their allegations or the extent of any alleged funds transferred by Qatar remain entirely unclear, if they are even true at all.
But even if heaven itself were to declare the allegations baseless, the damage has already been done. Netanyahu’s office was used by Qatari influence agents, and he still relies on close advisor Yonatan Urich, who is under investigation for receiving money from Qatar. Yet this week, the prime minister has suddenly remembered that accepting funds from the state of Qatar, which he has defended as “complex,” is wrong.
Netanyahu’s real objective is painfully obvious: to prevent the formation of a minority government reliant on Arab parties, and, even more immediately, to block the ouster of Knesset Speaker and Likud MK Amir Ohana.
Through his loyal mouthpieces, Netanyahu is trying to delegitimize Israel’s Arab community for making its voice heard at the ballot box. In doing so, the prime minister is replacing Ben-Gvir as Kahane’s ideological heir. He’s stoking hatred towards the 22 percent of the country’s citizens who, as things currently stand, will hold 19 seats in the next Knesset.
Those 19 seats sent an unequivocal message: Arab citizens want to be a part of Israel. After four years of persecution by the government and Ben-Gvir, which turned a blind eye to hundreds of murders and other crimes, carried out home demolitions, and pursued deliberate state abandonment, Arab citizens voted not only out of protest, but also out of a desire to change the face of the country. Arab citizens have spent four years being treated as enemies by the national security minister. Now, Netanyahu is trying to make their most basic right — the right to vote — into a crime. This cannot be allowed.
The above article is Haaretz’s lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel.
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We need a Jewish-Palestinian government now! You can help us get there.
Standing Together email message
October 29, 2026
Friend, the Israeli election results are clear: the majority of citizens voted against this horrible government, giving the opposition 67 mandates. The Netanyahu–Smotrich–Ben Gvir coalition received only 53 mandates, a huge drop from its current 68.
But our victory is in danger, because the far right is trying to delegitimize the huge turnout of Arab-Palestinian voters and the possibility of political partnership with their representatives. That’s why we’re writing to you today: we need your help to mobilize the public and push back.
Last night we were already in the streets calling for a Jewish-Palestinian government, and this Saturday night we’re organizing major protests across the country. Can you support our public campaign?
Support the Campaign for a Jewish-Palestinian Government
Over the past few months, we at Standing Together have organized a massive Get-Out-the-Vote campaign, which played a role in the historic turnout of Palestinian citizens. The Arab parties received 19 seats, nearly double their current 10. Now our role is to urgently build public pressure to translate the Jewish-Palestinian majority into a new Jewish-Palestinian government. It’s what the public wants, and it’s what we all deserve.
We’re building public pressure to call on the politicians of the Jewish opposition parties to partner with the Arab parties and form a coalition for change. This is just the start. We’re launching a major pressure campaign in the streets and online, and we need you with us. Will you support us by donating today?
Donate to Build Pressure for a Jewish-Palestinian Government
The far right is trying to steal this election by controlling the narrative and delegitimizing the Palestinian vote. We can’t let them!
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Categories: Palestine/Israel
The rise of electoral engagement by Palestinians in Israel is a welcome event in the polticial process toward the liberation of Palestine from Israeli Apartheid. It signals both the advance of and the need for a veritable mass movement toward Palestinian self-determination. I also believe that the lesson of South Africa and the Black struggle against Apartheid is indeed instructive toward engaging Palestinians in challenging the right wing of Israeli society in conducting its genocide of Palestinian people in occupied territories it intends to assimilate into its colonial settler state if not now but eventually.
However, I find this analysis inaccurate and presumptuous in its acceptance of the fact of Israeli generational colonialism on stolen land and making that established colonialism as a “fact” that the world and Palestinians need to accept if they are to find a road to their liberation. Israel has carved out its existence in the skin and blood of Palestinian land. It’s been created by European and US imperial interests with its intent to place a brake on Arab working class unity in a region it covets to control if not own for its aggrandizement and colonial power over the people of the Middle East along with its capitalist and monarchical partners in neighboring countries. The more apt comparison is the colonial project that resulted in creating the United States through its estermination of the vast majority of Indian people as it carved out this nation, much like Spain, France, England and other European projects from which “America” took over.
In South Africa, White apartheid sought to enslave Black Africans and keep them subservient to White rule. The right wing government that rules Israel is more intent in clearing Palestinians from the land much like U.S. policy that gave rise to the creation of this nation.
I do understand how revolutionaries like Edward Said and Khalidi and others argue for the need for a true mass movement that can galvanize Palestinian people toward effective challenge to Israeli genocide. The existence of ultra-reactonary forces like Hamas and the moribund slavishness of the Palestinian Authority are a direct result of the current inability of Palestinians to struggle with only desperaton and acquiescence. The rise of a mass independent political movement, an organized “intifada” if you will, is indeed necessary, in my view. However, your analysis seems tinged with an acceptance of an Israeli state that Palestinans, as a minority (in their own land!) ought to use for . . .I’m not sure what, a more democratic Israel that becomes more benevolent to its occupied territories? That somehow Palestinians can find “perstroika’ and “glasnost” in the context of the reality of Israel’s existence. You all seem to be arguiing (as do some Palestinian scholars, to be sure) that “Israel exists” it’s been around long enough to count that they are now part of the land, so, therefore, we (Palestinians) need to accept this reality and find a way to “live and let live”?!
What of all the Palestinians who are not citizens of Israel? Would they then become incorporated into Israel piecemeal once sufficient numbers of them have been eradicated to ensure they are permanent minority in what was their land?
As I have said, the arising of a politcally organized Palestinian minority in the formal state of Israel (that clearly seeks to expand into its occupied territories) is a welcome event. It raises these very important questions of intent; either to consolidate the colonial settler state or to build upon it as a democratic and secular Palestine in which European-descended Israelis become on ethnnicity among many, the potential for uniting Arab peoples throughout the region both against Apartheid settler colonialism and their own capitalist and feudal overlords. I believe the latter is the goal of international working class revolutionaries and not “acceptance of a ‘hard’ reality” of the “normalized” existence of the present Israeli state.
You speak of younger generational resistance to “normalization” of extremism as a form “both sides” being wrong. But your arguement seems aimed at normalizing the existence of European theft of Palestine as a fact that Palestinians may need to accept. The trouble with that view lies precisely in the intransigence of much of Israeli society and certainly in the government that it places in power. Right wing extremism toward Palestine is truly a fact among a majority of Israeli European society and it is reflected in who they place in political power. Seeking rapprochement with that mentality as a way to engender solidarity among the working masses of European Israelis may be an effective, and desirable, strategy. But ultimately the existence of their thievery and colonialism that allows them to be there in the first place will still be a political threshold that must be breached. I believe we disarm Palestinians by believing they can win such a breach as a minority electorate on their own land and separate from their larger society, the majority population oppresed by colonial settler state. The struggle of American Indans reads very much like this story and, to be sure, American Indian people have survived and persevered to exist more strongly in U.S. and American society throughout this continents. But such “progress” has occured in context of our broad extermination historically. I am Chicano, by which I am Indian and European, a product of that extermination and rape of early peoples who existed here before the coming of European colonial settlers. I could never wish such political “progress” upon Palestinian people when their viability as a people and country is still possible.
I believe the world has had quite enought of “social transformation and civil progress” through enslavement, colonization and genocidal extermination. I will not accept anything but the real self-determination of Palestine by Palestinian people against their European oppressors. Self-determination requires not acquiescence or acceptance but democracy, independence of oppressive thought and action, and human solidarity.
I encourage you all to think this through.
Manuel Barrera, Chicano