Awad Abdelfattah
The Palestine Chronicle / August 16, 2026
The strategic question is whether Palestinians can enter these different electoral arenas without losing sight of the larger struggle: the struggle to dismantle the structures of colonial domination.
It is difficult, and even unacceptable, for a Palestinian to view the elections to be held separately in Israel and the 67-occupied territories in the coming months outside the context of the monstrous Zionist regime, especially following its ongoing genocidal crime.
These elections carry deep paradoxes, contradictions, and existential questions: how can Palestinians reconcile their understanding of the genocidal regime and the constraints it imposes on the electoral process with their immediate need for protection from an unprecedented level of barbarism being perpetrated—not as a reaction, but as a strategy to eliminate Palestinians politically and physically?
The approach of boycotting the elections, and potentially deepening Israel’s international illegitimacy, may have been valid and legitimate years ago. Today, however, it could seem to many Palestinians like a luxury—and even counterproductive. Participation in elections is driven by the fact that avenues for political mobilization have drastically shrunk, as the Israeli regime increasingly applies many of the repressive tactics routinely used against Palestinians in the West Bank to Palestinians inside Israel who hold Israeli citizenship since 1948.
So it is a deep paradox that Palestinians residing across the entire Palestinian geography find themselves engaged in elections within radically different institutional and legal systems, yet under one overarching structure of apartheid and settler-colonial rule. As Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line enter new electoral cycles, they therefore face a dilemma that goes far beyond the familiar question of whether to vote.
Can elections revive Palestinian politics without further institutionalizing the fragmentation of the Palestinian people? Can each Palestinian community respond to its immediate dangers and concrete needs without losing its consciousness of being part of one people? And can electoral participation be connected to a long-term strategy of liberation rather than becoming a substitute for it?
These questions are particularly urgent because the majority of Palestinian political parties and factions, as well as many independent activists and public figures, have decided to engage in the electoral process not out of a conviction that elections can dismantle the genocidal apartheid regime, or could bring a better alternative government, but because they believe that the existing fascist Zionist coalition poses a real and existential danger and must therefore be ousted from power.
Even where there is no expectation that an alternative government would fundamentally alter the structures of domination, electoral participation is seen by many as a necessary means of confronting immediate threats. Other political options, including an electoral boycott, could theoretically have been pursued and mobilized more powerfully under different political circumstances.
At the same time, voices associated with one-state initiatives and campaigns have increasingly warned that political participation, if detached from a consciousness that transcends the reality of partition, risks further entrenching the fragmentation of the Palestinian people.
Without systematically educating the different Palestinian constituencies and communities about their common national identity, their connection to one another, and their shared liberation project across historic Palestine and the diaspora, electoral politics can become another mechanism through which colonial partition is reproduced.
The deeper dilemma, therefore, is not simply participation versus boycott, but between politics that manages fragmentation and politics based on strategic vision that seeks to overcome it in the long run. In other words, while engaging in elections, the strategic vision must be present, through education and analysis, of the nature of the Zionist regime, and the necessity to replace it with a democratic polity where all could live equally.
About the Paradox
In Israel proper, Palestinian parties are preparing for another Knesset election, debating how to rebuild their fragmented political representation, how to confront the growing strength of the fascist Israeli far right, and how to protect Palestinian communities from escalating repression and material insecurity.
Currently, Arab political parties, along with independent activists and public figures, are also struggling to bring back a political party, ironically one with an Islamic ideology, from its involvement in a bizarre political course: rejoining a right-wing alternative government, a conduct that many have described as a betrayal.
Many Palestinians don’t cease wondering how a Palestinian party, a splinter Islamist party, could prefer cooperation and collaboration with Zionist right-wing settler parties to cooperating and joining a broad coalition of Palestinan parties planning to run for election on one list. Therefore, multiple voices have been calling to excommunicate this party.
In the occupied Palestinian territories, the call for elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council has revived a different but related demand: political renewal, democratic representation, and an end to the prolonged stagnation of Palestinian political institutions.
The institutional circumstances are profoundly different. Palestinian citizens of Israel are voting within the political institutions of a state that declares itself a Jewish state, denies their collective national equality, continually incites against them—including, recently, against doctors and health workers in Israeli hospitals—and is committing genocide against their people. Palestinians in the West Bank are being asked to elect Palestinian institutions that operate under occupation and colonial rule and without sovereignty.
Yet the political dilemma confronting both communities is connected by a deeper question: can elections become a means of reviving Palestinian politics without further entrenching the fragmentation of the Palestinian people?
This is the paradox that deserves to stand at the center of the Palestinian electoral debate.
For Palestinians in each part of historic Palestine, elections in their current form inevitably respond to immediate and concrete needs. Inside Israel, participation can provide a political space from which to confront discriminatory policies, defend land and housing rights, resist the far right, protect civic freedoms, and address the growing dangers facing Palestinian communities.
In the occupied territories, elections can offer a means of challenging political stagnation, renewing leadership, restoring accountability, and giving Palestinians a voice after years in which their political institutions have increasingly lost legitimacy and relevance to the liberation project.
There is a long-standing popular desire to get rid of the Palestinian Authority and generate an alternative Palestinian leadership capable of endorsing a liberation project instead of maintaining a subcontractor role for the colonial apartheid regime. The decision to engage in these elections comes, observers have noted, after the failure or inability of multiple attempts and initiatives to effect change from below through grassroots mobilization—to fight the occupation, change the function of the PA, reform or rebuild the Palestine Liberation Organization, and reinvent it as a representative umbrella for all Palestinians while retaining its liberationist role.
These needs, especially the urgent need to stop the genocide in Gaza and rehabilitate its population, cannot simply be dismissed in the name of a more distant national strategy. Communities living under different legal and political conditions experience the conflict differently and face different forms of danger. A politics that ignores these differences risks becoming detached from the realities of Palestinian life.
But the opposite danger is equally serious.
If every Palestinian community organizes its political life exclusively around its immediate circumstances, elections may reinforce precisely the fragmentation that has been imposed upon the Palestinian people. Palestinians in the 1948 territories may increasingly understand themselves primarily as an Israeli minority seeking protection and equality; Palestinians in the West Bank may increasingly see their political future through the narrow framework of the collaborating Palestinian Authority and its limited institutions; Gaza, Jerusalem, and the diaspora may be treated as separate political questions rather than as parts of one national struggle.
The central question, therefore, is not whether these communities have different needs. They clearly do. The question is how these needs can be addressed without sacrificing the political consciousness that they belong to one people, whose fragmentation is itself a central feature of the colonial order.
This creates a series of difficult questions that Palestinian politics can no longer avoid.
Can elections inside Israel and elections in the occupied territories help reconnect the Palestinian national movement—or will they deepen the institutional and political divisions between its different parts?
How can each Palestinian community use the political opportunities available to it to confront its immediate dangers while preserving a common national horizon?
How can Palestinians reconcile the need for practical political intervention with the need to maintain a long-term strategy aimed at liberation from the structures of settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocidal violence?
And, perhaps most importantly, how can electoral politics serve the reconstruction of Palestinian national politics rather than become another mechanism through which the Palestinian people are governed as separate populations?
These questions become even more urgent at a moment when the existing Palestinian political system is deeply fragmented and the Israeli state is becoming increasingly repressive. The genocidal war in Gaza, the expansion of settler violence in the West Bank, the intensification of political repression inside Israel, and the continued exclusion of millions of Palestinian refugees have exposed, with renewed brutality, the limits of a political framework that treats Palestinians according to separate geographical and legal categories.
Yet these same conditions make electoral politics more complicated, not less.
For Palestinians under immediate threat, political participation cannot simply be dismissed as collaboration or accommodation. There are circumstances in which voting, parliamentary representation, and political organization provide indispensable tools for defending communities and preserving political space.
At the same time, participation becomes politically dangerous when it turns into an end in itself—when Palestinians begin to measure political success by their ability to influence an Israeli coalition or administer limited Palestinian institutions rather than by their ability to challenge the structures that produce their dispossession and subordination.
The Palestinian electoral dilemma is therefore not adequately captured by the binary of participation versus boycott.
The deeper dilemma is between politics that manages fragmentation and politics that seeks to overcome it.
This distinction is particularly important because the apparent separation between Israeli and Palestinian electoral arenas conceals a single territorial reality. Between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, Palestinians live under different legal regimes, but within an overarching structure of Israeli power. They have been divided into citizens of Israel, residents of Jerusalem, Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank, a devastated and besieged population in Gaza, and millions of refugees outside their homeland.
The fragmentation is real. The differences between these communities are real. Their political needs and immediate dangers are real.
But so is the historical and national connection between them.
The challenge for Palestinian politics is therefore not to deny these differences in the name of abstract unity, nor to allow these differences to destroy the very idea of a common Palestinian people. It is to develop a political framework capable of doing both things at once: responding seriously to the particular conditions of each community while maintaining a shared national consciousness and a common strategic horizon.
This is the real test of the coming electoral cycles.
The question is not simply who wins seats, which parties form coalitions, or whether voter turnout rises or falls. The more consequential question is whether elections can become occasions to rebuild Palestinian political agency across the Green Line—or whether they will further institutionalize the fragmentation of Palestinian politics.
The ballot box may be necessary. It may sometimes be useful. But it cannot be allowed to define the limits of Palestinian political imagination.
The strategic question is whether Palestinians can enter these different electoral arenas without losing sight of the larger struggle: the struggle to dismantle the structures of colonial domination and to build a political future in which the Palestinian people are no longer divided into separate populations whose political horizons are determined by the system that fragmented them in the first place.
Awad Abdelfattah is a political writer and the former general secretary of the Balad party; he is the coordinator of the Haifa-based One Democratic State Campaign, established in late 2017
