This article was originally published by Truthout on Oct. 28, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
Jaffa, Israel — Outside of Ahva Elementary School in Ajami, a historic Palestinian neighborhood just south of central Tel Aviv, the mood was defiant on October 27, the day of Israel’s national elections. “We fear that if we do not get this government out of power, we will lose everything,” one Palestinian voter told me after casting her ballot.
It came as no surprise that she, like most of the Palestinian citizens of Israel I interviewed on Election Day, asked not to be named. Since October 7, 2023, more than 400 Palestinian citizens of Israel have been investigated by police for “incitement,” often over social media posts, according to the legal rights group Adalah.
During the 1948 war, which Palestinians call the Nakba, most of Jaffa’s nearly 100,000 Palestinian residents fled or were expelled. The fewer than 4,000 who remained were concentrated in Ajami, fenced in with barbed wire, where they lived under Israeli military rule until 1949.
Just weeks ago, it was not clear that the parties most Palestinian citizens of Israel vote for would even appear on the ballot. In September, Israel’s Central Elections Committee, a body of party representatives, voted to disqualify both Arab parties — which are led by and draw most of their votes from Palestinian citizens of Israel — from running in the election. The Joint List is an alliance of three parties running together to clear the 3.25 percent threshold needed to enter the Knesset.
Hadash, a left-wing party with roots in Israel’s Communist Party, is the only one of the three with both Jewish and Palestinian members. Ta’al’s platform has historically focused on the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel. Balad, a Palestinian nationalist party, calls for Israel to become a state of all its citizens, with equal rights for everyone.
The other party, running independently, is Ra’am, a conservative Islamist party led by Mansour Abbas, which in 2021 became the first Arab party to join an Israeli governing coalition.
The two Arab parties were eventually reinstated and allowed to run in the Israeli election, but only after an appeal to Israel’s Supreme Court.
As Israelis vote to elect the country’s 26th parliament (Knesset), Palestinian voters in the Ajami neighborhood said Gaza was at the top of their minds. Just down the road is a public memorial displaying photos of some of the more than 20,000 children who have, according to a UN commission, been killed by the Israeli military in Gaza since October 7, 2023.
The memorial, at Hajj Kahil Square, has been torn down more than once. In May, according to Bokra, a Palestinian news site, two men, one of them carrying a rifle, ripped the photos from the walls. The next day, Jaffa residents put them back up and renamed the traffic circle the “Gaza Children’s Roundabout.” Police, who ultimately answer to Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far right minister of national security, have also tried to stop protesters from displaying the images.
Whether or not to participate in Israel’s national elections has long been a fraught topic among Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Whether or not to participate in Israel’s national elections has long been a fraught topic among Palestinian citizens of Israel. Some fear that voting in the election would lend legitimacy to a state that expelled most of their families in 1948 and maintains a military occupation over Palestinians in the West Bank, and that human rights groups say has committed genocide in Gaza; but others view it as their only way to gather power in the Knesset, especially more than three years after October 7.
An unprecedented wave of homicides in the community has also pushed many to the polls. At least 184 Palestinian citizens of Israel have been killed this year, putting 2026 on pace to surpass last year’s record of 252, according to the Abraham Initiatives. Police filed indictments in just 12 percent of homicides in Palestinian communities by June 2026, compared with a historic rate of indictments in 65 percent of cases involving homicides committed against Jewish Israelis.
On Israel’s Election Day, a recorded voice message went out to more than 1 million Palestinian voters from Sousan Sultan, whose sister Susan was killed in April 2025, and whose husband, Ziad, was murdered last August. “My sister was murdered, and she cannot vote in the election,” Sultan said in the recording, asking voters to cast their ballots in her sister’s name.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his main challengers have all ruled out forming a coalition with the Arab parties, even as polls suggest the opposition may struggle to reach a majority without them. Throughout the campaign, Likud (Israel’s largest right-wing party) and its allies have made those parties a frequent target of their campaign ads, using Palestinian electoral power as a way to drum up turnout among anti-Palestinian blocs.
Some ads depict images of Palestinian political leaders, including Ahmad Tibi, who was an adviser to Yasser Arafat, alongside center-right politician Gadi Eisenkot, whose Yashar party leads the opposition, proclaiming the choice is “the right” or “Palestine.”
In the Negev, the desert region in Israel’s south that is home to most of the country’s roughly 300,000 Bedouin citizens, many of whom identify as Palestinians, voter turnout has historically been low. But in this election, that appears to have completely shifted. In the Bedouin village of al-Atawneh, turnout had reached 64 percent by noon on the day of the election, the highest in the country, according to Central Elections Committee data. In the last election, it was 41 percent for the entire day.
“We are seeing record-breaking voter turnout in the Naqab [the Arabic name for the Negev] today for the Knesset elections, reaching unprecedented levels,” Huda Abu Obaid, advocacy coordinator with the Negev Coexistence Forum, told Truthout on Election Day. “However, right-wing groups are intentionally delaying the voting process, forcing voters to wait in excessively long lines.”
Many of the Negev’s Bedouin citizens live in villages the state does not recognize, which lack connection to the national water and electricity grids and where homes face demolition for being built without permits. Israeli authorities demolished a record 5,187 buildings in Bedouin communities in the Negev in 2024 alone, up from 3,283 the year before, according to the Negev Coexistence Forum.
Far right parties sent their own observers to polling stations in Palestinian communities, and rights groups reported long delays in the Galilee, in the north, and the Negev, both home to large Palestinian populations. The Central Elections Committee said it had found no evidence of systematic tampering and that polling stations would stay open past 10:00 pm for anyone still in line.
On Election Day in 2015, Netanyahu warned in a video that Palestinian voters were heading to the polls “in droves,” a message widely credited with driving a late surge in support for Likud. This year, he did it again, warning his base of high Palestinian turnout and claiming, without evidence, that his opponents were trying to steal the election.
With about 84 percent of all votes counted by Wednesday afternoon, no party bloc was close to reaching the 61-seat threshold required to form a majority in the Knesset. Netanyahu’s bloc was the largest, at 54 seats, but it was still down from 68 he held in the outgoing Knesset. Meanwhile, the opposition bloc (composed of all non-Arab parties running to unseat Netanyahu) won 49 seats. The Arab parties won a combined total of 17 seats, the most they have ever won in history. Turnout among Palestinian citizens reached an estimated 80 percent, breaking a record set in 1999, and surpassing the turnout rate among Jewish Israeli voters for the first time ever.
Jafar Farah, director of the Mossawa Center, a Haifa-based advocacy group for Arab citizens of Israel, cautioned against reading too much into the numbers. Farah was elected to the No. 2 spot on Hadash’s slate in May but withdrew in September. He said the rise in Palestinian turnout does not necessarily mean Palestinian citizens have renewed faith in the Israeli state or its institutions, or believe the ballot can end the military occupation of the West Bank (a theme in some of the Joint List’s campaign ads), or change conditions in Gaza. Instead, Farah said, many voters see casting a ballot as a form of “damage control.”
At least 184 Palestinian citizens of Israel have been killed this year.
“The increase in turnout projected in the 2026 polls, if it materializes, cannot automatically be interpreted as a return of trust in the Israeli establishment or in the Arab parties,” Farah said. “It may also reflect a growing sense of the need for political protection in conditions marked by uncertainty.”
A May poll by Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center found that while more than 77 percent of Palestinian citizens of Israel want an Arab party in the next government, only 40 percent believe Jewish Israelis genuinely support a political partnership with them.
Netanyahu’s challengers offer little on the issues many Palestinian voters care about. Eisenkot’s party says it supports Jewish settlement wherever it is carried out legally and opposes a Palestinian state. Eisenkot himself has said anyone still thinking about a two-state solution after October 7 is “simply delusional.” Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who leads the B’Yachad list, has ruled out ceding any land to what he calls Israel’s enemies, an apparent reference to a Palestinian state.
As of today, the math appears simple: Without the Joint List or Ra’am joining the coalition, the opposition appears to have no way to form a majority in the Knesset. Yet Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Liberman, two right-wing opposition leaders, are still ruling out any government that relies on Arab parties, and Eisenkot has not dropped conditions for coalition partners that most Palestinian lawmakers are unlikely to accept.
Palestinian citizens of Israel turned out in record numbers to get the Netanyahu government out of power, but it remains to be seen whether the other opposition parties will join in their efforts.
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