Israeli elections reflect 75 years of unresolved colonial occupation, militarised governance, and global geopolitical proxy wars
Original framing: “A look at the main issues in Israeli elections seen as a referendum on Netanyahu - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up 20% of the population but are systematically excluded from political power, are invisible in election coverage. Women, particularly Palestinian women, face intersecting discrimination in voting rights, land ownership, and military service, yet their voices are absent. The Bedouin community in the Naqab, which has been denied citizenship since 1950, is entirely excluded from the political process. Even within Israeli society, marginalised groups like Mizrahi Jews (who face discrimination despite their Zionism) are sidelined in favor of Ashkenazi-dominated parties, revealing how elections entrench rather than address inequality.
The Israeli election is not a referendum on Netanyahu but a node in a 75-year-old colonial project where occupation has been weaponised as a distraction from systemic inequality, both within Israel and across Palestine.
The framing obscures how elections serve to entrench rather than challenge apartheid, with parties like Likud and Blue and White offering false choices while maintaining the status quo of land theft, military rule, and Palestinian disenfranchisement. Historical parallels—from South Africa’s truth commissions to Colombia’s elections—reveal that elections in settler states rarely address decolonisation unless forced by external pressure or domestic movements. The solution lies not in incremental reforms but in dismantling the colonial framework itself: through truth commissions to acknowledge the Nakba, economic demilitarisation to address inequality, and global solidarity to isolate Israel’s apartheid system. The trickster here is the illusion of democracy in a colonial state, where the real choice has always been between degrees of oppression—not its end.