To Understand the Assault on Palestinians, We Must Understand Israel’s Knesset

Part of the Series

Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets in recent days to demand that their government secure a deal that would release Israeli hostages held in Gaza. Nearly two-thirds of Israelis support such a deal — if not to put an end to the genocide, to at least put an end to the war for the sake of their own population. Why won’t their government listen?

U.S. politicians and officials often justify their continued diplomatic and financial support for Israel by claiming that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in July 2020 that the U.S. alliance with Israel is rooted in Israel’s role as “the anchor and foundation for democracy in the region … commitment to Israel’s security is not going away.”

Despite the overwhelming support of their government, many Americans can’t answer the question of whether Israel is a democracy or not. In a 2023 Brookings poll, more than half of the respondents said “I don’t know” when asked to describe whether Israel is a vibrant democracy, a flawed one, a state with restricted minority rights, or a segregated apartheid system. As it stands, U.S. taxpayers foot the bill for Israel’s nearly $4-billion-a-year defense contractor gift card, including many of the weapons being used in Gaza.

The distance between U.S. rhetoric around Israel’s supposed democracy and the actual actions of the Israeli state became clearer than ever on July 18, when the Israeli government passed a resolution rejecting any creation of a Palestinian state — a blow to decades-old U.S. policy and growing international consensus around the necessity for Palestinian self-determination. The resolution, which rejects the establishment of a state even as part of a negotiated settlement with Israel, said “the establishment of a Palestinian state in the heart of the Land of Israel would pose an existential danger to the State of Israel and its citizens, perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and destabilize the region.”

Days later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the United States to address Congress and meet with President Joe Biden at the White House, in another repudiation by the Israeli government of U.S.-led efforts to secure a ceasefire deal.

Ceasefire talks have stalled within the Knesset, the Israeli legislative body, for almost three months since President Biden proposed a deal.

Ceasefire talks have stalled within the Knesset, the Israeli legislative body, for almost three months since President Biden proposed a deal, in large part due to the chokehold that far right ministers within the Israeli Parliament have on the coalition government. In order to understand the current moment, it is essential to understand how the Israeli Knesset works. The heart of the Israeli political system lies in the 120-member Knesset, which functions as both the Israeli legislative body and house of representatives. The Knesset also elects the president, a largely symbolic role as most of the executive power exists under the prime minister.

Knesset members are not elected directly by voters, as Israel has party-list proportional representation. Voters select their preferred parties in an election, and those parties maintain lists of candidates who could potentially win a seat. There is a very low election threshold required to win a seat; a party only needs to receive 3.25 percent of the vote in order to do so. Despite being so low, this threshold was actually raised in 2014 in a controversial election law designed to make it more difficult for small parties to enter the Knesset. The law was passed in reaction to Palestinian-led parties Balad, Hadash, and Ra’am-Ta’al winning 11 seats in the 2013 elections.

For the first 70 years of the State of Israel’s existence, only three of the over 50 political parties ever led governments. In the current coalition, formed during the 2022 election, 10 parties won seats. The majority coalition is made up of members from Likud, Shas, Religious Zionism, United Torah Judaism, Otzma Yehudit and Noam. The opposition is composed of Yesh Atid, National Unity, Yisrael Beiteinu, United Arab List, Hadash-Ta’al (the Joint-List Palestinian-Israeli party), Labor and New Hope. These parties may be more familiar to Americans via their party leaders: Benjamin Netanyahu is the leader of Likud; Yair Lapid represents Yesh Atid; Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir represent Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit, a Kahanist party within Religious Zionism.

Compared to other parliamentary systems, Israel’s is an outlier: it lacks personal and regional components to create accountability to voters. The entire country is a single electoral district which all 120 members of the Knesset represent. This creates, as Dr. Assaf Shapira and Yaniv Roznai of the Israel Democracy Institute write, “an electoral system with extremely limited responsiveness and accountability.”

There are 15 million people living between the river and the sea; 7.5 million of them are Jewish Israelis, and nearly 2 million are Palestinians living within the 1948 borders who hold Israeli citizenship. Another 5 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and Gaza. The Knesset purports to represent only the 9.5 million Jewish Israelis and Palestinian citizens of Israel, but the reality is that the Israeli government exerts a system of occupation and power over all Palestinians in the land.

Palestinian citizens of Israel who reside within the 1948 borders ultimately lack full citizenship rights compared to Jewish Israelis.

Even Palestinian citizens of Israel who reside within the 1948 borders ultimately lack full citizenship rights compared to Jewish Israelis. In 2018, the Knesset passed the Jewish Nation-State Basic Law, altering the constitutional framework of the state and establishing the ethnic-religious identity of the state as exclusively Jewish. The Nation-State law enshrined Jewish supremacy in the land. It codified what had been state policy of discrimination against Palestinians into a law with constitutional status, and was another nail in the coffin for the illusion of Israeli democracy. Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, says the Nation-State law “denies the collective rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel.” Palestinian legal scholar Mazen Masri argued that “this act demonstrates that Israel is closer to apartheid than democracy.”

Palestinian citizens of Israel can vote and run for office, but they are not considered equal players in the political process and their right to political participation is constantly under threat. There are Palestinian political parties in the Israeli landscape, two of which have seats in the current Knesset: Ra’am (or the United Arab List), and Ta’al, which is part of a joint list party composed of Hadash, a left-wing Israeli Jewish party and Ta’al, a Palestinian nationalist political party. Peter Beinart, editor-at-large at Jewish Currents, told Truthout that “the dynamics of left and right [within the Israeli political landscape] cannot be discussed without that segregated structure … there is no political party in Israel that genuinely brings together Palestinians and Jews.”

Despite being deeply unpopular, both before and after October 7, Prime Minister Netanyahu has managed to dominate Israeli politics for nearly 20 years and become largely representative of the Israeli state. The dominant narrative in Israeli political thought is that presence — whether that is settlements, military occupation, or both — equals security. Currently, “there is no one in the Israeli political landscape that challenges [that narrative] … nobody who is articulating a path for (a Palestinian state) here,” Mairav Zonszein, senior analyst on Israel-Palestine for the Crisis Group, told Truthout.

Both Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have said they will leave the majority coalition if the current ceasefire deal is accepted. If Smotrich and Ben-Gvir were to quit, the governing coalition would collapse. But Zonszein says these claims should be viewed with a grain of salt. “Why would they give up their seat in power right now? … [Unless] they’re playing the long game, they understand that they’re building a base and they’ve done quite well in the last couple of years, [and] they see that they need to continue to do that.” It is not very strategic for either of them to lose power in government right now, and Zonszein argues it’s more likely that Netanyahu could keep the coalition intact through concessions with Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. If there is a deal, “they may try to figure out a way to frame [a ceasefire deal] in such a way that the war continues.”

According to public opinion polling, support among Jewish Israelis for far right parties in the Knesset coalition has stayed the same since October 7 with no notable rise. The reality is that many, many Israelis were directly impacted on October 7, and some continue to be by the hostage negotiations. Tens of thousands of Israelis lost all faith in the state’s ability to protect and provide for them. That is going to change the way they think about the country, about the status quo, and could ultimately change the way they vote in the long term.

The protests demanding a hostage deal are not the first mass mobilizations of Netanyahu’s long tenure. Before October 7, the Judicial Reform protests of 2023 politicized a large segment of the Israeli population toward action. These protests were a reaction to what many Jewish Israelis saw as an attempt of religious coercion by the right, wherein Israel would cease to be a liberal democracy for Israeli Jews.

The Judicial Reform protests highlight the inherent inconsistency of the premise of Israeli democracy.

The reality, of course, is that Israel has never been a liberal democracy for Palestinian citizens and the Palestinians living under military occupation. For many Palestinians, these protests seemed incredulous: They displayed an incredible organizing capacity within Israeli society that mobilized in defense of the rights of Israeli Jewish citizens, but aside from the radical bloc, did not acknowledge the illiberal nature of the state’s treatment of Palestinians. Aida Touma-Suleiman, a Palestinian Knesset member of the Joint List, said in 2023 that “not all the demonstrators understand that there is no democracy under a situation of oppressing a minority.”

The Judicial Reform protests highlight the inherent inconsistency of the premise of Israeli democracy, a contradiction that is now more visible to the world than it was before October 7. Palestinians’ demand for freedom — in Gaza, the West Bank and the 1948 borders of the state — is being heard and acknowledged on a scale unlike ever before. As Israel faces increasing international pressure and isolation, Israelis will have to make a choice between continually escalating fascism and a transformation of the fundamental nature of the state that guarantees freedom for Palestinians, and safety, dignity, and a thriving future for everyone between the river and the sea.