A victory for Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition will set Israel’s expansionist West Bank policy in stone.

It has become customary for Israelis to describe the coming general elections, scheduled for October 27, as one of, if not the most, significant in the country’s history. Many view these elections as likely to affect the most important pillars of their country’s democracy. Abroad, attention seems to focus more on the negative trajectory of the current Israeli government’s policies and the odds that its next governing coalition can reverse them. So what are these elections about that so many Israelis attach such critical importance to? And what important issues are likely to be affected by the outcome of these elections even if they are not central to the debate waged among the competing parties? 

The first issue of the 2026 Israeli elections is accountability for Israel’s surprise at the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack. The focus here is on the current Likud-led government’s opposition to establishing a National Commission of Inquiry to ascertain the causes of Israel’s lack of preparedness for Hamas’ horrific attack. This opposition, maintained for some three years, violates the tradition established some five decades ago when the Israeli government established the Agranat Commission to study the reasons for the Israeli government’s failure to anticipate Egyptian and Syrian surprise attacks at the outset of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. 

Moreover, whereas Israel’s leaders of the early 1970s—primarily Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan—ultimately took responsibility for their errors and resigned, Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, continues to avoid taking any such steps. Because all opposition parties support such an institutional process of reckoning, the coming Israeli elections will serve as a referendum on this issue.

The second issue the coming Israeli elections address is the exemption of the ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews from service in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). While this exemption was granted soon after the country’s independence was declared in 1948 and was tolerated by most Israelis decades later, that is no longer the case. When the exemption was originally granted, it applied to very few Israelis. But the rapid growth of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community in the past decades now means that 80,000 Israeli men are eligible for exemption from what many Israelis consider a national duty.

Public resentment of this privilege increased significantly with Hamas’ October 7 attack and the consequent multi-front war. The three-year war, now longer than any war in Israel’s history, demands many more boots on the ground: conscripts and reservists who must provide hundreds of days of service to the detriment of their financial well-being and their family affairs.

This inequality has been further exacerbated by the ultra-Orthodox community’s decades-long success in extracting state subsidies and other concessions from the Israeli state, including generous support for religious schools that often neglect STEM education to the detriment of Israel’s future workforce. As a result, the ever-growing community is dependent on government subsidies funded by the country’s non-Orthodox taxpayers. Non-Orthodox Israeli anger at this state of affairs has made burden-sharing the second issue on which the coming elections can be regarded as a referendum.

The outcome of the coming elections will determine two other important and interrelated issues, but they are not central to the competing parties’ election campaigns. The first of these is the anarchy that Israel’s current government has permitted to develop in the West Bank. In political science, anarchy is the state of affairs in which no entity maintains a monopoly on the use of force within its territory. In the Middle East, at least four countries are currently in a state of anarchy: Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen. In all these entities, armed factions limit the state’s coercive power so that governments are not the only source of national decision-making. 

In some cases of anarchy, the competing sources of power have acquired a demonstrated ability to act independently even against neighboring states. Such was the case when, in the summer of 2006, Hezbollah attacked an Israeli patrol just south of the border without the Lebanese government’s approval, resulting in the launching of the Second Lebanon War. A more recent case is the drone attacks launched by pro-Iranian militias in Iraq against US bases and other targets in Saudi Arabia.

In the West Bank, young Israeli extremists known as the “Youth of the Hills” have targeted Palestinian villages, homes, and agricultural land for many years and aim to expand Israeli control of the area by harassing Palestinians into abandoning their homes and way of life. For many years, however, these radical youth groups were of small numbers and mostly unarmed.

All of this has changed, however, after the formation of Israel’s current government in early 2023, with the Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, granting thousands of settlers permits to carry weapons. Both Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich shielded such violent youth, even when caught by law enforcement personnel. Consequently, such armed extremists have proliferated in number and escalated their attacks in the West Bank over the last year, launching what other Israelis have come to describe as “Pogroms”—a term borrowed from the deadly mob attacks against Jewish communities in Eastern Europe during the 19th and early 20th centuries. 

The growing anarchy in the West Bank has also become a major issue in Israel’s foreign relations. European governments have protested, and some have taken steps to sanction Jewish activists and firms doing business in the West Bank. Even US Ambassador Mike Huckabee condemned the breakdown of order. No less important, Israel’s neighbor, Jordan, is increasingly alarmed that the growing anarchy in the West Bank will press Palestinians to immigrate to the East Bank, presenting the kingdom with an existential “demographic threat.”

In September 2026, the cumulative effect of these concerns compelled the Israeli government to raise the IDF presence in the West Bank to a total of 25 battalions. And yet armed Jewish youth attacks against Palestinian dwellers and farmers continue. In such anarchic conditions, Israel is no longer capable of enforcing law in an area that is adjacent to its largest and most prosperous metropolitan areas. While the coming Israeli elections are not technically a referendum on the West Bank issue, their results will likely significantly affect whether the state launches a massive effort to end the anarchy in the West Bank by arresting and/or disarming the violent extremists. 

Another issue shaped by Israel’s coming elections is the broader realm of the country’s foreign relations. Had Israelis assessed that there is a Palestinian partner to implementing a two-state solution to the conflict, the coming elections might have become a referendum about such a plan. But Israelis currently see no such partner and hence do not view such a solution as implementable. Given the weakness and illegitimacy of the formal Palestinian leadership in Ramallah and its failure to produce even one important initiative during the last three years—among the most consequential in Palestinian’s history—this negative Israeli assessment is not seriously challenged by important foreign governments. 

Instead, Israel’s relations with some of these governments and with important constituencies within these countries are affected by the extent to which Israeli policies and measures are viewed as harming, if not destroying, any hope for a future contiguous Palestinian state. Israel’s current government’s plan to construct thousands of additional housing units in the area east of Jerusalem marked as E-1 is one such measure. Not surprisingly, it is strongly opposed even by European governments that traditionally support Israeli security and prosperity. Whether Israel’s next government will continue or abandon such policies will be strongly shaped by the coming elections and closely watched by European governments and key constituencies in the United States.

About the Author: Shai Feldman

Shai Feldman is the Raymond Frankel chair of Israeli politics and society at Brandeis University’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies. From 2005 to 2019, Shai founded and served as director of the Crown Center. From 1997 to 2005, he served as head of Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies. He was a senior research associate at the Jaffee Center and, from 2019 to 2022, he served as president of Sapir College in Sha’ar Hanegev, Israel. Since 1997, he has also served as a board associate of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

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