On Tuesday 4 August, activists from the binational (Palestinian-Jewish) left-wing social movement Standing Together disrupted a session of the Finance Committee of the Israeli Knesset (Parliament). They were protesting the committee’s planned allocation of an additional ₪335 million, around £83 million, to the budget of the Ministry of Settlement and National Missions. The ministry, which is led by an MK from the far-right Religious Zionist Party (HaIchud HaLeumi-Tkuma), is one of the key political drivers of settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank. If approved, the increase will see the ministry’s overall budget rise to ₪821 million for 2026, its highest ever level, and greater than the budgets of 15 other government ministries.
The committee was also discussing proposals to increase budgetary allocations to social programmes benefiting Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) communities. The position of Haredi communities in Israeli society is a divisive issue; the exemption from compulsory military service granted to Haredis is widely resented by many Israelis. Former Standing Together co-director Alon-Lee Green has rightly criticised the focus on the issue of military service, arguing “we need fewer wars, not more soldiers”. Haredi communities are often impoverished, and Standing Together has argued that people from such communities can be mobilised in broad social coalitions around issues such as housing and wages. However, the dominant politics in Haredi communities, as in almost all religious-fundamentalist communities, are deeply reactionary and patriarchal. The move of Haredi parties from the margins to the centre of Israeli political life has been part of a wider right-wing trajectory, not only in terms of the Israeli state’s policies towards the Palestinians, but in terms of domestic policies too.
Standing Together activists also held a sit in at the Religious Zionist Party’s headquarters in Shoham in central Israel. They chanted: “[Far-right minister] Smotrich finances, the settlers burn, the blood is on the hands of the bloody government”. Following the protest, a Religious Zionist Party statement called on the leaders of other parties to “condemn the violence of the far left, which is fueled by incitement against the settler community”. A protest, which involved no damage to people or property, at a political party’s headquarters is seen as “violent incitement”: the pogroms, destruction, and killings regularly carried out by armed settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank is merely the prosecution of a “national mission”.
The 4 August protests follow a number of protests in late July against settler terror, following an attack against Palestinians in Tal, near Nablus, on 24 July. Four Palestinians were killed, with two Israeli settlers also dying in retaliatory clashes. A week previously, settlers had set fire to a home in Tal with residents inside.
This kind of pogrom is increasingly typical across the West Bank, as armed settlers, abetted by the state, seek to impose a regime of Israeli-Jewish supremacy across the territory, and force Palestinians from their homes.
In response to the events in Tal, the Israeli military launched an operation that led to almost 50 arrests — not of violent settlers, but of Palestinians. Around 70 Palestinians homes were raided.
The raids sparked protests within Israel. On Saturday 25 July, the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, known by its Hebrew acronym Hadash, held a protest in Tel Aviv. Nine people were arrested. Hadash MK Ofer Cassif told The New Arab: “We organised the Tel Aviv demonstration because we refuse to remain silent while state-sanctioned settler terror and government escalation ignite the occupied West Bank [...] The police have increasingly become a politicised militia that shields violent settlers while using brutal force to silence peaceful citizens protesting for human rights. The arrest of nine demonstrators in Tel Aviv is a blatant attempt to criminalise dissent and protect government-backed extremism.
“Mainstream political and media discourse continues to whitewash state aggression. However, video evidence makes it harder to deny the truth. A growing, courageous joint Jewish-Arab camp realises that settler violence is not a ‘fringe issue’ — it is a core tool of state policy designed to dispossess Palestinians.”
On 28 July, a coalition of anti-occupation organisations led by Standing Together organised a further protest against settler violence. Standing Together said: "We didn’t take to the streets just because of settler violence — we were also protesting against our extremist government that backs and funds this terror.
“Not only does it make daily life for many Palestinians in the West Bank unbearable, but it makes every single one of us less safe and threatens our future. There can never be peace when our government depends on inciting endlessly against Palestinians and encouraging more and more violence across the land to stay in power.
“That’s why our protest was so powerful. It proved that our struggle against this terrifying reality is growing, that people will not accept this as fate, that they’ll fight for peace, equality, and justice because they know it’s the only way.”
With elections for the Knesset set for 27 October, electoral campaigning is now underway. Under Israel’s proportional representation system, a party must win at least 3.25% of the national vote share to secure parliamentary representation, with the number of seats depending on the size of its vote above the qualifying threshold. A party with 61 seats or more can form a government; no single party has ever achieved this, meaning governments rely on coalitions, temporary electoral blocs, or MKs from smaller parties agreeing to sponsor a government led by a larger party, without formally joining a coalition.
All Israeli citizens have an equal vote, including the country’s 20% Palestinian minority, and those from other minorities including the Druze. Israeli Jews living beyond Israel’s internationally-recognised borders, as settlers in occupied Palestinian territories, can vote. Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, whose lives are profoundly shaped by the policies determined in the Knesset, cannot. There are also fears that far-right parties will engage in violent voter suppression, as well as concerns that Netanyahu and his allies, who openly admire authoritarian regimes, will refuse to accept the results if they lose.
For the past several months, most opinion polls have shown the parties which make up the current governing coalition winning between 48 and 52 seats. But the remaining seats are split between a wide range of parties, from hard-right parties such as Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, to the Palestinian-led parties of the Joint List, which includes the far-left Hadash. The single party currently projected to win the largest number of seats, after Netanyahu’s Likud, is Yashar, a party led by former IDF general Gadi Eisenkot. Eisenkot’s criticisms of Netanyahu are often, in effect, from the right: rather than proposing a less militarised policy, or easing the oppression of the Palestinians, Eisenkot argues his own military expertise and experience make him a more competent steward of Israeli militarism than Netanyahu.
The last anti-Netanyahu coalition government lasted less than two years, from June 2021 to December 2022, highlighting the instability and ultimate impossibility of attempting to cohere a government around a single, and negative, principle: anyone but Netanyahu.
Israel’s traditional “Zionist left” (i.e., the mainstream left) will be represented in the election by the Democrats, a party formed via the merger of the Labour Party and Meretz, a left-of-Labour social-democratic party. Current Democrat MKs Gilad Kariv and Naama Lazimi spoke at the “It’s Time!” peace conference, an event held annually since 2024 that brings together a broad swathe of Israel’s anti-occupation and peace movements, and generally promotes a vision of equality between Israeli Jews and Palestinians.
However, the Democrats’ leader, Yair Golan, continues to peddle the historic line of Israel’s political establishment: a two-state solution is necessary because Israelis must eventually “separate” from Palestinians. However, Palestinian statehood is the end point of a lengthy process, and must be conditional, rather than being an inviolable democratic right to which the Palestinians are entitled simply because they are a national people.
That perspective, which was hegemonic in Israeli politics for generations, has been utterly sidelined by the one-state policy of the current government, which insists on an “exclusive” right to Jewish sovereignty over the entire territory of pre-1948 Palestine. The pro-settler authoritarianism of the Netanyahu regime can only be fought by a radical alternative, not an effort to rewind the clock to the late-1990s.
The Democrats’ list for the election includes a number of Palestinian and Druze candidates, although the highest-placed of these, Somaya Bashir, is in 10th place, and highly unlikely to be elected.
The Palestinian parties running in the elections are the National Democratic Assembly (at-Tajammuʿal-Waṭanī ad-Dīmuqrāṭī, known as Balad, which is both the acronym of its Hebrew name and an Arabic word for “country”); the Arab Movement for Renewal (Ta’al); and the United Arab List (al-Qā'ima al-'Arabiyya al-Muwaḥḥada, often referred to by its Hebrew acronym Ra’am). The former two are secular-nationalist parties. Ta’al, led by Ahmad Tibi, broadly aligns with the dominant politics of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and advocates a two-state settlement to the national question. Balad has a one-state position, advocating a single state across the whole pre-1948 territory, and advocating for greater rights for the Palestinian minority in Israel in the meantime. Ra’am is an Islamist party, aligned with the Islamic Movement, a longstanding Islamist current in Palestine with historic links to the Muslim Brotherhood. However, it has evolved in a more moderate direction, with its leader, Mansour Abbas, positioning himself as a reasonable pragmatist. Ra’am joined the 2021-22 anti-Netanyahu coalition, becoming the first Palestinian party to participate in an Israeli government.
Ra’am is running independently in the elections, while Ta’al and Balad are running as part of the Joint List bloc, along with Hadash. Part of the reason for Ra’am’s refusal to align with the Joint List, which it participated in in 2020, is its desire to have the freedom to join a government coalition again, which Balad, Ta’al, and Hadash are all opposed to.
The Palestinian journalist Samah Watad summarised the parties’ conflicting views thus: “Abbas, who made history in 2021 by joining Israel’s governing coalition, argues that precisely because no favourable governing coalition is on offer, Palestinian citizens must use their electoral weight to bargain for whatever concrete gains they can extract. The leaders of the three other parties draw almost the opposite conclusion: Joining such a government risks turning Arab parties into a safety net for another Zionist coalition rather than a source of power for their own community, and lends legitimacy to a political system that does not recognize Palestinian citizens as an equal national collective.”
Hadash is nominally a binational party, but its membership and voter base is overwhelmingly Arab-Palestinian. In its internal primaries, Yousef Jabareen won the contest to replace retiring MK Ayman Odeh as the head of its list. The other top slots, who are likely to be elected based on previous performance and current polling, were won by Jafer Farah, Ofer Cassif, and Yousef Atauna. Cassif won the election for the third slot, which is, by convention, reserved for a Jewish candidate, against a challenge from younger activist Noa Levy. Cassif’s victory means that, following the retirement of Aida Touma-Suleiman and for the first time since 2013, the top positions on Hadash’s list will all be held by male candidates.
Jabareen, who will head the Joint List’s slate, told the Jerusalem Post: “We want to see renewed negotiations with the leadership of the Palestinian people, in order to advance the process of establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel. [...] We want a commitment to advancing a policy of equality for Arab citizens. We want to see a plan to fight crime organisations in Arab society, to eradicate crime. We of course want to see budgets for the severe hardships in Arab society, and support for local authorities.”
Crime is a major issue in Arab-Palestinian communities within Israel. Acute underfunding of social provision, combined with disregard and avoidance by an increasingly politicised, racist police force content to step back and watch Arabs killing each other, has allowed an epidemic of violent crime to spread in Palestinian communities. Almost 150 people have been killed since the start of 2026.
New to the field in 2026 is A Place for Us All, founded by leaders of Standing Together. Whilst organisationally independent of the movement, the new party is widely seen as the expression, in the electoral sphere, of Standing Together’s approach: binational co-resistance towards a horizon of equal rights and self-determination for both peoples. A Place for Us All orients in part to Arab-Palestinian communities, and refutes criticisms that it will split the vote by arguing it aims to increase turnout and win support from new voters, rather than haggling over the existing vote share. Whilst Standing Together itself cannot campaign directly for any individual party, it has been running a “Get Out The Vote” campaign aimed at resisting racist voter suppression and encouraging Palestinian participation in the elections. However, A Place for Us All also differentiates itself from Joint List parties by articulating a political vision for the whole of Israeli society, rather than pursuing a politics focused solely or mainly on the Arab-Palestinian minority. Some of its leaders have also criticised the Joint List parties for being overly male-dominated.
Based on existing electoral projections, of the 68-72 seats likely to be won by anti-Netanyahu parties, 10 could be won by the Joint List and Ra’am. This means that any anti-Netanyahu coalition would require either the direct participation of a Palestinian party, or a confidence-and-supply agreement with one or more of them. Several leaders of anti-Netanyahu parties have explicitly ruled out the prospect of governing alongside an Arab party. Should an anti-Netanyahu government be formed, the main immediate material benefit will be moving the openly fascistic parties, Itamar Ben Gvir’s Jewish Power and Smotrich’s Religious Zionist party away from the centre of power. Given the instability and political unsustainability of any anti-Netanyahu coalition, that may very well only provide some short-lived breathing space. Anti-occupation movements, and movements within Palestinian society demanding social provision and equality, must use that space to develop their forces.
The international left is unlikely to pay a great deal of attention to the Israeli elections. For a left which substantially sees the very concept of an Israeli Jewish national entity, on any political basis, as a necessarily colonial endeavour, the outcome is immaterial: whichever party leads the government, some form of Jewish chauvinism will remain dominant. It is true that there is no likely outcome to these elections that will automatically lead to any significant advance in Palestinian rights. However, some outcomes (coalition parties scraping enough seats to continue in power, or form a minority government) could lead to regressions, and other outcomes (Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, and Smotrich being ousted) could open up space to build resistance.
The refusal of much of the left to see Israeli society as just that, a society, blinds it to the connections between struggles within Israeli society, and the struggle against occupation. Outcomes in the election — for example, how many seats are secured by Palestinian parties — could be directly, materially consequential for the lives of Israel’s two-million-strong Palestinian minority. Left-wing parties such as Hadash and A Place for Us All seek to connect immediate class struggles over wages, housing, and other domestic issues to the question of national equality, arguing that policies of settlement and occupation benefit a settler elite. Good results in the elections for these parties will help the anti-occupation movement grow.
Winning real equality in Israel-Palestine, including an equal right to self-determination for both peoples, will require much more than a change in government. It will require a thoroughgoing democratic revolution, to abolish constitutional reforms such as the Nation-State Law and roll back the settlement project. The political forces advocating such a revolution are currently an embattled minority. But it is, in part, precisely because they are a minority that their struggles need our support and solidarity.
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