Israeli voters head to the polls on Tuesday in a closely fought election that will determine Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's political future and the direction of Israel's policies towards Palestinians.

The vote pits a coalition of opposition parties led by former military chief Gadi Eisenkot against the far-right bloc led by Netanyahu, whose opponents accuse him of undermining Israel's democratic institutions.

It is the first Israeli election since the Hamas-led attack of 7 October 2023 and Israel's subsequent genocidal war on Gaza, which has been followed by wider regional conflicts involving Lebanon, Iran and Yemen.

While much of the campaign has focused on Netanyahu's leadership, the war and domestic divisions, the outcome will also affect millions of Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank who have no vote in the election.

Palestinian citizens of Israel, meanwhile, could play a decisive role in determining the balance of power in the Knesset, even as the main Jewish-led political blocs remain reluctant to cooperate with them.

How will the vote work?

Polling stations will open at 7am on Tuesday and close at 10pm.

Major Israeli news organisations will publish exit polls shortly after voting ends, with counting beginning the same evening.

More than three dozen parties are contesting the election, with around 7.4 million people eligible to vote at polling stations across Israel.

Israel uses proportional representation, meaning voters choose a party rather than an individual candidate. The 120 seats in the Knesset are allocated according to each party's share of the national vote.

Candidates enter parliament according to their positions on their party's electoral list.

Parties must win at least 3.25% of the vote to enter the Knesset, equivalent to four seats.

No single party has ever secured an outright majority, meaning Israeli governments have always depended on coalitions.

When will the results be announced?

The official results must be declared by 4 November, although the likely distribution of seats should become clear as early as Wednesday morning.

Attention will then turn to coalition negotiations, with parties seeking to assemble a parliamentary majority of at least 61 seats.

After the official results are announced, President Isaac Herzog will consult parliamentary factions before selecting a Knesset member to attempt to form a government.

These negotiations could take weeks, particularly if neither of the main blocs wins enough seats to govern.

What are the polls saying?

The final opinion polls suggest that neither Netanyahu's bloc nor the opposition coalition led by Eisenkot is on course to secure a majority.

Surveys published over the weekend put the opposition on 54 to 56 seats, compared with around 50 for Netanyahu's Likud-led alliance.

Eisenkot's Yashar party was projected to become the largest party with 22 to 23 seats, ahead of Likud on 19 to 21.

The polls also pointed to gains for the far right, with National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir's Jewish Power party projected to win eight seats.

But the remaining seats could prove crucial.

Parties representing Palestinian citizens of Israel were projected to win between 14 and 16 seats, potentially leaving them with considerable influence over whether a government can be formed.

Eisenkot has previously ruled out forming a coalition with Palestinian-led parties, leaving questions over how the opposition could secure the parliamentary support it needs.

Could Palestinian voters decide the election?

Palestinian citizens of Israel account for a substantial share of the electorate, but their political representation has long been constrained by divisions between parties, low turnout and the reluctance of major Jewish-led parties to include them in governing coalitions.

This election could nevertheless give their parties considerable influence over whether Netanyahu remains in power.

The two main Arab-majority electoral lists are Ra'am, also known as the United Arab List, and the Joint List, bringing together Hadash, Balad and Ta'al.

Their performance will depend partly on turnout among Palestinian citizens of Israel, whose votes could influence both the number of seats won by Arab-led parties and the overall balance of the Knesset.

In an interview with The New Arab, Balad leader Sami Abu Shehadeh highlighted the importance of Palestinian voters in an election where neither main bloc appears assured of a majority.

The campaign has also been marked by attempts to exclude Palestinian-led parties and candidates.

Israel's Central Elections Committee voted in September to bar the Joint List and Ra'am from contesting the election, but the Supreme Court overturned the decision.

The court nevertheless upheld the disqualification of Abu Shehadeh over an article in which he described the 7 October attacks as an important historical event.

The episode has renewed questions about the political rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel and the limits placed on their participation in Israeli politics.

Netanyahu has also repeatedly portrayed the possibility of opposition cooperation with Arab-led parties as a campaign warning, seeking to pressure his rivals into ruling out such an arrangement.

What about Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank?

Millions of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip cannot vote in the election that will help determine the policies governing their lives.

The next Israeli government will have a major influence over military operations, movement restrictions, settlement expansion and the future of Gaza.

In the occupied West Bank, Palestinians face an expanding network of military checkpoints, road closures and settler attacks.

Israel has also announced the closure of land crossings into the West Bank for election day, adding to restrictions that have intensified since October 2023.

In Gaza, the central questions include whether Israel will ease its blockade, withdraw troops from occupied areas, allow displaced Palestinians to return home and permit reconstruction after three years of devastating war.

However, Netanyahu's principal challengers have offered little indication that a change in government would bring a fundamental shift in Israeli policy towards Palestinian statehood or the occupation.

Eisenkot, a former Israeli military chief, has opposed the establishment of a Palestinian state, while other prominent opposition figures have supported Israel's military campaigns and taken hardline positions towards Gaza.

Yisrael Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman, whose party is part of the opposition coalition, has criticised Netanyahu for being too soft on Gaza and called for the Palestinian Authority to be dismantled.

Meanwhile, far-right ministers Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have advocated annexing Palestinian territory and ethnically cleansing the Palestinians.

The election could therefore change Israel's leadership without necessarily bringing major changes to the policies Palestinians face.

 

 

What are the main election issues?

Netanyahu's opponents have sought to make the vote a referendum on his leadership, focusing on the security failures surrounding the 7 October attack, his long-running corruption trial and Israel's growing international isolation.

According to the Israel Democracy Institute, the October 2023 attack is expected to play an important role in the voting decisions of more than two-thirds of the electorate.

Other major issues include military conscription exemptions for ultra-Orthodox Jews and Netanyahu's attempts to overhaul the judiciary in 2023, which sparked widespread protests.

The election also comes after years of Israeli military operations in Gaza and regional conflicts involving Hezbollah, Iran and the Houthis.

Yet there is considerable overlap between the main Jewish-led parties on questions relating to Palestinian rights, the occupation and Israel's military operations.

While opposition politicians have criticised Netanyahu's handling of the wars and the diplomatic damage caused by his government, few have advocated a fundamental reversal of settlement expansion or a renewed peace process leading to Palestinian statehood.

The most explicit calls for annexation and Palestinian displacement have come from the far right, particularly Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.

What happens if coalition talks fail?

If neither bloc can assemble 61 seats, Israel could face prolonged negotiations over a possible minority government or another election.

A minority government would need support or abstentions from parties outside the governing coalition to survive key parliamentary votes.

That could make Palestinian-led parties particularly important, even if they are excluded from formal coalition agreements.

If negotiations fail altogether, another election could be called in 2027, with Netanyahu potentially remaining as caretaker prime minister until a new government takes office.

The result could therefore leave Israel facing continued political deadlock, with Palestinian parties holding potentially important seats but little guarantee of a role in government.

For Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, the immediate consequences will depend less on which party wins the most seats than on the policies the next government adopts towards the occupation, military operations, settlements and displacement.

Israeli voters head to the polls on Tuesday in a closely fought election that will determine Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's political future and the direction of Israel's policies towards Palestinians.

The vote pits a coalition of opposition parties led by former military chief Gadi Eisenkot against the far-right bloc led by Netanyahu, whose opponents accuse him of undermining Israel's democratic institutions.

It is the first Israeli election since the Hamas-led attack of 7 October 2023 and Israel's subsequent genocidal war on Gaza, which has been followed by wider regional conflicts involving Lebanon, Iran and Yemen.

While much of the campaign has focused on Netanyahu's leadership, the war and domestic divisions, the outcome will also affect millions of Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank who have no vote in the election.

Palestinian citizens of Israel, meanwhile, could play a decisive role in determining the balance of power in the Knesset, even as the main Jewish-led political blocs remain reluctant to cooperate with them.

How will the vote work?

Polling stations will open at 7am on Tuesday and close at 10pm.

Major Israeli news organisations will publish exit polls shortly after voting ends, with counting beginning the same evening.

More than three dozen parties are contesting the election, with around 7.4 million people eligible to vote at polling stations across Israel.

Israel uses proportional representation, meaning voters choose a party rather than an individual candidate. The 120 seats in the Knesset are allocated according to each party's share of the national vote.

Candidates enter parliament according to their positions on their party's electoral list.

Parties must win at least 3.25% of the vote to enter the Knesset, equivalent to four seats.

No single party has ever secured an outright majority, meaning Israeli governments have always depended on coalitions.

When will the results be announced?

The official results must be declared by 4 November, although the likely distribution of seats should become clear as early as Wednesday morning.

Attention will then turn to coalition negotiations, with parties seeking to assemble a parliamentary majority of at least 61 seats.

After the official results are announced, President Isaac Herzog will consult parliamentary factions before selecting a Knesset member to attempt to form a government.

These negotiations could take weeks, particularly if neither of the main blocs wins enough seats to govern.

What are the polls saying?

The final opinion polls suggest that neither Netanyahu's bloc nor the opposition coalition led by Eisenkot is on course to secure a majority.

Surveys published over the weekend put the opposition on 54 to 56 seats, compared with around 50 for Netanyahu's Likud-led alliance.

Eisenkot's Yashar party was projected to become the largest party with 22 to 23 seats, ahead of Likud on 19 to 21.

The polls also pointed to gains for the far right, with National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir's Jewish Power party projected to win eight seats.

But the remaining seats could prove crucial.

Parties representing Palestinian citizens of Israel were projected to win between 14 and 16 seats, potentially leaving them with considerable influence over whether a government can be formed.

Eisenkot has previously ruled out forming a coalition with Palestinian-led parties, leaving questions over how the opposition could secure the parliamentary support it needs.

Could Palestinian voters decide the election?

Palestinian citizens of Israel account for a substantial share of the electorate, but their political representation has long been constrained by divisions between parties, low turnout and the reluctance of major Jewish-led parties to include them in governing coalitions.

This election could nevertheless give their parties considerable influence over whether Netanyahu remains in power.

The two main Arab-majority electoral lists are Ra'am, also known as the United Arab List, and the Joint List, bringing together Hadash, Balad and Ta'al.

Their performance will depend partly on turnout among Palestinian citizens of Israel, whose votes could influence both the number of seats won by Arab-led parties and the overall balance of the Knesset.

In an interview with The New Arab, Balad leader Sami Abu Shehadeh highlighted the importance of Palestinian voters in an election where neither main bloc appears assured of a majority.

The campaign has also been marked by attempts to exclude Palestinian-led parties and candidates.

Israel's Central Elections Committee voted in September to bar the Joint List and Ra'am from contesting the election, but the Supreme Court overturned the decision.

The court nevertheless upheld the disqualification of Abu Shehadeh over an article in which he described the 7 October attacks as an important historical event.

The episode has renewed questions about the political rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel and the limits placed on their participation in Israeli politics.

Netanyahu has also repeatedly portrayed the possibility of opposition cooperation with Arab-led parties as a campaign warning, seeking to pressure his rivals into ruling out such an arrangement.

What about Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank?

Millions of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip cannot vote in the election that will help determine the policies governing their lives.

The next Israeli government will have a major influence over military operations, movement restrictions, settlement expansion and the future of Gaza.

In the occupied West Bank, Palestinians face an expanding network of military checkpoints, road closures and settler attacks.

Israel has also announced the closure of land crossings into the West Bank for election day, adding to restrictions that have intensified since October 2023.

In Gaza, the central questions include whether Israel will ease its blockade, withdraw troops from occupied areas, allow displaced Palestinians to return home and permit reconstruction after three years of devastating war.

However, Netanyahu's principal challengers have offered little indication that a change in government would bring a fundamental shift in Israeli policy towards Palestinian statehood or the occupation.

Eisenkot, a former Israeli military chief, has opposed the establishment of a Palestinian state, while other prominent opposition figures have supported Israel's military campaigns and taken hardline positions towards Gaza.

Yisrael Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman, whose party is part of the opposition coalition, has criticised Netanyahu for being too soft on Gaza and called for the Palestinian Authority to be dismantled.

Meanwhile, far-right ministers Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have advocated annexing Palestinian territory and ethnically cleansing the Palestinians.

The election could therefore change Israel's leadership without necessarily bringing major changes to the policies Palestinians face.

 

 

 

What are the main election issues?

Netanyahu's opponents have sought to make the vote a referendum on his leadership, focusing on the security failures surrounding the 7 October attack, his long-running corruption trial and Israel's growing international isolation.

According to the Israel Democracy Institute, the October 2023 attack is expected to play an important role in the voting decisions of more than two-thirds of the electorate.

Other major issues include military conscription exemptions for ultra-Orthodox Jews and Netanyahu's attempts to overhaul the judiciary in 2023, which sparked widespread protests.

The election also comes after years of Israeli military operations in Gaza and regional conflicts involving Hezbollah, Iran and the Houthis.

Yet there is considerable overlap between the main Jewish-led parties on questions relating to Palestinian rights, the occupation and Israel's military operations.

While opposition politicians have criticised Netanyahu's handling of the wars and the diplomatic damage caused by his government, few have advocated a fundamental reversal of settlement expansion or a renewed peace process leading to Palestinian statehood.

The most explicit calls for annexation and Palestinian displacement have come from the far right, particularly Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.

What happens if coalition talks fail?

If neither bloc can assemble 61 seats, Israel could face prolonged negotiations over a possible minority government or another election.

A minority government would need support or abstentions from parties outside the governing coalition to survive key parliamentary votes.

That could make Palestinian-led parties particularly important, even if they are excluded from formal coalition agreements.

If negotiations fail altogether, another election could be called in 2027, with Netanyahu potentially remaining as caretaker prime minister until a new government takes office.

The result could therefore leave Israel facing continued political deadlock, with Palestinian parties holding potentially important seats but little guarantee of a role in government.

For Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, the immediate consequences will depend less on which party wins the most seats than on the policies the next government adopts towards the occupation, military operations, settlements and displacement.

Writing villains is supposed to be hard. No grand, world-dominating plan ever really makes sense in a story. Soon after "The Dark Knight" came out, David Goyer, its writer, told me the Joker had been a real relief. "Blessedly, because of who the Joker is, we just said, 'fuck the plan. We don't have to do it. He's the Joker. He's the anti-plan,'" Goyer said. "Trying to take over the world is such an impossible, stupid idea — as if anyone could do it with a single act, you know?"

Yet now very real people seem to try just that, on the regular. Except if you believe Hollywood, they're not insane clowns. They're billionaire tech bros. It's starting to seem like every movie and TV bad guy is a douchebag who got rich making stuff that works on your phone. Mark Zuckerberg in "The Social Reckoning," Elon Musk in "Musk," Elizabeth Holmes in "You Can See Everything," Sam Altman in the upcoming "Artificial," Sam Bankman-Fried in "The Altruists." In these stories, at varying levels of fictionality, the evil villains' megalomaniacal plans mostly make sense. Some of them even got away with it. America is eagerly consuming stories about them. "You Can See Everything" grossed $15 million on opening in just 855 theaters, twice what its producers expected.

The more interesting question is why these founders are our demons, all of a sudden. Chalk it up to the reality of the "techlash," the society-wide revulsion to Big Tech's ubiquity and power. But if you really want to understand the extent to which everyone thinks Silicon Valley is so uncanny these days, you should be watching a CBS legal procedural called "Cupertino." It's a sharp look at tech and its discontents — but more than that, it clarifies how widely the techlash is spreading.

"Cupertino" comes from the TV-making couple Michelle and Robert King, best known for the "The Good Wife" and "The Good Fight." In their new show, a slick lawyer played by Mike Colter gets iced out of the tech company he cofounded at the same time as a more junior attorney also gets ousted. The two join their wrongful-termination lawsuits against the company, eke out a big settlement, and start a firm to represent "little guys" against Silicon Valley giants. In one plotline, a drone maker tries to blame a mid-level coder for one of its bots falling out of formation during a show and killing a man — it turns out the company had changed batteries to accommodate a prospective military contract. In another, a mysterious whistleblower client asks for help to force an Anthropic-like company to put guardrails around its most powerful AI. Then the whistleblower claims to in fact be the AI.

It's all in good fun. The actors are beautiful. They banter well. Colter wears the hell out of a suit. Busy Philipps plays a Mackenzie Scott-like benefactor of the new law firm — if Scott used her incredible wealth to become a hardcore partier.

A CBS show like "Cupertino" picks bad guys that millions of people can easily recognize as deserving of comeuppance. It picked the overlords of Silicon Valley.

But thematically, there's depth. That Colter is the only Black person for miles does not go unremarked. His new partner Olivia Siffre (pronounced "cypher"), played by Rachel Keller, is a devout, cross-wearing conservative from the Midwest, an alumna of Liberty University. Their closest allies don't come from the ranks of coders, marketing, or venture capital but are instead service workers, tradespeople, and the waitstaff from a nearby TGI Fridays. (Alas, a fiction — there are no TGI Fridayses in the Valley.)

So see that class rage for what it is. The fantasy here is that the middle-American proletariat gets to stick it to bespoke-suited, arrogant C-level types and unkempt, geniuser-than-thou sex pests. Because for the last few years, those people have had all the power. "They always have a friendly audience, an accommodating interviewer who won't ask them anything controversial. And then they get into territory where the price is much higher," Robert King said in a recent interview. "They reveal who they really are: robotic, inhuman nerds who never got laid in high school and are now kind of crazy with power, self-importance, and a sense of entitlement."

The point is, the "little guys" fighting this good fight seem like they're supposed to be proxies for the viewer. "Cupertino" is a CBS procedural, the genre of shows like "NCIS" and its offspring — things that no one watches, except for 10 million people every week. That's a lot. CBS typically has the largest primetime viewership of any network, and the oldest — like, people in their 70s. It's all well and good for young coastal sophisticates to post about Elizabeth Holmes' inability to grasp the Who's-on-First routine, but "Cupertino" is aimed at America's parents and grandparents. And apparently they are excited to see the people who make their phones portrayed as the wealthy engines of every inconvenience — sources of half a billion dollars to Republicans only, builders of data centers, creators of chatbots that drive kids to death by suicide, purveyors of screens that watch you back. "Cupertino" debuted to rapturous reviews and more than 3 million viewers, beating "Grey's Anatomy" in its time slot.

A show like "Cupertino" is meant to have a low barrier to entry; it picks bad guys that millions of people can easily recognize as deserving of comeuppance. It picked the overlords of Silicon Valley.

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Not so long ago it would've seemed preposterous to give a scrawny, socially awkward, brainy little guy the job of Big Bad. They're the assistant, or the butt of a particular kind of joke, like the spectrum-y heroes of the wildly popular "Big Bang Theory" — Klingon-speaking, physics-doing, Green Lantern oath-knowing clods. Still, I can think of examples of "bad guy, subtype: tech nerd" going back to the early days of science fiction. Mad scientists like Dr. Frankenstein or Dr. Jekyll, or various HP Lovecraft antiheroes, probably count. So too might the arrogant cyberneticist in Robert Heinlein's "Waldo."

A rough analog in the mid 20^th century might be the rogue industrialist. After all, James Bond villains have often been tech-bro adjacent. Karl Stromberg in "The Spy Who Loved Me" wants to build independent ocean settlements; he's basically a seasteader. Hugo Drax in "Moonraker" is a eugenics-obsessed CEO who wants to build space stations, which sounds familiar. Max Zorin, played by Christopher Walken in "A View to a Kill," is an "industrialist" and the product of Nazi genetic experiments. But his megalomaniacal plan is to use a California natural disaster to gain a monopoly on silicon computer chips. That's just Jensen Huang on any given Tuesday.

The weirdest new phenomenon here is how personal it all is. Evil technology oligopolies have been representatives of oppressive capitalism in Hollywood for decades — but they were faceless. The anonymity was part of the terror. Think of the company that orders Bruce Dern to destroy the last forest in his spaceship biodome in "Silent Running," the Umbrella Corporation in "Resident Evil," or Cyberdyne Systems, creator of Skynet in the Terminator movies.

More recently, film and television have started identifying not just faceless corporations but specific tech-coded people as their worst-of-the-worst. And not just any people, but people geofenced into Silicon Valley: "Glass Onion," "Don't Look Up," "Ex Machina," "Devs," "Super Pumped" (fictionalized Uber), "WeCrashed" (fictionalized WeWork), "The Playlist" (fictionalized Spotify), and "The Dropout" (fictionalized Theranos), "Mythic Quest" — the list goes on.

Actually, Cyberdyne's a good example of one important way these depictions have changed; in 1984's "The Terminator," Cyberdyne is a Los Angeles-area heavy-industry firm. In 2015, "Terminator Genisys" moved Cyberdyne to a gleaming tech campus explicitly modeled on the headquarters of Oracle. It's an inside joke, though not the ha-ha kind. The movie's producers included Megan and David Ellison, children of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. David now owns the merged studios of Warner Bros. and Paramount, and he just got a billion-dollar investment from Elon Musk. The new company, Skydance, includes in its holdings … CBS.

Christopher Walken's Bond villain has a megalomaniacal plan is to use a California natural disaster to gain a monopoly on silicon computer chips. That's just Jensen Huang on any given Tuesday.

"A sequence of Hollywood contemporary science-fiction movies identifies Silicon Valley capitalists as a new type of villain," write Northumbria University film studies scholars Joe Street and Russ Hunter in a 2024 paper. These new movies critique tech, they say, using an approach "in the grand tradition of cinematic science fiction touchstones such as the Cold War alien invasion films that allegorized fears of Communism in 1950s America."

In other words, movies about time-travelling killer robots and dead-eyed billionaires aren't so different, after all. Horror is about shared anxieties. Old-school mad scientists posed a threat because they dared to do experiments that contravened the laws of nature; they were evil for love of the game. The Silicon Valley bad guys are worse, because they do it for profit. "When presented with an innovation," Street and Hunter write, "the prime movers in these corporations think not of moral or ethical concerns and crucially not of the material impact of what they are doing — but only of the innovation's potential for financial gain."

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Is Hollywood's techlash actually on the rise? The schlemiels of "Silicon Valley" premiered in 2014. I have tech-bro-villain articles in my files going back to 2022 at least. And the business world has always been fodder for stories filtered through the anxieties of the time—what was Ebenezer Scrooge if not a capitalist oppressor?

Mapping the full arc of technology-associated villains would be, in the words of Ted Underwood, "hard to code." Underwood's an English and information science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, researching ways to identify literary trends across time, in big canons. "In addition to tracing the history of villains, you'd have to think how often these social types appear as heroes," he says. For every Max Zorin there's a Tony Stark. Ethan Hunt's nobody without tech aces Luther and Benji. "Star Trek" doesn't trek without Scotty, or Chief O'Brien. Every movie heist is basically a hack. And let me just say unto you: "MacGyver." "One hypothesis would be that what we're feeling right now with evil tech bro villains is just that the counterbalancing examples have dropped out," Underwood says.

Clearly, though, tech billionaires and their hangers on have actively tried to make themselves into main characters. Some of them seem to think they're the only real consciousnesses in a simulation, a virtual world populated with non-player characters like you and me. At minimum they evince a belief that they possess a greater depth of perception and knowledge. As the architect and tech historian Fred Scharmen once wrote, "for this particular kind of person, wealthy and powerful or not, intelligence comes paired with a certain kind of malignance. The Evil Nerd is sharp, and also mean, their big brains are oriented towards anger and destructiveness." The Thiels, Altmans, Musks, and Karps of the world turn what had been nerdy weakness into nerdy strength. They go on friendly podcasts and show up in pictures taken with presidents. We don't have to imagine them delivering what the screenwriter John Rogers, creator of the anticapitalist TV show "Leverage," calls the Evil Speech of Evil. They monologue at tech conferences! These guys embody their ideologies; l'enterprise, c'est moi.

And what happens if that kind of behavior gets depicted, week in and week out, on a popular legal procedural TV show? Even if that show airs on a network owned by one of those "evil nerds"? Hard to say. Maybe it'll be enough to turn some people into the Joker.