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ISRAEL’S OPPOSITION IS PLOTTING A RETURN TO POWER. BUT IT REMAINS
ITS OWN WORST ENEMY  
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Joshua Leifer
September 15, 2025
+972 Magazine
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_ Despite a strong showing in the polls, Israel’s center-left camp
is still in denial about its only trump card: joining forces with
Palestinian-led parties. _

Democrats head Yair Golan, National Unity head Benny Gantz, Yesh Atid
head Yair Lapid, and Yisrael Beyteinu party Avigdor Liberman hold a
joint press conference at the Knesset in Jerusalem, November 6, 2024.,
Yonatan Sindel/Flash90

 

In late May, the Berl Katznelson Center, a center-left Israeli think
tank and longtime clearinghouse for social-democratic policy, held its
annual conference at the Expo center in north Tel Aviv. The theme for
this year’s conclave, “Democratic Israel Will Win,” riffed on
the bellicose signs that have blanketed the country since October 7:
“Together We Will Win.”

The idea behind the conference slogan, and at the core of its
programming, was that the fight for a hostage deal
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ceasefire in Gaza on one hand, and the struggle against the
right-wing government’s assault
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the last remaining vestiges of procedural democracy in Israel on the
other, are one and the same.  

The backdrop could hardly have been darker: two months earlier, Israel
had shattered the ceasefire
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Gaza and recommenced its devastating aerial bombardment and ground
invasion of the already devastated territory. Yet inside the
conference, the atmosphere was strangely optimistic. 

Buoyed by promising poll numbers
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activists and journalists brushed shoulders with academics and
politicians, podcasters, and civil society organizers. Yair Golan,
chair of the newly re-formed Democrats, took the podium to a standing
ovation, as the audience hailed him as the new leader of a center-left
camp that had regained its confidence. Mansour Abbas
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United Arab List (Ra’am), presented a plan for regional peace that
was met with thunderous applause, while the underwhelming former army
chief Benny Gantz
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to strive for a “national unity government” and was nearly booed
off stage. 

“The center left,” one veteran progressive activist told me a few
days later, “is in a kind of euphoria. They’ve practically started
dividing up cabinet positions among themselves.”

Democrats leader Yair Golan and MK Naama Lazimi attend a party rally
in the northern Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona, May 22, 2025. (Ayal
Marglin/Flash90)

Even Israel’s 12-day war against Iran in June, widely viewed inside
the country as a military triumph
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has not buoyed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his increasingly
unpopular coalition. The political divisions that define Israel’s
political terrain are so calcified, the public’s attention span so
short, that the war barely left a dent in opinion polls.

The latest polls consistently show that Netanyahu and his far-right
and ultra-Orthodox coalition partners will struggle to form a majority
come the next election, which is currently scheduled for October 2026.
At the same time, the opposition’s edge is slim; only in some polls
does it appear large enough to form a majority of its own without
relying on at least one of the Palestinian-led parties — something
that no leader of the Zionist opposition parties, save for the
Democrats’ Golan, has professed willingness to do. 

In July, the two ultra-Orthodox parties, Shas and United Torah
Judaism, quit the government over the ongoing dispute about the
military draft exemption
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to yeshiva students, depriving Netanyahu’s coalition of its Knesset
majority and increasing the likelihood of early elections. As the
Palestinian-led parties weigh a merger that would increase their
collective parliamentary influence, the question is whether the
Zionist parties in Israel’s opposition camp have learned from the
last drawn-out election cycle which ultimately returned Netanyahu to
power with the most right-wing coalition in Israel’s history.

Bad imitators

When it comes to Israel’s nominal center, the answer appears to be
no. In early July, Yair Lapid, chair of Yesh Atid and leader of the
parliamentary opposition, declared that he would support the
right-wing-led effort to expel Ayman Odeh
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leader of the Arab-Jewish socialist party Hadash, from the Knesset.
When it came time for the vote, which failed, Lapid gave his party
members freedom to vote as they pleased; he, like most of the
opposition, abstained, except for Golan’s Democrats who voted
against the measure.  

“I think this gave us the opportunity to see whether Lapid
understands the mistakes of the past,” said Samar Sweid, executive
director of the Arab Center for Alternative Planning and an expert on
voter turnout among Palestinian citizens of Israel. “Lapid has shown
he doesn’t really understand what it means to lead. He’s trying to
imitate the right, and he’s a bad imitator.”  

Lapid’s refusal to oppose the vote against Odeh was a strategic
failure no less than a moral one. During the country’s repeated
election cycles from 2019 to 2022, progressive pollsters and
strategists repeatedly warned Lapid (and any other centrist willing to
listen) that the success of the anti-Netanyahu electoral bloc was, and
would remain, dependent on Arab voters. 

National Unity head Benny Gantz speaks to Yesh Atid head Yair Lapid
during a joint press conference at the Knesset in Jerusalem, November
6, 2024. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

There were two reasons for this. First, higher turnout among
Palestinian citizens would lower the right’s overall vote share due
to Israel’s electoral system being based on proportional
representation. Second, the surest way for the opposition to secure
the first mandate to form a government was to gain early backing from
the Palestinian-led parties, even without their formal entry into the
coalition. 

The Israeli right, by contrast, has long understood this basic math.
For years, Netanyahu’s Likud and its coalition partners have mounted
ceaseless attacks on Palestinian parties and parliamentarians, coupled
with voter suppression campaigns
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at weakening their base. 

The attempted expulsion of Odeh was part of this strategy: to
delegitimize Palestinian politicians and intimidate and demoralize
their voters. And it is likely only the opening salvo in a broader
campaign ahead of the next elections to bar Palestinian-led parties
and their representatives from running altogether. Likud has already
introduced
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Knesset bill to make that easier. 

Rather than oppose these measures, the centrist parties have
frequently joined in the attacks on Palestinian politicians like Odeh,
in practice aiding the Israeli right’s attempt to eliminate Arab
political representation in the Knesset and all but guarantee a
permanent right-wing majority.

Nonetheless, Sweid said he was hopeful that the hostility from the
self-described “centrist” parties would not significantly dampen
voter turnout among Palestinian citizens of Israel. “People have
seen the reality of the last two or three years. It started with the
judicial overhaul, whose goal was first and foremost to harm
Palestinians
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and continued with the war and repression that followed,” he
explained.

Since October 7, Israeli police have violently repressed anti-war
protests
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clamped down harshly on freedom of expression
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Authorities have arrested Palestinian activists, jailed
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journalists, and interrogated or imprisoned ordinary Palestinian
citizens [[link removed]] merely
for expressing dissent on social media.

Palestinian citizens of Israel protest against Israel’s genocide in
Gaza, in the northern city of Sakhnin, July 25, 2025. (Jamal
Awad/Flash90)

“We are witnessing this extreme right-wing government’s dangerous
rule in the ongoing devastation of Gaza, in the hostile policies
toward the Arab communities in Israel, and in the surge of settler
violence in the West Bank,” Yousef Jabareen, a former Knesset member
from Hadash and legal scholar, told +972. “We feel a great, perhaps
historic, responsibility to do our best to bring down this government,
in the hope that an alternative government would be less dangerous.”

Unification or a ‘technical bloc’?

Still, the outcome of any future election will also hinge, in no small
part, on whether the four Palestinian-led parties — Hadash, Ta’al,
Ra’am, and Balad — run separately, as two distinct lists, or as a
single unified front
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as they did in 2015. “I will cautiously estimate that we will not go
with the same format as last time, with three separate lists, but
instead with one or two,” Sweid wagered. 

Recent polls suggest a sizable majority of Palestinian citizens of
Israel would prefer to see the parties run together as a single list.
That scenario could restore the Joint List to its peak strength of 15
seats out of the Knesset’s 120, which it held in 2020. But the
desire among the Arab public for unity is so great that even running
as two coordinated lists would likely yield substantial political
dividends. “In that case, even if voter turnout remained at 53
percent, as it was last time, we would get between 12 and 13 seats,”
Sweid noted. 

Leading members of all four parties have also expressed their desire
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reach some kind of arrangement. Still, ideological differences,
personal acrimony, and strategic disagreements may stand in the way. 

“We would like to see the Joint List remain together after the
election and uphold the vision shared by most of its parties,”
Jabareen said. “We all agree on ending the occupation, ending the
war, on the Israeli army withdrawing to the 1967 borders, and
achieving full equality for the Arab-Palestinian minority in
Israel.”

Members of the Joint list during a vote on a bill to dissolve the
parliament, at the Knesset, in Jerusalem, December 12, 2019. (Olivier
Fitoussi/Flash90)

Mansour Abbas’ Ra’am party, by contrast, has proposed running as a
“technical bloc,” which would break into its constituent parties
once in the Knesset. This would allow Ra’am to join the coalition,
as its voters tend to prefer, while giving the secular-nationalist
Balad as well as Hadash and its close ally Ta’al the freedom to
remain in opposition.

But even if the Palestinian-led parties do return to the
high-watermark of their parliamentary strength, Netanyahu’s
right-wing bloc will still triumph if the Zionist parties refuse to
cooperate with them, for which there is recent precedent. 

During the 2019 and March 2020 election rounds, Ayman Odeh made the
historic decision to back Benny Gantz, offering the Joint
List’s support to a Gantz-led minority government
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outside the coalition. It was the first time since Yitzhak Rabin’s
government in 1992 that the Palestinian-led parties endorsed a
candidate for prime minister and promised such support. But Gantz
refused to overcome the anti-Arab racism within his own party
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rejected the Joint List’s support in both instances. Gantz then
brought his Blue and White party into Netanyahu’s government against
the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In 2021, Ra’am’s participation in the government that briefly
deposed Netanyahu seemed to suggest a shift away from this norm: it
was the first time in Israel’s history that an independent Arab-led
party was formally part of a governing coalition. But the so-called
“change” government
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immense racist backlash from the public, proved fragile from the very
start [[link removed]]. Held
together less by shared principles than by the raw necessity of
keeping Netanyahu out of power, it collapsed after little more than a
year in the summer of 2022.

In the eyes of the figures who today represent Israel’s “center”
— namely Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid — the failure of the
“change” government was caused not by a lack of shared values or
political vision, but by the inclusion an Arab party, said Noam Vidan,
director of IDEA: The Center for Liberal Democracy. “They think that
their mistake was forming a government that depended on Ra’am, and
that their voters punished them in the subsequent elections in
November 2022 by re-electing Netanyahu,” she explained. “Now
they’ve decided, ‘We’ll never go against the wishes of our
voters again.’”

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and MK Mansour Abbas during a
vote on a law proposing reforms regulating medical marijuana in the
assembly hall of the Knesset, Jerusalem, October 13, 2021. (Yonatan
Sindel/Flash90)

For this reason, these parties have renewed their racist opposition to
joining forces with any Palestinian representatives, regardless of
their positions. Bennett, who has a long history
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remarks
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stated
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he seeks to form a “wide coalition that will include 90 Knesset
members … and what that means is that the coalition will not include
Arab parties.” His political calculus also appears to hinge either
on luring elements of Netanyahu’s current far-right coalition away
from the prime minister — a scenario that remains highly unlikely
— or on forming a government _with_ Netanyahu’s Likud, should he
manage to lead it.

Maximizing influence

Since the start of the war in Gaza, eliminationist discourse has
become mainstream
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Israel, as has widespread denialism
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nature and extent of Israel’s war crimes and crimes against
humanity, which even some Israeli rights groups now say amount to
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“Israel’s public has lurched rightward; it has become much more
extreme,” Vidan explained. “We are not in the same situation as
before October 7.” 

Under these conditions, the prospects for replacing the current
government with a political vision beyond a return to the status quo
ante — before October 7 and the Netanyahu government’s assault on
the country’s judiciary — are bleak. And even if Netanyahu’s
right-wing coalition were to fall, almost any plausible configuration
would leave Golan’s Democrats — whose members have been among the
most strident Zionist critics
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destruction of Gaza — as a junior partner with limited influence. 

Yet that appears not to have dampened the determination among some of
the the Democrats’ activists and lawmakers, who have maintained a
feverish pace of old-school political organizing. Their calculation is
straightforward: the more seats they win, the more leverage they will
have in shaping the priorities of any coalition that unseats
Netanyahu. 

“It’s true that there are significant ideological differences
between us and the other parties that should be part of the next
coalition” said Efrat Rayten, one of the party’s four current
Knesset members. “That’s why it is so important that we’ll be a
significant force and win as many seats as possible. This way we’ll
have real influence over the coalition’s fundamental principles and
receive important government offices, like the ministries of justice,
defense, and education.”

The Democrats and their supporters are not wrong that a government in
which the Zionist left holds double-digit seats, as some polls
suggest
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and significant ministerial positions, would inevitably be
substantially different from the current one, in which the hardline
settler right and Kahanists are the kingmakers. Perhaps, then, the
sense that the tide of far-right extremism, even fascism, could
feasibly be pushed back accounts for the center left’s strange
optimism — that stopping things from getting worse is a prerequisite
for making them better.

“We’re seeing the current government take steps to serve the goal
of annexation, as Smotrich has declared, in direct confrontation with
international law,” Rayten explained. “The desire to overpower the
judiciary stems from this aspiration for total control and annexation.
Me and my party hold a liberal-democratic vision, with the aim of
reaching international and regional agreements and a political
resolution between the two peoples, with a deep understanding of the
importance of human dignity, liberty, and rights.” 

Yet such promises count for little at a time when Israel’s current
government continues to bomb, shell, and starve Palestinians in Gaza,
all while taking rapid steps
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formally annexing the West Bank. Nor has the opposition — neither
its parliamentary representatives, like the Democrats, or the protest
movement in the streets — shown the ability to turn growing
discontent over the government’s handling of the war and abandonment
of the hostages into a full-throated defense of Palestinians’
humanity. 

Until they do, it is hard to imagine just how different the next
government, whoever comprises it, will be when it comes to the
prospect of peace and equality for all the people in this land.

_JOSHUA LEIFER is a member of the Dissent editorial board. He is the
author of “Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Century and the
Future of Jewish Life.”_

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Israel's ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza continues to inflict
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point of famine. All the while, the families of Israeli hostages watch
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_In the West Bank, the Israeli army has displaced tens of thousands of
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