Israel election live: polls open in most consequential vote in country’s history

Four decades ago, when the extremist rabbi Meir Kahane won a single seat in Israel’s Knesset, other legislators passed a law to prevent him running again, left the chamber when he rose to speak and worked together to block discussion of his ethnonationalist proposals.

These ranged from mass expulsions of Palestinians to apartheid provisions such as segregated beaches and the criminalisation of sex between Jews and gentiles.

This month, Kahane’s political heirs may claim more Knesset seats in national elections than the remains of the once mighty Labor party, home of Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Golda Meir.

At an election rally this week, Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, mixed calls for ethnic cleansing and jokes about starving Palestinian prisoners with a proud anecdote about his conviction in 1998 over bumper stickers that read “Rabbi Kahane was right”.

A poll for the Israel Hayom newspaper, published on 16 October, forecast his Jewish Strength party would win nine seats in the 27 October election. The Democrats, successor to the Labor party led by former general Yair Golan, were predicted to claim eight seats.

Ben-Gvir’s rise is one of the more extreme manifestations of a broad shift to the right among Jewish citizens of Israel. It is particularly pronounced among the young and will shape the country’s next government, regardless of who becomes prime minister after closely fought elections.

More than 500,000 Israelis have reached voting age since the last election in 2022, and three-quarters of first-time Jewish voters define themselves as right or centre-right, a recent poll for Channel 12 television found (it did not survey Palestinian citizens of Israel).

The generation voting for the first time came of age after the Oslo process collapsed, when the prospect of negotiating a political resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict seemed to be fading.

They were teenagers during the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023, which resulted in the deaths of about 1,200 people, the majority of them civilians. Militants took 251 living hostages and dead bodies to Gaza, leading to a two-year hostage crisis.

Erez Uzan, vice-chair of the Young Democrats, said:

double quotation markThere’s a lot of people, especially young people, who think that there is no solving the conflict, that we’ll always be at war. There’s a lot of racism, a lot of hatred, but most of all, there’s fear.”

Bucking global trends, young Israelis are more rightwing than older generations and are likely to vote in a new Knesset with more rightwing members than the current chamber, said Dahlia Scheindlin, a political analyst and public opinion researcher.

Consistently rightwing ultra-Orthodox and nationalist religious communities make up a growing proportion of Israel’s Jewish population but still account for only around a quarter of the electorate, so demographics alone do not explain the growing age gap on political issues.

“All Israelis, and particularly younger people, have been living in a political environment where not only is the government rightwing but the general terms of debate are really populist and ultra-nationalist. That’s all they know. They’re socialised into it,” Scheindlin said.

double quotation markThere’s been a real downplaying of anything to do with democracy, universal values or human rights. Those are seen as weak, if they’re discussed at all, possibly as bad as betrayal. And very few politicians talk about peace, concessions, negotiations, Palestinian self-determination, or even Palestinian wellbeing.

The far right is on the rise globally, but Israeli politics that “revolve round constant conflict” heighten the appeal of ethnonationalist messages, Uzan said.

“We grow up in fear, seeing war all around us – and that leads to a certain perspective. In the last 20 years, our leadership in the centre-left camp has avoided talking about security issues,” Uzan said, adding they had ceded that ground to the right.

The rise of the far right and religious fundamentalism, combined with Netanyahu’s assault on institutions protecting Israel’s partial democracy (Palestinians living under Israeli military rule in the occupied West Bank do not have the rights of citizens), mean many Israelis on the centre and left see this vote as existential.

David Harel, the president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, says the country’s current path leads towards a bleak future as a corrupt, impoverished pariah state, dominated by messianic fundamentalists maintaining a “violent, cruel occupation”.

“We are already in ‘stoppage time’. If we lose this time, there will be no second chance. The country we love so dearly will breathe its last. Plain and simple!” he told a rally in the northern city of Haifa.