Across the Western world, politicians have discovered an unusual shortcut to electoral relevance. Rather than talking about housing, education, healthcare, crime or the cost of living, they campaign on Palestine.
The issue is particularly potent in constituencies with large Muslim populations or a significant far-left organising presence. Even in municipal elections, where candidates are supposed to concern themselves with rubbish collection, schools and public transport, Israel can somehow become the central question.
A global campaign has even emerged around the slogan “Palestine is on the ballot”, encouraging voters to judge candidates according to their position on a conflict thousands of miles away.
The phenomenon has reached almost parodic proportions. New Zealand now has a political movement called the Palestine Free from the River to the Sea Party. Five of its six founding principles concern Israel and the Palestinians, including the “dismantling of the Zionist structure of the state of Israel”. The sixth advocates withdrawal from Western military alliances, particularly those involving the United States.
Apparently, even in one of the world’s most remote democracies, Israel must dominate the ballot paper.
Yet amid this extraordinary international fixation, there is one country where Palestine will barely feature in the coming election: Israel.
Israel faces an intensely divisive upcoming campaign. The parties will clash over responsibility for the failures of October 7, the conduct of the war, ultra-Orthodox enlistment, the judiciary, the economy and Benjamin Netanyahu’s continued leadership. However, the creation of a Palestinian state is unlikely to be a defining issue.
The left-wing Democrats may include the two-state solution in their manifesto. Bezalel Smotrich and the Religious Zionist Party will trumpet settlement expansion as a means of preventing one, but the larger parties competing to lead the next government are unlikely to place negotiations with the Palestinians near the centre of their campaigns.
This is not merely because Israelis have moved to the right. It is because the conventional peace-process debate has almost entirely disappeared from Israeli political consciousness.
Even before October 7, it was difficult to remember an election in which negotiations with the Palestinian leadership featured prominently. After almost three years of war, the idea has become still more remote.
Israelis remember that the war began with the murder of around 1,200 people and the abduction of 251 others. They remember the rape, torture and burning of civilians. They know that the attack came from Gaza, a territory from which Israel withdrew every soldier and civilian in 2005, handing it to the Palestinian Authority, only for Hamas to brutally seize power two years later and turn it into a heavily armed base for terrorism.
For many Israelis, withdrawal is therefore no longer associated with peace. It is associated with rockets, tunnels, destruction and massacres.
They also see the incitement that continues across Palestinian society. They have watched celebrations of terrorism and opinion polls showing persistent support for the October 7 attack.
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas eventually distanced himself from the massacre, but his condemnation came too late and too reluctantly to restore Israeli confidence in the Palestinian Authority as a credible partner.
The problem is not that Palestinians want a state. It is that too many Israelis believe Palestinian political culture remains more committed to ending Israel’s existence than to building a state alongside it.
Perhaps the greatest change, however, is generational. Israelis voting for the first time this year have no memory of an Israeli prime minister and a Palestinian leader conducting meaningful negotiations, or even being in the same room. The peace process is not something they watched collapse. It is something they know only from history books.
The last serious negotiations took place nearly two decades ago, when Ehud Olmert made Mahmoud Abbas an extraordinarily far-reaching offer which met almost one hundred percent of Palestinian demands.
Abbas simply walked away.
Since then, young Israelis have grown up through rocket attacks, stabbing and car-ramming assaults, waves of terrorism and, finally, October 7.
They have never experienced the Palestinian leadership as a partner. They have experienced it primarily as a source of danger, rejection or incitement.
This explains why even many Israelis who once supported the peace camp no longer regard Palestinian statehood as an immediate answer. The relevant question is no longer what borders such a state would have, but what would prevent Hamas or another terrorist movement from taking it over. Who would disarm it? Who would stop Iranian weapons entering? Who would ensure that the hills overlooking Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion Airport did not become another launchpad for attack?
These are not abstract objections. They arise from lived experience.
Security will therefore dominate Israel’s election. Even the bitter argument over ultra-Orthodox enlistment will ultimately be framed through security and the need to build an army capable of defending the country on several fronts. Avigdor Liberman, one of the most persistent advocates of sharing the military burden, is currently campaigning under the slogan: “We must achieve a decisive victory.”
Meanwhile, foreign politicians continue arriving to lecture Israelis about Palestinian statehood. Potential US presidential contenders Rahm Emanuel and Ro Khanna have recently used visits to Israel to advance their own positions on the conflict and bolster their standing at home.
Whatever their convictions, both are also speaking to Democratic voters at home.
That is the wider reality. Across much of the West, Palestine has become less a foreign-policy question than an instrument of domestic politics. It provides candidates with votes, activist enthusiasm and a place in the ongoing culture war.
Its political usefulness frequently bears little relationship to conditions on the ground in the Middle East.
Those closest to the conflict see matters differently. They do not view Palestinian statehood as a slogan, a badge of moral virtue or a device for winning an inner-city constituency. They see the possibility of another failed state, another terrorist enclave and another front in a region already containing far too many.
Across the world, politicians insist that Palestine is on the ballot. In Israel, where the consequences would actually be lived, it scarcely registers at all.
Ashley Perry is a former senior Israeli government adviser who has worked with eight cabinet ministers, was a former advisor to the Negev Forum, and has been involved in Israeli politics and every election campaign for the past two decades
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