Ahead of tomorrow’s vote, in which a minority of the people under Israeli rule will choose the country’s next government, Anglophone newspapers flew in their marquee pundits to produce the familiar chin-stroking election-eve dispatches. Candidate rallies, vox pops, a nation at a crossroads …

A visiting Sunday Times columnist found an “anxious” nation fighting over “the very essence of its identity”. The Guardian nourished the liberal Zionist wish that so many sensible Israelis flying home to vote meant “the age of Bibi might, at last, be drawing to a close”. Even a serious newspaper like the Financial Times issued the very belated warning that “a Netanyahu victory would set the country and region on a destructive path”, and called for “responsible leadership” to “heal the deep divisions” in a society evidently committed to ethnic cleansing. In all this, one senses a desperate wish to return to a comforting fantasy: that our ally, genocide and all, might become a normal country overnight with a simple electoral rebuke to the one man who caused all the trouble.

For a more accurate preview, Equator turned to Nathan Thrall, one of the sharpest analysts of Israel’s entrenched system of dominance over Palestinian lives. Thrall is the author of two essential books on the conflict: The Only Language They Understand, a scathing study of the Oslo era, and A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, an intimate portrait of one Palestinian family’s ordeal inside the machinery of occupation. In an exchange conducted over email from Jerusalem, we discussed the campaigns, the opposition’s record in government, the place of Palestinian parties in Israel’s democracy, and why a change of prime minister might matter more in Western capitals than in Gaza or the West Bank.

Jonathan Shainin: How would you describe the campaigns so far? Is any party proposing a serious change to the status quo?

Nathan Thrall: The central electoral issue in Israel for many years has not been one of policy but of whether one is for or against Prime Minister Netanyahu. The fixation on Netanyahu is so pervasive that it defines how the media and polling companies group the parties into electoral blocs. In the Western and Israeli media, it is often implied that the opposition is to the left of Netanyahu’s “right-wing governing coalition”. But on matters of security and foreign policy, some of the opposition parties hold positions that are as hawkish as, or even more hawkish than, those of parties in the governing coalition. What this means is that, if one looks beyond who is pro-Netanyahu and who is anti- and examines the policy proposals of the various parties, there is a broad Jewish political consensus in favour of maintaining Israeli control over the Palestinians and preventing Palestinian sovereignty.

Parties led by Palestinian citizens are polling at about 12.5% of the vote, but have little influence on issues of foreign policy and security. Almost every Zionist party – in the opposition and governing coalition alike – has vowed not to include Palestinian-led parties in a future government, despite polls indicating that the opposition cannot form a government without their support. There are differences among the Zionist parties about whether to formally annex parts of the West Bank or to suffice with annexation de facto, about which types of settlements should be prioritised for expansion (isolated farms versus bourgeois suburbs, towns and cities), and about the manner in which Palestinian displacement should be pursued (quietly, by the army alone, or through the vigilantism that gives Israel so much bad press).

These differences can have real consequences for Palestinians. But the end of apartheid, the dismantlement of settlements, a withdrawal from Gaza, Palestinian freedom and equal collective rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel are firmly rejected by the major parties competing to lead the next government, indeed firmly rejected by more than 80% of the Knesset. That will be true whether or not Netanyahu disappears from political life. So will the fact that a majority of Israeli Jews recently told pollsters that they favour expelling not just the Palestinian residents of Gaza but Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Do both sides want this to be a referendum on Netanyahu?

The fixation on Netanyahu is expedient to many. For the prime minister and his allies, it affirms that he is, as the posters proclaim, in another league. For the opposition, denouncing his corruption and lies is easier than coming up with substantively different policy proposals on security and foreign policy. Netanyahu monomania has not decreased since 7 October, which Israelis agree was the worst security failure in the country’s history. The opposition rightly demands that he be held accountable for the fiasco, while he promises to be the one who will prevent another 7 October.

What is remarkable is that a catastrophe of this magnitude, followed by years of devastating war, has produced an election in which the central argument is over who failed to protect Israelis on that day, rather than whether to revisit the decades of policies leading up to it. The opposition slams Netanyahu for allowing Qatari financing to prevent Hamas-ruled Gaza from collapsing, but this same policy was supported by the major Israeli security bodies, as well as by many of the politicians in the opposition. Netanyahu supported it not because his media flacks were taking money from Qatar or because he didn’t want unified Palestinian rule over Gaza and the West Bank but for the same reason that the rest of the Israeli security establishment supported it: because the Palestinian Authority was seen as too weak to take over Gaza, the only realistic options were thought to be Hamas rule, characterised by long periods of quiet punctuated by Israeli assaults on the enclave, or a collapse of Hamas governance, which would lead to total security chaos. The consensus was that the latter was more dangerous for Israel.

In short, the opposition wants an investigation into the failure of 7 October, but it has remarkably little to say about the failure of the political order that preceded it.

Netanyahu is a convenient scapegoat most of all for Israeli centrists and liberals, those enlightened opposition voters who would like to believe that they bear no personal responsibility for their country’s policies, that the nation’s problems stem primarily from the current leader, and that his departure would mark a decisive break with the past. Never mind that one of the principal opposition leaders, Gadi Eisenkot, served in the war cabinet that failed to achieve its goals in Gaza, or that another, Naftali Bennett, was recently prime minister during a period of accelerated settlement expansion and rising settler violence.

To what extent was Netanyahu the architect of that prevailing political order before 7 October?

Historical amnesia is pervasive in Israeli political debate, particularly in the way the Zionist centre and centre-left recount their own history. The settlement project was not invented by Netanyahu or the religious right. Its first decade was advanced by Labor-led governments. Successive Israeli administrations have invested enormous political and economic resources in expanding and consolidating it. Settler violence, moreover, cannot be understood simply as the work of extremists operating independently of the government: it takes place within a system of military protection and assistance, legal impunity and state support.

The gradual absorption of the West Bank into Israel’s state infrastructures of law, policing, health care, education, emergency services, transportation, energy and communications has proceeded under governments of the left, right and centre, with the support of the legislative, judicial and executive branches. Netanyahu has accelerated and radicalised important aspects of this process, but he did not create it; the pace of annexation did not slow in the two years when he was not prime minister. To attribute the occupation and settlement enterprise primarily to him is to obscure the much broader political responsibility for their development.

Where do the Palestinian citizens of Israel fit into all this?

Palestinian political parties running for Knesset offer perhaps the clearest illustration of what the word ”democracy” means in Israel. Parties representing Palestinian citizens of Israel are polling at around 14 seats, 12.5% of the Knesset, and could determine whether Netanyahu stays or goes. Yet the main Zionist opposition parties, which claim that the survival of the state of Israel depends on removing Netanyahu, refuse to include them in a governing coalition or even rely on their votes from outside the coalition. In 2015, on election day, Netanyahu posted a video warning Jewish Israelis that “Arab voters are coming out in droves” and that left-wing organisations were bringing them to the polls in buses. He presented the democratic participation of Arab citizens as a threat to the country that his supporters needed to mobilise against.

Eleven years later, the opposition denounces Netanyahu’s racism and authoritarianism while treating the prospect of governing alongside Palestinian parties as politically unacceptable. Palestinian citizens are entitled to vote, of course. But when their votes might determine who governs, they become a danger to the Jewish right; and when their representatives might actually participate in governing, they become unacceptable to most of the Israeli opposition. The same parties that claim to be fighting for the survival of Israeli democracy cannot bring themselves to share power with – or even receive political support from – the elected representatives of a substantial part of the country’s citizens. Apparently, democracy is worth saving, provided that Palestinians aren’t a part of it.

This is how you can have an election perceived by many voters to be “existential” and yet have so little substantive debate about what may be the most significant issue for Israel’s future: what to do about the millions of non-Jews living under Israeli control, most of whom have no political rights in the state that determines nearly every aspect of their lives. This is how Israeli Jews can fiercely, and sincerely, argue over the future of “Israeli democracy” while leaving largely unexamined the contradiction between democratic government for Israeli citizens and the permanent denial of political rights to millions of Palestinians under Israeli rule.

What are the main issues for Jewish Israeli voters?

Even in an election conducted during a period of numerous wars, an unprecedented shift in global public opinion against Israel, the first Western sanctions on Israeli entities, and a genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, economic concerns remain among the highest priorities for Israeli voters. This needs to be understood by anyone interested in seeing change in Palestine. Israel’s expansionist project depends not only on the ideological commitment of the settlement movement or the decisions of successive governments, but also on the acceptance, indifference or political disengagement of much of the Israeli Jewish public. It depends on the possibility of living a comfortable middle-class life without having to confront the daily reality of the subjugation of millions of Palestinians in the same territory. For decades, Israel has largely succeeded in preserving that sense of complacency. Even today, despite wars and genocide, much of it remains intact.

A central reason this has been possible lies with us, citizens of the states that continue to support Israel, trade with Israel, protect it diplomatically and politically, and maintain normal relations with it. It is called impunity. As Israel was pulverising Gaza and creating a living hell for two million traumatised and bereaved people, the cafés and bars of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem remained full. Those in the West who want to see change in Palestine need to confront the question of how international pressure might alter the political calculations of Israeli voters and leaders. Sanctions, diplomatic isolation, divestment, sports boycotts and travel restrictions are among the measures that could make the continuation of occupation and denial of Palestinian rights carry a tangible cost. Without sustained pressure, there is little reason to expect the major Zionist parties to abandon their opposition to Palestinian statehood or the policies that have entrenched Israeli control over Palestinian lives. In which case Israeli political debate can continue to devote more attention to Netanyahu’s personal scandals – champagne! cigars! outbursts against the housekeeper! – than to the system of ethnic domination that successive governments have helped sustain.

What difference, if any, will the result make in Gaza and the West Bank?

The Israeli newspaper Makor Rishon recently published the results of a questionnaire sent to the major political parties by several Israeli right-wing and pro-settlement organisations. The results underline the absurdity of describing the anti-Netanyahu bloc as an opposition when it comes to the Palestinian issue. Every Zionist party that answered a question on Palestinian statehood declared itself to be opposed. Only one, the Democrats, which is polling at less than 8%, is believed to support Palestinian statehood, and it refused to provide an answer. Its leader, Yair Golan, condemned France for the entirely symbolic step of recognising a Palestinian state, calling it “destructive” and “extremely damaging” to Israel. He is careful to speak not of Palestinian statehood or independence or even peace but instead talks of “separation” from the Palestinians, the language of the Oslo Accords, which made no mention of Palestinian statehood.

As for the parties thought to have a chance of leading the next government, their positions on Palestinian sovereignty and continued Israeli control differ far less from Netanyahu’s Likud than their opposition to Netanyahu might suggest. The two largest parties in the anti-Netanyahu bloc are led by Gadi Eisenkot, one of the architects of the Israeli military’s “Dahiya doctrine”, which calls for the use of overwhelming and disproportionate force against civilian infrastructure and was implemented to such devastating effect in Gaza, and Naftali Bennett, a former director-general of the Yesha Council, the umbrella group for Israeli settlements. Both support the wars on Iran, both oppose Palestinian statehood, and both support continued settlement in the West Bank.

The occupation itself, the elephant in the room, is not at the centre of the Israeli electoral debate. It is not even at its margins. The parties are arguing over who should govern Israel, who is responsible for 7 October and who can best guarantee Israeli security. But the question of whether millions of Palestinians should continue to live under Israeli domination has been effectively removed from the range of legitimate political choices. A new government might change how Israel speaks to the world, and how the world speaks about Israel, without changing the fundamental terms under which Palestinians live.

Thus the most consequential effect of replacing Netanyahu may be felt not in Gaza or the West Bank, but in Washington, London, Paris and Berlin. A new Israeli prime minister would give Western governments something they have been desperately lacking: a plausible story of change. The question of what Israel is doing to Palestinians could once again be displaced by the question of how best to support Israel’s new leadership. And a political change that leaves the fundamental structures of occupation intact could be presented internationally as a turning point.

What kind of political change would we expect to see from an anti-Netanyahu government?

With so much liberal Western hope pinned on what an Israel without Netanyahu might look like, it’s often forgotten that this experiment has already been run. Bennett and a centrist figure to his left, Yair Lapid, co-led the previous Israeli government, from 2021 to 2022. How did that anti-Netanyahu coalition, the so-called “government of change”, perform on the questions of peace and security that concern Western governments?

For Palestinians, the “government of change” mostly changed things for the worse. Compared to the period under the preceding Netanyahu government, annual construction of outposts doubled; settler violence increased more than twofold; greater numbers of Palestinian homes and structures were demolished in both East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank; many more settlement housing units were advanced in these places; and Israelis killed more than twice as many Palestinians in the West Bank.

That doesn’t mean that the opposition, if it succeeds in forming the next government, will not make any changes at all. There could be more serious efforts to prosecute violent settlers, restrictions on particular settlement initiatives, or the evacuation of some illegal outposts. Such measures would matter to the Palestinians directly affected by them, and the differences between Israeli governments should not be dismissed simply because they fall short of ending the occupation. But neither should they be mistaken for a political alternative. The larger reality would remain one of continued settlement expansion; destruction of Palestinian homes; Israeli military control over Gaza and the prevention of Palestinian entry into more than 60% of the enclave; a steady drumbeat of killings of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank; entrenchment of apartheid; furthering de facto annexation; and widespread support among Israeli Jews for policies of Palestinian displacement.

This is where the responsibility of Western governments becomes impossible to separate from the story. Their decades of diplomatic protection, economic cooperation, and refusal to impose meaningful consequences on Israel have helped make the present reality possible. The settlements did not appear overnight. The fragmentation of Palestinian territory, the dispossession of Palestinian communities, and the steady consolidation of Israeli control have unfolded in full view of governments that repeatedly condemned individual decisions while supporting Israel and allowing the larger project to proceed.

The West Bank and Gaza have reached their present condition not despite Western policy, but in significant part because of it.

If Netanyahu does lose, how will Western governments respond?

Imagine what happens if Netanyahu leaves office. The arrival of a new Israeli government would allow Western leaders to stop having to pretend that they are critical of an Israel they never stopped supporting. They would present the new Israeli government as a break with the past, and stifle all questions about their own role in producing that past. Their inaction over the West Bank, and their failure to stop the devastation of Gaza, could be politically absolved by the simple act of supporting a prime minister whose name is not Benjamin Netanyahu. The change of leadership would become a form of political makeup, concealing the continuity of policies that Western governments have enabled for decades.

If Netanyahu steps down, there will be many Western voices calling for the new Israeli prime minister to be given a chance, for a halt to any sanctions, for opening a new chapter with Israel. If those calls are heeded, Israel will have bought itself more time to consolidate its control over Palestinian land and lives, Palestinians will continue to be subjugated and strangled, and Western leaders will be able to avoid questions of complicity and accountability as they resurrect dusty old slogans of peace and hope.