Treating Cancer with a Diet: Israel’s Election and the Fatal Politics of Denial

As the national election approaches, Israel’s political establishment offers voters a choice between cosmetic domestic repair and violent extremist fantasies, while avoiding the deeper diagnosis that both Israeli and international voices have warned about for decades.

Imagine a patient diagnosed with a metastasizing illness by independent global specialists. Most of his local doctors, eager to protect their standing and keep him calm, offer a comforting alternative: the international experts are biased and alarmist; the condition is merely a manageable metabolic imbalance; a change in diet will suffice. The patient adjusts his routine, comforted by the illusion of control while the disease turns terminal.

As Israelis prepare to vote, the metaphor captures their political choices: competing prescriptions for domestic problems while avoiding the country’s foundational illness.

For decades before October 7, Israel’s political system operated under the assumption that permanent military control over millions of Palestinians could be managed indefinitely through barriers, military deterrence, economic arrangements and diplomacy. October 7 violently shattered the illusion that this status quo was stable or sustainable. Yet rather than confronting the underlying condition, much of the political system has simply mutated its denial: failed conflict-management has given way to intensified military suppression, while a political horizon remains largely taboo.

The warnings from outside Israel have become increasingly difficult to dismiss. International legal institutions and longstanding democratic allies are imposing growing constraints. Permanent military rule without equal political rights carries profound consequences for Israel’s democracy and international standing.

But this diagnosis did not originate abroad. For decades, Israeli intellectuals, security figures, politicians and analysts warned that indefinite rule over millions of Palestinians would gradually transform Israel itself. Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned after 1967 that ruling over another population would corrupt Israeli society and undermine its democratic institutions. Others within Israel’s political and security establishment repeatedly warned that permanent occupation would entrench unequal rights, distort political priorities and erode institutional restraints on state power. The diagnosis is therefore not a foreign prescription imposed on Israel. Israelis themselves have articulated it for generations.

Yet those warnings receive little attention in the campaign. International criticism is frequently dismissed as biased, politically motivated or antisemitic, while Israeli warnings about indefinite control rarely occupy the center of electoral debate. But the silence is not simply imposed by political leaders. It reflects a broader public reluctance to confront an issue that has become deeply associated with insecurity, national identity and the trauma of October 7. For many Israelis, the occupation is easier to regard as a security problem to be managed than as a political condition requiring a fundamental resolution. The result is an electoral conversation that concentrates on urgent domestic problems while leaving the larger strategic question outside the frame.

Rolling back Netanyahu’s assault on Israel’s democratic institutions, restoring judicial checks and balances, addressing the Haredi military-service crisis, investigating the failures of October 7 and repairing the machinery of government are essential repairs to a democracy under serious strain. But they do not answer the fundamental question of what political future Israel intends for the millions of Palestinians living under its control.

A state cannot maintain a brutal military occupation for decades without risking profound damage to its own democratic institutions. To protect permanent control and shield political power from accountability, Netanyahu’s coalition launched a systematic assault on democratic checks and balances. The judicial overhaul, attacks on independent gatekeepers, political pressure on law enforcement, and demonization of civil society are part of this broader struggle.

As the illusion of conflict management lies in ruins, an even more sinister “cure” has filled the political vacuum.

Where centrist candidates offer a diet, the far right offers radical amputation. Ofer Winter, leader of the new right-wing Amcha Israel Party, has called for “voluntary emigration” and the removal and transfer of Palestinians. Far-right ministers allied with Netanyahu have likewise promoted proposals for mass “voluntary emigration” from Gaza. To a traumatized electorate, the logic is brutal: if permanent containment has failed, remove the population.

Forced displacement is not a cure; it would be catastrophic. It would risk destabilizing relations with Israel’s Arab neighbors, strain peace agreements, deepen international isolation, and jeopardize critical economic and security relationships. It would undermine Israel’s claim that it can preserve security and national identity without abandoning democratic principles.

The opposition offers a different prescription: domestic repair. Its platforms emphasize restoring judicial checks and balances, equal civic burden-sharing and investigating the failures surrounding October 7. Proposals include pressure on Haredi draft evaders, prime-ministerial term limits, constitutional guardrails and an independent State Commission of Inquiry concerning the events surrounding October 7.

But whether it is the Beyachad Alliance Party of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar! Party, Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu Party or Yair Golan’s Democrats Party, the opposition remains remarkably united in keeping the occupation and the political future of the Palestinians outside the center of the electoral contest.

Reforming Haredi draft deferments and protecting the courts are essential to Israeli democracy. But they do not resolve permanent military rule over millions of Palestinians without equal political rights. They repair the nation’s internal metabolism while leaving the malignancy untouched.

A state can live with chronic illness only as long as its strategic buffers hold. For decades, Israel benefited from a booming high-tech economy, a strong relationship with the United States, military dominance, and vibrant civil society. Those buffers are now under strain: prolonged conflict and institutional uncertainty have contributed to economic pressures; international legal proceedings increasingly constrain Israeli leaders and military personnel; and political consensus in Western capitals, especially Washington, has become increasingly contested.

That is the campaign’s central deception. Israelis are being asked to believe that the crisis can be managed through better administration, stronger institutions, tougher security policies or the removal of Netanyahu. All may matter enormously. None answers the underlying question: What political future does Israel envision for itself with the seven million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza?

With the Arab parties and the Democrats as partial exceptions, Israel’s political spectrum increasingly resembles fifty shades of right-wing politics: competing over how to manage the occupation, how aggressively to suppress its consequences, or how radically to alter the population under its control, while leaving the underlying political question largely unchallenged.

The diagnosis has been available for decades, from Israeli voices as well as international ones. The question is whether Israel’s political system will finally acknowledge that the malignancy is not the Palestinians but the system of indefinite occupation and unequal political rights and undertake the structural surgery required to rebuild its democracy and international standing.