JUSTIN AMLER: As Israelis vote, Palestinian democratic accountability remain elusive

On October 27, over seven million eligible Israelis, including 1.2 million Israeli-Arabs, will head to the polls to cast their vote for a party to represent them in the Knesset.

Meanwhile, Palestinians have not voted in a presidential election since 2005 or a national legislative election since 2006. There were supposed to be Palestinian elections on November 28, but the Palestinian Authority“postponed” them, yet again.

For Israel, many describe the upcoming poll as the most consequential election in recent times, not least because it will be the first held since the October 7 massacre. This will be a significant factor in the decision of many voters.

The current Israeli government headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is often referred to as the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, yet it is facing strong opposition, not from a left-wing coalition, but from a myriad of mostly right-wing and centrist parties opposed to Netanyahu’s continued rule.

No single Israeli party has ever won an outright majority of the Knesset’s 120 seats, forcing parties to work together to form coalitions, often despite significant ideological differences.

If recent opinion polls are any indication, it’s likely to be a tightly contested election with no clear-cut winner.

It is likely to get messy, but that’s democracy in action.

And let’s remember, this is democracy that’s taking place under extraordinarily difficult conditions. Despite ostensible ceasefires, Israel still faces major security threats in Gaza, in Lebanon, from terrorist cells in the West Bank, from Iran, and from numerous Iranian proxies. Many ordinary Israelis have served hundreds of days of reserve military duty during the last three years, while the devastated communities of Israel’s south and far north still have not fully recovered.

Despite the continuous security threats it faces from enemies committed to its destruction, Israel’s democracy continues to thrive.

And still, too many governments remain fixated on portraying Israel as the sole obstacle to peace in the region, while ignoring or even facilitating the profound democratic deficit within the Palestinian leadership – amidst numerous other shortcomings, including widespread corruption and incentivising terrorist violence against Israelis.

Thus, even as Israelis prepare to exercise the very democratic rights Western societies supposedly champion, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas has proven once again that the Palestinian leadership has, at best, a highly conditional commitment to democracy.

On September 24, Abbas addressed the United Nations General Assembly and reaffirmed that legislative elections would take place on November 28. Just over two weeks later, they were postponed, with both presidential and legislative elections now promised for September 11, 2027. We’ll see if they actually happen.

After all, it wasn’t that long ago that Abbas indefinitely postponed elections scheduled for 2021.

Abbas was elected to a four-year presidential term in 2005. That mandate expired in 2009. Seventeen years later, he remains in power without having faced another presidential election. An entire generation of Palestinians has now reached adulthood without ever having the opportunity to choose its national leaders.

What’s more, democratic reform was one of the supposed Palestinian commitments used to justify Western recognition of Palestine last year.

When Australia, France, Britain, Canada and others chose to recognise a Palestinian state in 2025, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong cited the Palestinian Authority’s commitment to democratic reform and elections as a key reason for this move.

Abbas committed in writing to democratic reform and elections, while French President Emmanuel Macron said France would “keep a close eye: on the implementation of those commitments.

Yet in the wake of the latest election postponement, these same governments could not muster anything more than a joint statement expressing “regret”.

If Palestinian democratic reform was important enough to cite as a justification when Australia recognised the currently non-existent “State of Palestine”, what consequences follow when the Palestinian leadership fails to honour that commitment? And what value did that commitment actually have?

Without consequences for failing to honour it, Australia’s recognition begins to look not like the diplomatic incentive for Palestinian reform and move toward the two-state resolution Australia says it was seeking to encourage, but pure feel-good symbolism. And that not only damages Australia’s credibility on the world stage, it actually makes the peace we say we want harder to achieve — especially since the terrorists of Hamas painted recognition as an achievement that was a result of the mass terrorism they launched against Israel on October 7, 2023.

We are thus witnessing a tale of two vastly different worlds. One is a thriving democratic country that, despite immense challenges, still manages to uphold the essential principles of freedom, choice and consent.

And the other an entity recognised as a so-called state by much of the world, yet run by a corrupt authority whose people have been denied the most basic democratic right to choose their national leaders for more than two decades. And this contrast also provides a pretty good clue as to why Israeli-Palestinian peace has proven so elusive.

Justin Amler is a policy analyst at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council