In the past three years, emigration from Israel has reached record heights. According to a study published by Tel Aviv University, 270,000 citizens have left the country in the past three years. Between 2013 and 2015, the corresponding period in the previous decade, the number sat at 183,000. Like much of the American Jewish diaspora, those who have left in recent years have become deeply critical of Benjamin Netanyahu.

While Israel guarantees every citizen over the age of eighteen the right to vote, it has never permitted absentee ballots. With the exception of diplomats, emissaries, and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers occupying territory in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, voters must be in the country on Election Day. With this election largely seen as one of the most consequential in the nation’s history, a survey taken before the election estimated that up to 67,000 expats could be returning home to vote.

On October 27, Likud won twenty-seven seats, and Gad Eisenkot’s Yashar party won twenty-one. Netanyahu’s bloc took fifty-three seats, against forty-eight for the Jewish opposition bloc and nineteen for the Arab-led parties. No bloc won the sixty-one seats needed for a majority. The results have left the country facing uncertain coalition negotiations.

Leading up to the vote, Likud tried to stop Israelis outside the country from coming back. In September, Likud petitioned the Central Election Committee, demanding it block Fly & Vote, an initiative by the nonpartisan American-Israel Democracy (AID) Coalition, which sought to help Israelis abroad return and cast a vote.

Offering logistical help, including eligibility checks and passport renewals, the organization also coordinated six group flights and helped search for commercial flights. While participants were still required to pay their airfare, Likud argued the initiative violated financing laws and constituted election bribery.

While the petition was ultimately dismissed, the AID Coalition agreed to not subsidize tickets, organize any additional group flights, or provide transportation and accommodation.

This summer, a second spat broke out when hundreds of Israelis living abroad discovered they had been stripped of their voting rights after being classified by the Interior Ministry as nonresidents. The designation, known as Code 51, excluded citizens from the voter registry altogether.

Petitioning the Supreme Court, the expats argued that they were not notified of their status change, with several only realizing when checking their electoral eligibility. The courts dismissed the case on procedural grounds, stating the claim was filed too late.

While there is no definitive proof linking Likud to the Code 51 scandal, it is clear that the party has repeatedly tried to curtail the expat vote. Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that informal discussions were held between senior Transport Ministry officials about the possibility of restricting designated landing slots at airports, making it more difficult to fly into the country.

Similar to the proposed judicial reforms of 2023, where Netanyahu sought to weaken the power of the Supreme Court, this democratic backsliding has prompted furor among the Israeli left. But as is often the case with liberal Zionists, the far greater repression affecting Palestinians remains largely ignored.

The AID Coalition describes itself as a group “strengthening, and preserving the democratic foundations of the State of Israel.” While a valiant objective, a more honest statement would be about preserving an ethnocracy. Israeli Professor Oren Yiftachel describes this form of governance as one that “promotes the expansion of the dominant group in contested territory and its domination of power structures while maintaining a democratic facade.” This dynamic has been present since the state’s founding.

While the 150,000 Palestinians who remained in their homeland after the Nakba were declared citizens and granted the right to vote from the beginning, the community also faced systematic discrimination from the outset. From 1948 until 1966, Palestinian citizens of Israel were placed under military rule, which included measures that restricted their movement, prohibited political organizing, and imposed arbitrary curfews. Simultaneously, the government confiscated hundreds of thousands of dunams of land, uprooting farmers from their livelihood and forcing many to turn to low-wage labor to survive.

In 1967, a year after lifting the military administration, Israel would turn their attention toward Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza after occupying both territories in the Six-Day War.

Assuming control of around one million Palestinians, residents of the newly occupied territory were placed under military rule. This time citizenship and the right to vote were withheld from them, since such incorporation would threaten the Jewish demographic majority.

As Jewish settlers moved into the occupied territories, aided by generous Israeli government subsidies, an apartheid regime took shape, as authorities applied separate laws, courts, and democratic rights to Palestinians and Israelis living in neighboring areas.

Although Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005, it lay siege to the Strip two years later, imposing a crushing blockade. After the October 7 attacks, it returned yet again as the occupying power, this time unleashing a genocide that has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians. In the West Bank, the apartheid regime continues, as roughly 500,000 settlers, excluding those in East Jerusalem, live with full rights outside of Israel’s internationally recognized border, beside Palestinians who cannot vote, travel freely, or even build on their ancestral land.

Amid the dire situation in the West Bank and Gaza, the plight of Palestinians living inside Israel is largely forgotten. Yet these 2.1 million residents continue to live as second-class citizens.

In 2018, the Israeli Knesset passed the quasi-constitutional Nation-State Law, stipulating that self-determination is unique to the Jewish people, without guaranteeing equality for its other citizens. Furthermore, Palestinian citizens of Israel continue to face entrenched discrimination in urban planning, economic development, and educational opportunities.

In 2024, the Varieties of Democracy Institute downgraded Israel from a liberal to an electoral democracy. The demotion followed Netanyahu and his coalition’s attempt to overhaul the judiciary, their accusations the Supreme Court was “left-leaning,” and deterioration in protections against torture. This classification did not take into account the active atrocities that Israel was perpetrating in Gaza and the West Bank at the time.

Yet since this reclassification, Netanyahu has shed more of the democratic facade he has long sought to uphold.

More than five hundred humanitarian workers have been killed since the war in Gaza began. In December 2025, Israel attempted to bar thirty-seven nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from operating in the West Bank and Gaza. The Supreme Court froze the ban, allowing the organizations to continue operating pending a final ruling.

More recently, numerous foreign journalists have been turned away at the border during the election campaign, with others facing arduous interrogations and detention before being allowed entry.

Perhaps most revealing is the government’s willingness to break long-standing supremacist laws, which uphold Jews as a privileged class in Israel.

Starting in 2025, several Jewish activists were detained and deported for engaging in protective presence, a form of nonviolent solidarity work in which civilians deter violent settlers from harassing Palestinian communities. Earlier this year, a Jewish American academic on a three-year residency visa was denied entry after being accused of being a “left-wing anarchist.”

After the backlash prompted by the film NAZA, in which IDF soldiers admitted to knowingly killing innocent civilians in Gaza, Netanyahu announced plans to introduce a bill that would strip those who defame the IDF of their Israeli citizenship.

Last month, it was reported that two Jews were denied citizenship for having previously partaken in anti-occupation activism in the West Bank. This was the first known case of the state violating the Law of Return, which stipulates that every Jew is entitled to immigrate to Israel.

Many saw Gad Eisenkot as the last chance to halt the country’s authoritarian drift. The election has left open the possibility that he could still lead the government, but he has no clear path to power. While he might reverse the emerging trend of discriminating against Jews and Israelis deemed insufficiently patriotic, none of his proposed policies address the core issues that make Israel an ethnostate.

The election has not changed the reality for Palestinians, with or without Israeli citizenship, or the refusal of every major party to address these injustices. What Eisenkot may offer is merely a return to the illusion of democracy.