Candidates always say it, but this time it’s true. When Israel goes to the polls on 27 October, it really will be the most important election in the country’s history – and not just for Israelis. I saw that for myself this last week, in a visit that served as a sharp reminder of both what is at stake – and the role of those watching from afar.
More than one voter I spoke to voiced the fear that, if the coalition headed by Benjamin Netanyahu is returned to power next month, 27 October will not merely be Israel’s most important election: it will be its last. They were not referring to the absence of democracy in the occupied territory of the West Bank – which we’ll come to – but rather to Israel’s internationally recognised, pre-1967 borders: what you might call Israel-proper. There, the last four years have seen a sustained assault on the machinery of liberal democracy by the most rightwing government since Israel’s establishment in 1948 – a committed, focused attempt to remove the checks and restraints on its own power, installing instead a kind of elective dictatorship.
Democratic norms are breaking down all the time. While I was there, Netanyahu joined calls to strip two Israeli film-makers of their citizenship, as a livid mob surrounded the home of the parents of one of the two directors. The film in question is NAZA, produced by the Guardian, which features interviews with two dozen Israeli military insiders, their identities disguised, and which is named for the acronym euphemistically used by the Israeli military when calculating the number of civilians it expects to die in an airstrike. Unlike everyone protesting against it, I have actually seen the film: I have some misgivings about specific choices it makes, but that is irrelevant. A country true to its self-designation as the only democracy in the Middle East would not threaten with expulsion or violence those who say what its rulers do not want to hear.
But such egregious behaviour is becoming commonplace. Last month, Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, implied, without evidence, that Yair Golan, leader of the left-leaning Democrats party, had inside knowledge of the 7 October 2023 attacks that saw the massacre of 1,200 Israelis and the abduction of 251 hostages – the trauma of which still touches every aspect of Israeli life and looms over this election campaign. It’s part of a baseless conspiracy theory pushed by Netanyahu and his “poison machine” of acolytes and media allies to shift the blame for the PM’s own 7 October failures, but it’s especially despicable when directed against Golan. A former general, he leapt into his car on 7 October, drove south and personally rescued six of those who had come under fire. He is a hero of that dark day – and has threatened to sue Sara Netanyahu. As it happens, soon after her intervention, it was reported that someone high up in Israel had indeed been explicitly warned before 7 October that a devastating Hamas attack was on the way. That someone was Benjamin Netanyahu and the warning came from the president of the United Arab Emirates. Netanyahu vehemently denied the allegation.
It is a dirty campaign, filled with disinformation and lies, utterly in keeping with the degraded state of Israeli politics in the age of late-stage Netanyahu. Thanks to Israel’s unwritten constitution, there now remains only one serious obstacle in his way: the courts. He has had the judiciary in his sights since he returned to office nearly four years ago, not least because he wants to halt the ongoing corruption trial that could send him to jail. He tried to gut the supreme court once already, in early 2023, and, if he wins next month, most observers are clear: the court will be gone.
That matters for Israelis, who will find themselves in a Turkey- or Russia-style autocracy poorly disguised as a democracy. But it also matters for Palestinians. Yehuda Shaul, an Israeli anti-occupation activist fully aware of the court’s inadequate record as a defender of Palestinian rights, told me that Israel has been on the wrong road for a long time: “But so long as the courts and basic democratic institutions are standing, we can still turn back. If they’re gone, we’re heading off a cliff.”
I was with Shaul driving around the West Bank, seeing the changing reality there up close. I stood in the burnt-out and broken mosque of what had been the small Bedouin village of Mu’arrajat, its population chased out by settler terrorists – to use the formulation favoured, remarkably, by the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. Through harassment and violence, they made the lives of the inhabitants there so unbearable that the villagers could hold on no longer. It was the same story in Ras ‘Ein al ‘Auja, where I stood among similar ruins, including a small, abandoned school, and where a herd of settler-owned goats now grazes. Shaul points out the vast swathe of land, more than 100 sq miles, in the east of the West Bank, close enough to see Jordan, where now next to no Palestinians live. Small wonder that former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert speaks of ethnic cleansing, or that UK foreign secretary Ed Miliband does the same.
I saw, too, in what the settlers call northern Samaria, the four settlements that Ariel Sharon dismantled in 2005, now returned and rebuilt along with 14 others either built or approved for construction. Their arrival sees roadside buildings demolished and olive trees uprooted, in the name of safety for settlers as they travel. And dotted, seemingly on every ridge and hilltop, the distinct, bright white caravans that mark a new officially “unauthorised” outpost, popping up with such frequency that Shaul can barely name them all – he estimates 250 new settlements and outposts have gone up since 2023 – and which are steadily encircling the major Palestinian cities, reducing them to isolated enclaves, thereby preventing the territorial contiguity that would be essential for a viable Palestinian state.
Netanyahu’s coalition, with radical settler Bezalel Smotrich in de facto charge of the West Bank, has directed this settlement expansion and turned a blind eye to the pogroms staged by the movement’s most aggressive wing. The best chance to stop it going farther and further comes on 27 October.
Those outside the country appalled by what they see in Gaza or the West Bank sometimes struggle to know what they can do to help. The temptation is to rally around, say, the rapper Macklemore, calling out “Free Palestine” from Ed Sheeran’s stage – but that temptation fades a little when you see that the same Macklemore once performed dressed up as what looked unmistakably like an antisemitic caricature of a Jew, complete with a false, giant nose. He later apologised, saying a “Jewish stereotype” had never crossed his mind.
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Or you might want to get fully behind Miliband’s sanctions package, which at long last signals that the settlement enterprise will not be allowed to continue with impunity – until you hear from those involved who say that the immediate impact will fall not on settlers but on Palestinians. That’s because the Netanyahu government’s predictable and predicted response – which included the closure of the UK consulate in East Jerusalem – has robbed Britain of its main mechanism to aid Palestinians through delivering development programmes and the like.
The truth is that, for those desperate to see change, the best hope is the ejection from office of what has been a vile, cruel, bigoted and lethally dangerous government. Be under no illusion: even if Netanyahu is toppled, he will not be replaced by a peacenik who will instantly lead the country in the opposite direction. It doesn’t work like that. But there is a bloc, unofficially led by former general Gadi Eisenkot, which is defined by its opposition to the man who has ruled Israel on and off for much of the last 30 years and there are campaigners and activists, such as Shaul, who are fighting every hour of every day to avert further disaster. They are branded as traitors at home and shunned simply for being Israeli by too many supposed progressives abroad. They need allies and friends, because right now they are all that stands between this moment and the abyss.
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Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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