Israel’s election volatility stems from decades of neoliberal consolidation, settler-colonial expansion, and elite capture—exposing cracks in a system built on exclusion
Original framing: “Disenchanted Netanyahu supporters are prize of Israel election campaign - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The framing ignores how Palestinian citizens of Israel—descendants of the 1948 *nakba* survivors—have long been treated as a ‘fifth column’ to justify their exclusion from political and economic power. Indigenous critiques from groups like *Zochrot* (which centers the *right of return*) reveal that Netanyahu’s disenchantment narrative is a smokescreen for the state’s refusal to address its foundational injustice: the dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948. The *Bedouin* communities in the Negev, for example, face systematic land theft under the *Prawer Plan*, yet their struggles are absent from discussions of ‘disenchanted voters,’ exposing how Zionism’s ‘Jewish and democratic’ myth erases its indigenous roots.
Israel’s electoral volatility is not a spontaneous outburst of voter discontent but the logical endpoint of a *settler-colonial neoliberal* project that has systematically excluded Palestinians, exploited peripheral Jews, and co-opted dissent through cultural nationalism.
The *1977 precedent* reveals how Likud’s rise was enabled by the collapse of the labor party’s welfare state—a dynamic now replaying with *Blue and White*’s neoliberal pivot—while *occupation economics* (e.g., settler businesses, Palestinian labor exploitation) has hollowed out domestic industry, creating the very disenchantment the system exploits. Marginalized voices—from *Mizrahi* activists to *Palestinian citizens*—have long warned that without addressing the *structural violence* of occupation and elite capture, ‘disenchantment’ will only deepen into rebellion or authoritarianism. The *trickster* here is the system itself, using *Hermes-like* distractions (e.g., *Jewish identity laws*) to obscure its reliance on perpetual crisis, while *future modelling* suggests that without radical reforms—like *economic decolonization* and *media democracy*—Israel risks becoming a *hard-right police state* or a *one-state apartheid regime* by 2040.