🔻 Why are the anti-Palestinian positions so prominent in these captive elections?
🖌BBC monitoring department.
The October 27 election witnessed some of the most blatant anti-Palestinian statements ever seen in Israel's captive politics.
Both Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of the Israeli POWs, and his main opponent, Gadi Eisenkot, pledged to maintain the presence of Israeli POWs in Gaza and rejected the establishment of a Palestinian state.
This political literature was also extended to the captive Palestinian citizens of Israel, and attempts were made to exclude Palestinian parties from participating in the elections and to exclude them from the coalition negotiations.
Netanyahu operated under the slogan "Right or Palestine" and often accused the opposition of supporting the Palestinians.
The salience and clarity of such messages is a significant change compared to previous election campaigns. Positions that once faced criticism from a different political spectrum have become mainstream politics since the attacks on October 7, 2023.
In 2015, Netanyahu faced widespread criticism after he warned on election day that "the Arabs are voting en masse"; A response for which he later apologized and said "hurt several captive citizens of Israel".
Between 2019 and 2022, Palestinian parties achieved an unprecedented level of infiltration. In March 2020, they won 15 of the 120 seats in the Knesset, and in 2021, the Islamic Ra'am party became the first Palestinian party to join a ruling coalition.
But in these elections, which are the first elections after the October 7 attacks, the demand to remove the Palestinian parties from political life became much more explicit, and at the same time support for a stricter policy in Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank increased. Benjamin Netanyahu and Gadi Eisenkot also accused each other of not opposing the establishment of a Palestinian state enough.
The explicit demand to remove Palestinian parties from the captive political system in Israel was not limited to Netanyahu's campaign.
Since the beginning of the election campaign, both the ruling parties and the opposition parties have warned against the formation of a government with the participation of Palestinian parties.