Ramallah - Driving in the occupied West Bank, motorists are confronted with a barrage of campaign billboards for the Israeli elections.
The messages are geared towards Israeli settlers in the territory, not the Palestinians barred from voting.
Many of the posters express support for National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s far-right Jewish Power party, as he draws his core voter base from settlers.
But there are also numerous posters for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud party, including an ominous ad along the road to Jerusalem featuring Zohran Mamdani and Ayatollah Khomeini, warning against the power of Palestinian allies.
Against this radicalised backdrop, Israelis will head to the polls on Tuesday in an election that many hope will spell the end of Netanyahu’s 19-year non-consecutive rule as prime minister.
The election comes in the wake of growing domestic resentment against Netanyahu over reports of his advanced knowledge of the 7 October attacks.
Netanyahu’s Likud is seemingly facing an uphill battle against a bloc of four Jewish opposition parties that have joined forces to defeat him: the Yashar party, the Democrats, the Yisrael Beitenu party, and the Together alliance.
After the bloc’s establishment, the parties announced their goal was to “preserve and strengthen Israel as a Jewish and democratic state”.
The elections are projected to be a near deadlock with no bloc winning an absolute majority. That outcome would trigger a period of negotiations and coalition building, where different parties must agree to come together to form a government.
But as settler violence reaches record levels in the West Bank, many Palestinians are left wondering: will any electoral outcome change the facts on the ground?
West Bank violence surges ahead of election
Approximately 750,000 Israelis live in settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem today, illegal under international law.
The settlers comprise a disproportionately powerful bloc in Israeli politics, despite accounting for around 7-8% of the total Israeli population.
Under Netanyahu’s current administration, which has brought settlers from the far-right fringes into a governing coalition, the settlers’ political influence has coincided with a rapid acceleration of settlement expansion.
But it’s unlikely that another government would slow the pace of settlement building.
“In order to ameliorate pressure from the settler lobby, the left often are tempted to expand settlements even more than the right,” Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, a political commentator and former Israeli diplomat, tells The New Arab.
“It [the opposition winning] might even lead to an increase in settlement construction in order to pay them off for concessions.”
As settlements expand, so does the pressure on Palestinians living nearby. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) recorded an average of six settler attacks per day this year thus far.
Those numbers were released before the autumnal olive harvest commenced, when violence dramatically escalates as settlers launch coordinated attacks against Palestinian farmers in their olive groves.
And after two Palestinian gunmen opened fire on an Israeli checkpoint on 23 October, Ben-Gvir suggested that Palestinians should be barred from driving on the roads in the West Bank - or the land of Judea and Samaria, as he refers to it.
The Israeli army subsequently launched a collective punishment operation and began home demolitions across the neighbourhood where the shooters hailed from, displacing 400 families thus far.
Netanyahu has promised the biggest military occupation in the West Bank since 1967, though many experts say he may be bluffing to bolster support for Likud ahead of the elections.
The election will now take place against a backdrop of expanding settlements, escalating settler violence, and increasingly severe restrictions on Palestinian movement, fuelling fears that tensions across the West Bank are near boiling point.
“There are a lot of people in the Israeli security forces who want Palestinians to have a better quality of life, just so that the West Bank doesn't explode into another Intifada,” says Ben-Ephraim.
Projected electoral outcomes
Netanyahu’s main rival, Gadi Eisenkot of Yashar!, is seen as the leading centrist alternative for Prime Minister.
Eisenkot has promised to rein in settler violence while firmly opposing a two-state solution. Once the Israeli army Chief of Staff, Eisenkot was the architect of the Dahiyeh Doctrine in 2006, which advocates "disproportionate force” against Israel’s perceived enemies.
“None of the Israeli governments that would come is going to give a Palestinian state to the Palestinians, but change may come, depending on how you define change,” Muhanned Qafesha, a Palestinian journalist from Hebron, tells The New Arab.
An Eisenkot government could mean greater restrictions on settler violence and a slight change in settlement policy, without fundamentally interfering with the settler project.
Alternatively, if Netanyahu secures another term or temporarily heads a caretaker government if a stalemate arises, the settlers in his administration may feel their time is limited and accelerate their existing plans for the annexation of the West Bank.
As it stands, neither major political bloc is projected to secure the 61 seats needed for a majority in Israel’s 120-seat parliament.
While the opposition bloc has sworn not to form a coalition with either of the Palestinian parties on the ballot - the left-leaning Joint List and the United Arab List (Ra’am) - that pledge may not hold, as they could be a potential lifeline to forming a government.
“The two Arab parties can maybe win like 15 seats or something, and this will make a huge difference because if they can make a coalition with the opposition, they can kick out Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir,” Qafesha tells The New Arab.
“I do believe that the opposition in Israel is saying they won’t form a coalition with the Arabs because they want to get as many votes from the Jewish community as possible. But if they need the Arab parties to form a coalition to kick out Netanyahu, they might do it,” he adds.
But any coalition will also depend on parties that oppose Palestinian statehood, and thus a fundamental shift in Israel’s approach to the occupation is virtually impossible.
Even if Eisenkot eventually forms a government, his fragile coalition across the ideological spectrum would struggle to agree on significant changes towards settlement policy in the West Bank.
Will the opposition improve life in the West Bank?
The 3.4 million Palestinians living in the West Bank under military occupation cannot vote in Israeli elections, but Palestinian citizens of Israel can.
Arab voters have long boycotted Israeli elections, but there has been a recent push for their participation - with a record turnout for the group anticipated.
The vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank want Palestinian citizens of Israel to vote in the elections to improve their daily lives, explains Qafesha, who himself cannot vote.
He believes an administration without settlers at the helm may alleviate some of the daily struggles in the West Bank.
“We live in hell. We just want to breathe,” Qafesha says.
But if Netanyahu finally goes down, some Palestinians believe Western governments may attempt to rehabilitate Israel’s image under a new administration - and lift the recent round of European sanctions against settlements that were years in the making.
“The upcoming election is between fascists and ultra-fascists. If Netanyahu loses the chance to lead the next government, his loss can be used to alleviate the pressure that is just starting to build from the international community,” Mazin Qumsiyeh, Director of Palestine’s Natural History Museum in Bethlehem, tells The New Arab.
Yet Qafesha remains adamant that the reality on the ground is more important than the views of the international community, which could promote a new government as an example of Israel’s return to democracy.
“Over the past three years, Israel has killed more than 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza. What has the world done for us? Has anything changed in our life? I don't want the view of the world to change at the expense of the blood of Palestinian children, whether it's in Gaza, West Bank, or Jerusalem,” says Qafesha.
An opposition government less reliant on far-right parties could potentially curb some of the policies driving unchecked violence and forced displacement, ameliorating a few of the numerous obstacles to a dignified life under occupation. But any improvement would likely be limited in scope.
“If the opposition wins, the intensity of the ethnic cleansing will probably somewhat lessen, but it's only temporary,” concludes Ben-Ephraim.
“I think that the Israeli public opinion has turned so far in favour of genocide and ethnic cleansing that it will just be a respite at best.”
Kate McMahon is a freelance journalist and foreign correspondent focused on the Middle East and South Asia. She reports on environmental change, human rights, and geopolitical conflicts
Follow her on Instagram: @katemontanaa
Edited by Charlie Hoyle