Israel voted for Israel: Why Gaza wasn’t on the ballot
Israel's parliament remains in deadlock after neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition nor the opposition alliance secured the required 61 seats for a majority in the October 27 polls.
After one of the highest voter turnouts in decades, neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition nor the self-styled Zionist opposition alliance secured the 61 seats required for a parliamentary majority in the October 27 polls. Netanyahu's camp came first, with 53 seats, five more than the main opposition bloc. The Arab parties surged to a record 19 seats but have been relegated to merely observing coalition negotiations.
Gaza absent from ballot
The judicial reforms ushered in at the start of Netanyahu's government term in 2022 provoked the largest street protests in Israel's history, while the prime minister himself is still embroiled in a corruption trial dating back to 2019. Alleged failures ahead of the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, that triggered Israel's war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have still to be reckoned with, despite overwhelming public pressure to do so.
Nevertheless, roughly 2.38 million Israelis on Tuesday made the journey to the polls to back Netanyahu's coalition, led by his Likud party, while some 2.21 million cast their ballots for the opposition alliance. Between the two, little space was given to examine the multiple war crimes Israel stands accused of having carried out in Gaza, where Israeli attacks have killed more than 74,500 people and left much of it in ruins.
Internal issues dominate
Analysts said the fact that neither Gaza nor the West Bank were a deciding factor in how Israelis voted was largely because they already represented an area of broad agreement across both alliances. Instead, the election was fought on largely internal issues: the power of Israel's courts, whether members of the ultra-Orthodox minority should be exempted from military service, and whether the government's alleged culpability in missing the warnings of the October 2023 attack should be examined.
Many Israelis know that Gaza has been devastated, even though they are exposed to a very selective representation of that devastation. But knowing something and recognising its moral and political implications are different things.
Denial mechanism
For Shenhav-Shahrabani, there has been "a powerful mechanism of denial" at work. "Not necessarily denial of the facts, but denial of their meaning," he said. "Ordinary people, who love their families, care for their friends, and consider themselves decent human beings, can participate in or acquiesce to a political order that produces immense suffering for others." For Netanyahu's supporters, however, this denial could be traced to something more personal.
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