With Israel’s October 27 election approaching, voters face a consequential choice over who should govern the country, but a less obvious one over the direction in which it should go. The main opposition parties are campaigning against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership and record, promising greater competence, institutional repair, and improved relations with international partners. Yet on some of the most consequential and strategic questions facing Israel—particularly the future of the Palestinians and the basic premises of Israeli security policy—there is considerably less distinction.
This points to a deeper transformation in Israeli politics: political competition remains intense, but the range of strategic choices has narrowed. Parties can criticize the conduct of a war while accepting its broader strategic assumptions. They can oppose settlement expansion without supporting a comprehensive political settlement. They can call for improved relations with neighboring states while insisting that existing security arrangements remain largely unchanged. Underlying all this is a securitization trap in which it is much easier politically to double down on a failed security paradigm than to propose, defend, and sustain a new diplomatic approach.
The result is an election that is shaping up to be as much a contest over stewardship as policy. A different government could bring meaningful changes in conduct and priorities, but it is far less clear that it would bring a fundamentally different approach to the most strategically important issues.
How the Options Narrowed
The decline of Israel’s traditional left is one reason those options have narrowed. In a stark indication of what that has entailed, Israel’s Labor Party—once the most dominant grouping in the country—secured only four Knesset seats in the 2022 legislative elections, down from 44 seats in 1992, when it spearheaded the Oslo peace process. Meretz—Labor’s partner in the 1992 coalition—failed to enter parliament during the 2022 election. In 2024, both parties formed a joint electoral framework, The Democrats, while retaining separate organizational structures. Their electoral decline is striking, but cannot by itself explain the changing boundaries of political debate.
Demographic shifts, religious and national identities, party leadership and broader ideological changes contributed to the traditional left’s decline. The collapse of the Oslo process and the violence of the second intifada also weakened confidence in negotiations, strengthening arguments that what Israeli politicians called territorial concessions could create further insecurity. Parties associated with compromise found it harder to persuade much of the Jewish electorate.
Although new parties fill Israel’s political center, power has become unattainable absent support from the political right. With Netanyahu and his Likud party the most dominant force in Israeli politics over the past 15 years, the principal alternative has been the kind of broad coalition assembled in 2021.
The 2021 unity coalition was instructive, showing the limits of political change without a shared strategy. Eight parties spanning the right, center, left, and an Arab party formed a government despite deep disagreements. With the left diminished and only one Arab party accepted as a partner, unseating Netanyahu required right-wing allies, and such a government could hold together only by keeping the Palestinian question off its agenda. The coalition could cooperate on a limited domestic agenda but had no common approach to more decisive issues.
The government’s record bears this out. In its first year, it advanced plans for 7,292 settlement housing units, 26 percent above the annual average under Netanyahu’s governments, according to Peace Now; its Meretz and Labor ministers protested, but the plans went ahead. In October 2021, Defense Minister Benny Gantz designated six Palestinian human rights groups as terrorist organizations. What the coalition could agree on, as Israel Policy Forum noted, were work permits and tax transfers to the Palestinian Authority: measures to “shrink the conflict,” not resolve it.
A revealing incident occurred in September 2022. When caretaker Prime Minister Yair Lapid endorsed a two-state solution at the UN General Assembly, he presented it as serving Israel’s security. Yet members of his own coalition challenged the proposal. Justice Minister Gideon Sa’ar warned that Palestinian statehood would endanger Israel’s security, while Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked insisted that Lapid was speaking for himself, not the government. She also said the coalition had agreed to keep the issue off its agenda. Thus, a proposal defended on security grounds was rejected by coalition partners using the same language of security.
The unity government had already collapsed in June 2022 amid defections and internal disputes, allowing Netanyahu to return to power at the head of the most right-wing coalition in Israel’s history. But the experiment left behind a broader lesson for the opposition: defeating Netanyahu required assembling a coalition whose ideological breadth made agreement on weighty issues exceedingly difficult. Replacing Netanyahu was possible; constructing a governing majority around a fundamentally different strategy was much harder.
The Securitization Trap
October 7 did little to loosen these constraints. If anything, it reinforced them. The failure of Israel’s prewar security strategy created an opening to reconsider not only how Israel managed threats from Gaza and elsewhere, but whether military containment without a political strategy could provide durable security. Instead, the dominant response has been to revise the means while preserving the underlying premise: insecurity is primarily a problem to be managed through superior military force.
This is where Israel’s securitization trap becomes most apparent. In political science, securitization describes the process through which issues are framed as existential security threats, making exceptional responses easier to justify and alternatives harder to defend. The problem is not that security concerns are necessarily exaggerated or illegitimate. It is that once security becomes the dominant framework for understanding a political problem, the costs of departing from established policy can appear more immediate than the costs of maintaining it.
October 7 discredited a particular security strategy without discrediting the primacy of security strategy itself. Israel’s response to the Hamas-led attack did not produce a comparable reckoning over its political approach to Gaza and the Palestinians. Instead, it prompted a reassessment of how Israel should confront Palestinians and regional adversaries, producing an even more militarized approach.
A July 2026 analysis by the Politics & Society Institute describes a shift from relying on containment and deterrence toward pre-emptive operations and efforts to prevent adversaries from rebuilding their capabilities. This is an analysis of evolving practice, not an officially adopted security doctrine.
That dynamic helps explain why the persistence of insecurity does not necessarily weaken the prevailing approach. Military operations may degrade an adversary, disrupt its capabilities or prevent an immediate attack without resolving the political conditions that generate recurring confrontation. When insecurity returns, leaders can reconsider whether the existing strategy can achieve their long-term objectives—or argue that the threat requires a stronger version of the same strategy. In a political environment dominated by security concerns, the latter is often easier to defend. The continued existence of the threat can therefore become the justification for preserving the paradigm, even when it has failed to produce lasting security.
Notably, Israeli majorities have backed the use of force while doubting the government directing it. In June 2026, 69 percent of Jewish Israelis supported military action against Hezbollah in Lebanon and 61 percent supported military action against Iran, even at the cost of a confrontation with President Trump; that September, 72 percent of Jewish Israelis rejected any withdrawal from Gaza that left no Israeli security perimeter inside the Strip. Yet only 34 percent of the public were satisfied with the government’s management of the war, compared with 61 percent for the IDF’s. The disagreement is less over the premises of the war than over how it has been managed.
Moreover, security remains central to how Israelis vote even when voters do not agree on particular policy outcomes. A September 2026 survey by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 39 percent of Jewish respondents ranked foreign affairs and security among their two most important voting considerations, roughly level with economic concerns. For 68 percent of Jewish respondents, October 7 was central to their party choice. The figures show the premium voters continue to place on security credibility.
That helps explain why the opposition has stronger incentives to compete with Netanyahu over competence than to challenge the premises of Israeli security policy. Gadi Eisenkot, one of the opposition’s leading figures, is the architect of the military doctrine being used by the current government in Gaza and the region more broadly. His appeal therefore rests in significant measure on the proposition that Israel requires more credible stewardship of its security establishment, rather than a fundamental departure from the security-centered paradigm that has shaped Israeli policy. The electoral contest can consequently be fierce even as the strategic distance between the principal alternatives remains comparatively narrow.
Conclusion
The October election therefore presents Israeli voters with a consequential choice, but not necessarily between competing strategic visions. Netanyahu’s opponents can plausibly promise greater competence, institutional repair, and better relations with allies. These differences matter. But they largely concern how Israel is governed rather than the assumptions guiding its approach to the Palestinians and regional security.
That is the deeper constraint hanging over the election. The decline of the left, coalition arithmetic, the legacy of October 7 and the continuing primacy of security have narrowed the space for strategic alternatives. Israel may change the government managing its insecurity without changing the paradigm through which that insecurity is understood. The election may therefore bring meaningful change in leadership and conduct while leaving the country’s broader strategic direction largely intact.
