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 and ceasefire in Gaza on one hand, and the struggle against the right-wing government’s assault on 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 in 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, 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, head of the 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 vowed 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, 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 granted 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, 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 aimed 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 a 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, and continued with the war and repression that followed,” he explained.
Since October 7, Israeli police have violently repressed anti-war protests and clamped down harshly on freedom of expression. Authorities have arrested Palestinian activists, jailed Palestinian journalists, and interrogated or imprisoned ordinary Palestinian citizens 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, 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 to 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 from 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 and 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, facing immense racist backlash from the public, proved fragile from the very start. 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 of inflammatory anti-Palestinian remarks, has openly stated that 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 in Israel, as has widespread denialism about the nature and extent of Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity, which even some Israeli rights groups now say amount to genocide. “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 of Israel’s 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, 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 toward 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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