The following is Part 1 of a 4-Part series on contemporary Israel that we will publish over the coming weeks.
To say that Israel has experienced intense election cycles in recent years would be a gross understatement. Voters in this country, who will head to the polls again on October 27, have long approached the ballot box with a kind of existential, constitutional, this-time-the-country-itself-is-on-the-line mentality. They had learned to do so well before October 7, 2023—the day Israel suffered its most devastating blow and descended into its most violent and protracted war.
The previous general election, held in late 2022, brought to power the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, admitting into its ranks populist Jewish nationalists and hardline religious Zionists who had long been considered beyond the pale of respectable politics. That new coalition also announced its infamous plan for a sweeping overhaul of the judiciary, which, since the 1990s—many on the right claim, with more than an iota of truth—had developed into a powerful, unelected, broadly liberal institution that infringed upon the will of the people (or at least the right-leaning portion thereof). The decision to pursue this “judicial reform”—described by opponents as a “judicial coup”—sparked a massive wave of street protests and civil unrest, bringing the country to the brink of a constitutional crisis. This extraordinarily intense, months-long domestic conflict was halted (or rather, suspended) only by the appearance of an external enemy on the morning of October 7.
The government coalition had announced its infamous plan for a sweeping overhaul of the judiciary, which had developed into a powerful, unelected, broadly liberal institution that infringed upon the will of the people.
The fateful election of 2022, however, was itself only another turning point in a longer era of political madness. That election was precipitated by the premature disintegration of the short-lived “Government of Change”—a fragile and astonishingly diverse (read: incoherent) alliance of political forces united by little more than their opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu—which had taken office in June 2021. To appreciate just how unusual the Government of Change was, suffice it to recall that it was marked by two developments that were not only historically unprecedented but also, in a sense, contradictory. For the first time, Israel’s prime ministership was held by a kippah-wearing religious Zionist, Naftali Bennett, who was closely identified with the settler movement and had previously served as director-general of the umbrella organization representing Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria (known internationally as the West Bank).
At the same time, and no less remarkably, an Arab party—the Islamist Ra’am, led by Mansour Abbas—became a full-fledged partner in the governing coalition. Thus, the first Israeli government headed by a homegrown leader of the religious-Zionist settler movement was also the first to include in its ranks a representative not merely of Israel’s Arab minority, but of its Islamist constituency.
The short-lived “Government of Change” (2021-22) included settler advocates and Islamists.
How did such a schizophrenically innovative political arrangement come to power in the first place? As it happens, this extraordinarily unusual arrangement was itself the product of extraordinarily unusual circumstances. The Government of Change’s short tenure marked the end of a prolonged political crisis that had subjected Israel to four successive elections in barely two years. Since late 2018, a stubborn electoral stalemate had left the country’s party system in a seemingly intractable deadlock, with neither Netanyahu and his allies nor his opponents able to command a sufficient parliamentary majority.
Now, Israel’s most election-ridden period—during which voters headed to the polls five times in four years—has been followed by the first parliamentary term since 1988 to run its full, constitutionally prescribed four years. Ironically, the electoral stability of 2022–2026 represents an intensification, rather than a reversal, of the political turmoil that preceded it. Precisely because the current government, which has ruled the country through some of its most tumultuous and bloody years, is among the most bitterly divisive and least broadly accepted in Israel’s history, its members have displayed extraordinary coalition discipline. The fact that large swaths of the public—particularly in the wake of October 7—regard this government as unfit, if not outright illegitimate, has given its members a powerful incentive to postpone elections and cling to their seats. Thus, a lack of popular support has paradoxically produced electoral stability. Rather than a sign of democratic health, the government’s completion of its full term may be a symptom of a legitimacy deficit.
Ironically, the electoral stability of 2022–2026 represents an intensification, rather than a reversal, of the political turmoil that preceded it.
Israel is not the only country in which democracy’s constitutional and institutional structures are increasingly becoming the object rather than the framework of electoral competition. The sense of heightened political stakes—the feeling that citizens are voting not on the identity of the state’s leaders, but on its fundamental essence or existence—has become a feature of many democracies.
That such blurring of the distinction between legal form and political content is democratically unhealthy should be obvious. Popular self-rule is a delicate business, and the ability of mass societies to govern themselves requires firm normative and institutional boundaries. In this sense, the tendency—common among populist insurgents and establishment liberals alike—to turn every election cycle into a battle over democracy itself is deeply undemocratic. In Israel’s case, however, this harmful existentialist mentality may be more than a discursive phenomenon. To be sure, here too, the idea that every election might be the last derives in part from a polarized political culture and a recklessly sensationalist media. But the malaise of late-modern Western democracy is here compounded by the geopolitics of the Middle East, a region that has seen more than its fair share of state collapse.
All this makes one aspect of the current election cycle particularly odd. What international coverage of Israel largely fails to capture is perhaps one of the most distinctive features of the present moment: the intensity and urgency of political debates playing out daily in newspapers and across the media is strangely at odds with the broader mood and texture of public life. The coming elections—fateful as they may be—have barely left a mark on everyday social experience. With less than two weeks to go, the usual signs of an Israeli election season—bumper stickers, enormous highway banners, mass rallies, streets brimming with political chatter—are nowhere to be found. The atmosphere is remarkably, perhaps ominously, un-election-like.
The usual signs of an Israeli election season—bumper stickers, enormous highway banners, mass rallies, streets brimming with political chatter—are nowhere to be found.
One explanation circulating in Israeli political discussions, though difficult to verify, attributes the subdued atmosphere partly to the campaign calculations of the anti-Netanyahu camp. The assumption is that its educated and politically engaged supporters are already highly mobilized, whereas a more energetic election season might awaken otherwise disengaged voters, sociologically inclined toward Netanyahu’s Likud party—particularly lower-class voters in Israel’s geographic periphery, the so-called “left behind”.
Such a strategy of quiescence, if indeed it is being being pursued, would add yet another layer of paradox to an already paradoxical political reality: the struggle to save democracy would depend, at least in part, on discouraging popular participation and encouraging civic apathy.
Another, perhaps more substantive, explanation refers to a pervasive sense of exhaustion. It may be that, sometime in the past few weeks or months, Israeli society has crossed an invisible threshold separating anxiety from fatigue, urgency from indifference. What seems strange about this explanation, however, is that over the past several years, politics has become personal and palpable for vast numbers of Israelis in a way that most citizens of Western countries would struggle to understand.
Experiences of violent death, physical injury, and psychological trauma have become so widespread that it would hardly be an exaggeration to suggest that every Israeli who has not been directly involved still either personally knows someone who was killed or injured on October 7 or in the ensuing conflict, or knows someone who does.
While it is difficult to assess precisely how such experiences shape society’s relationship to politics, there can be no doubt that they do. One might even wonder whether the subdued atmosphere of the current election cycle could actually be a positive sign: an instinctive recoil from the indecency of contemporary politics in the face of collective sorrow and private anguish, as though a slowly recovering social fabric were trying to protect itself from the indignity and toxicity of hyper-polarized public life.
