Israel’s Election of Consensus: Power, Fear, and the Vanishing Center

Elections are traditionally advertised as a marketplace of competing visions for the future. Yet as Israel approaches its general election on October 27, the political landscape offers less of a debate and more of a contest in military posture. Three years after the October 7 attacks that left 1,139 dead in Israel, the domestic debate has settled into a hardline consensus where political moderation is treated as an unaffordable liability.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains the master of this arena. Facing lingering anger over security failures that preceded the 2023 disaster—and brushing aside reports that intelligence officials in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates had offered pre-attack warnings—Netanyahu continues to pitch himself as the sole guarantor of national survival. When a co-pilot attacked the captain with an axe on a Flydubai flight to Tel Aviv, the Prime Minister immediately seized on the incident to reinforce his narrative of omnipresent danger. Past controversies over judicial overhauls fade when voters are convinced that existential threats loom around every corner.

What was once considered the fringe of Israeli politics now dictates the baseline of public discourse. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich publicly advocates applying Gaza-style military operations to the West Bank, while his ally Moshe Feiglin openly calls for annexing Gaza entirely. Meanwhile, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Minister of National Security who was previously convicted of inciting racism, now eyes the Defence Ministry. This rightward drift operates with clear asymmetry: while Arab-Israeli politicians like Sami Abu Shehadeh face election disqualification over remarks criticizing military operations, incendiary rhetoric from governing coalition members encounters no institutional friction.

Voters looking to the opposition for a softer alternative will find little comfort. Netanyahu’s primary challenger, former army chief Gadi Eisenkot, brings credentials built on the Dahiyeh Doctrine—a doctrine that explicitly embraces disproportionate force against enemy infrastructure. Eisenkot’s critique of the current government is not that it has been too aggressive, but that it allowed American pressure to restrain its operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon. In contemporary Israeli politics, the primary challenge to the government comes from its right flank.

This relentless commitment to military deterrence carries a heavy domestic and regional cost. Israel’s Ministry of Defence recently reported that nearly 30,000 soldiers and security personnel are receiving treatment for psychological trauma, driving the military rehabilitation budget up by 88 percent to 10 billion shekels. In Gaza, over 74,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 1,500 since a nominal ceasefire last year. Yet war fatigue among the electorate has not generated a appetite for political compromise.

The traditional international framework for regional stability has effectively vanished from the domestic conversation. With over 700,000 Israeli settlers now living in the West Bank—up from 260,000 during the Oslo process—a two-state solution is treated as a historical curiosity rather than a policy option. No major Zionist party is campaigning on a return to territorial compromise. Instead, the upcoming vote promises to ratify a doctrine of permanent military posture, expanding security zones, and the uncompromising application of force.

Written by Christiane Hofreiter christiane.hofreiter@alpineweekly.com