Netanyahu or not, Israel’s settler colonialism will continue

On Tuesday, Israel went to the polls. By the next morning, both Benjamin Netanyahu and Gadi Eisenkot had claimed victory. Exit polls put Likud first, with 53 seats to 48 for Eisenkot’s Yashar, but left both blocs short of the 61 seats needed to govern.

The question now is who will form the next government and whether the two men may end up sharing one.

For many Palestinians, this election matters less for who wins than for what the result reveals to the world and what it conceals.

Mask off

Likud has governed Israel for most of the period since 1977. Netanyahu has held the premiership longer than anyone, outlasting even David Ben-Gurion’s roughly 13 years.

Netanyahu and the parties to his right are the most honest expression of the Israeli state: a state founded on ethnic cleansing and sustained through racism, apartheid, and genocide. Others dress this reality in the language of democracy, coexistence, and peace. Netanyahu does not bother.

In 2019, he said it plainly: “Israel is not a state of all its citizens,” but “the nation-state of the Jewish people and them alone.” That year, his campaign ran on “Bibi or Tibi,” casting Palestinian lawmaker Ahmad Tibi and the Palestinian citizens of Israel he represents as the threat voters had to defeat. His official Facebook page urged Israelis to stop a government dependent on “Arabs who want to destroy us all women, children and men.” This year, one of his central campaign slogans is “The right or Palestine.”

The 2018 Nation-State Law, passed under Netanyahu, declared that the right to national self-determination in Israel belongs exclusively to the Jewish people and enshrined Jewish settlement as a “national value.” His government did not invent this principle; it gave legal form to the principle on which the Zionist project was founded.

Since then, Israel has approved dozens of new settlements and retroactively legalised unauthorised outposts. In February 2026, it went further, reopening West Bank land registration for the first time since 1967. In Area C, land that Palestinians cannot prove they own under Israeli procedures can be registered as Israeli state land and made available for settlement.

Meanwhile, state-backed settler violence has reached record levels. And then there is Gaza.

Netanyahu’s unfiltered colonial politics have forced both the Israeli public and world leaders to confront what they have spent decades refusing to see.

A “liberal” or “centrist” government would not undo this. It would launder it. We have seen this before: settlements expanded under Labour governments, including through the Oslo years, while the world applauded a peace process.

Mask on

A friendlier face in Tel Aviv would give many in the “international community” the excuse they have been waiting for to look away.

Consider Eisenkot, Netanyahu’s main challenger and leader of the “centrist” Yashar party. He was a central decision-maker in the Israeli occupation army, rising to chief of staff and later sitting in Netanyahu’s war cabinet after 7 October. He publicly articulated the Dahiya Doctrine: the strategy of overwhelming force against civilian areas used in Lebanon and Gaza.

Eisenkot’s party promises a “Jewish and democratic” state- ethnonationalism, but made to look democratic. He rejects the two-state solution that Washington and Brussels still present as the road to peace. His objection to Ben-Gvir and Smotrich is not what they do, but how it looks abroad.

The West, the EU included, has hoped an opposition victory would whitewash Israel’s image. The election results point the other way: over 77% of Israelis voted for right-wing and far-right parties, around 15%, largely Palestinian citizens of Israel, backed the Arab parties, and just 6.51% voted for the Zionist left.

The result also exposes the limits of framing opposition to Netanyahu as an awakening to the horrors committed by the state. Given a choice, most Israeli voters did not opt for a fundamentally different agenda; they endorsed the same core project of Jewish supremacy and Palestinian dispossession, and they backed the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Across the political spectrum, Israel has shed any pretence of democratic equality. Arab citizens are delegitimised: their parties were banned before the vote and reinstated only by the courts, and their turnout was branded an “emergency” on election day.

Their record result has been met with cries of a stolen election and demands that their leaders be interrogated and arrested, and a further crackdown on their rights now looks all but certain. Even the “centrist” opposition refuses to govern with them.

The difference between “moderate” and “extremist” Zionism lies less in its goals than in how it presents them to the outside world.

Both currents seek to preserve Israel as a state that privileges Jewish nationality and control over historic Palestine. “Moderate” Zionism speaks the language of democracy, security and a negotiated settlement while continuing settlement expansion, military occupation and the structural exclusion of Palestinians.

“Extremist” Zionism says the same things openly: annexation, transfer, Jewish supremacy, making the underlying reality harder for Western allies to ignore.

Eisenkot and figures like him do not oppose the system so much as manage its image. Their objection to Ben-Gvir and Smotrich is not that Palestinian rights are being denied, but that the denial has become too visible, too crude and too damaging to Israel’s standing abroad.

The “moderate” opposition offers a more presentable version of the same political order: one that Washington and Brussels can still call “Jewish and democratic,” even as that democratic claim becomes impossible to sustain.

Every Israeli election, regardless of the outcome, offers Palestinians, whether those eligible to vote or not, the same choice: one settler-colonial project, with or without the mask.

I would rather see it without.

It is a grim truth that we live in a world where people and leaders often wait for Palestinians to suffer visibly before they speak or act against Israel’s colonial occupation. And it is crueller still that Palestinians are expected to choose between those who kill us brutally and those who would kill us just as surely, only more slowly, and in a manner more acceptable to the international community.

Tamam Abusalama is a Palestinian-Belgian communications professional, born and raised in the Jabalia Refugee Camp. She is currently leading the strategy for the European Citizens’ Initiative Justice for Palestine, which calls for the full suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement.

Follow Tamam on X: @TamamBeitJirja

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.