Two Visions for Israel
Updated: 3 days ago
Hadar Susskind
On September 24, 2026, Israel's Central Elections Committee voted to bar the country's major Arab parties, the Joint List and Ra'am, from the October 27 Knesset election.
The vote did not make big news outside Israel, and that's understandable. It is far from the gravest injustice Israel's government is committing, and it will likely have little practical effect. The parties will almost certainly be on the ballot anyway: Every disqualification needs the High Court's approval, and the Court has reversed similar, less sweeping efforts in the past.
But the vote is worth paying attention to because it offers a particularly clear illustration of the struggle over Israel's future: whether Israel will be a country in which political power is reserved for Jews, or a democracy based on the value of equality.
The members of the elections committee who voted for disqualification know that the Court is likely to reverse them. They voted for it anyway. The vote gave them an opportunity to drive the news cycle for a day around a basic question: Are Palestinian citizens of Israel legitimate participants in the country's political system?
That question tells us something about the people who sit on the elections committee. It is not a panel of neutral officials. Its members are representatives of the Knesset factions, and the committee reflects the balance of power in the current Knesset. When most of its members vote to shut Arab parties out of Israeli politics, they are expressing a vision of Israel in which Jewish citizens hold political power and Arab citizens participate only when, and only to the extent that, the Jewish majority permits it.
There is a name for that ideology. It is not Zionism. It is Jewish supremacy.
In this vision of Israel, one in five citizens is treated as a second-class citizen. Their votes are tolerated only if they vote for Jewish parties, their loyalty is suspect, and their rights are always up for negotiation. It is the logic behind the Nation-State Law, behind ministers who describe Arab lawmakers as a fifth column, and behind the claim that any government relying on Arab votes is illegitimate.
And that vision does not stop at the Green Line.
The same principle—that Jewish political and national rights should take precedence over Palestinian rights—helps explain the current Israeli government's unprecedented land grabs in the West Bank. In 2024 alone, Israel declared 24,258 dunams of West Bank land as "state land," which is about half of all such declarations since the Oslo Accords. In 2025, the government approved 54 new settlements, compared with a previous record of nine in one year, and settlers set up 86 new outposts, most of them "farming outposts" built to take over grazing land.
This ideology also helps explain the violence that accompanies those land grabs. Peace Now recorded 1,828 settler attacks in 2025, which injured 838 Palestinians, killed nine, and drove 22 Palestinian communities from their lands.
New Jewish Narrative stands for a different vision.
We believe Israel's future depends on ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, on allowing a Palestinian liberation movement to flourish there, and on building a real democracy within Israel.
This might sound far fetched. But within the Green Line, Israel has already offered us a glimpse of what it can look like when Jewish and Arab citizens participate in political life as equals.
In 2021, Ra'am joined a governing coalition, the first Arab party to do so. The sky did not fall. Jewish and Arab lawmakers negotiated, compromised, and governed together, which is exactly what democratic politics is supposed to look like.
This is not a radical vision for what Israel should be. Israel's own Declaration of Independence promises "complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex," and calls on the state's Arab residents to participate "on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions."
Similarly, the idea that Israel should end its control over the territories it conquered in 1967 is fully consistent with the country's founding ideals.
Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, understood the fundamental problem with permanently ruling over millions of Palestinians. In 1968, a year after the Six-Day War, he said on camera that "if I could choose between peace and all the territories which we conquered last year, I prefer peace."
Ben-Gurion was no dove, and his record toward Palestinians is far from spotless. But he understood that permanent occupation would force Israel to choose between its Jewish character and its democratic character. The people running Israel's government today are making the opposite choice.
The High Court's expected reversal will settle the question of whether Israel’s Arab parties will appear on the ballot in 2026. It will not settle the larger struggle.
The forces behind last week's vote are currently in government. They hold the key ministries, they hold the power, and they are playing a long game. Each attempt to disqualify Arab parties, each law that defines citizens’ rights according to their identity, and each attack on Arab lawmakers' legitimacy pushes the boundaries of what is considered acceptable in Israeli politics. It sends Palestinian citizens a message about their place in the country that they rightly call home. And it shifts the boundary of acceptable political discourse to be more tolerant of racism.
The vote showed, in miniature, the ideological fork in the road that Israel faces. One vision sees Palestinians as a problem to be contained. The other sees Palestinians as people entitled to national liberation alongside Israel, and as partners in a shared democracy within Israel.
Those of us who care about Israel should be clear about the distinction.
Supporting Israel does not mean supporting whoever happens to be in power. It means supporting the Israel that we want to see: Jewish and democratic, with democracy belonging to all of its citizens.
