As has been the case in recent decades, Israelis will probably not get a chance to see a debate between the top two candidates for prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett, ahead of this year’s election.
If they were to go head-to-head, though, it would be illuminating to hear each man answer this question: What do you propose for the future of the West Bank, and for Israeli-Palestinian relations more broadly?
How would they respond? Surprisingly, and in contrast to previous votes, it’s hard to say. Israel is approaching what many believe to be one of its most pivotal elections ever. But one issue that has occupied and bedeviled the country’s politics for decades barely seems to register.
It’s clear that this election will be about October 7, 2023. It’s the first election since the Hamas-led onslaught that devastated Israel and precipitated a change in the country and across the Middle East. The massacre and its legacy will be at the center of the campaign.
Bennett and others in the anti-Netanyahu camp — Yair Lapid, Gadi Eisenkot, Yair Golan — will continue trying to indelibly link the premier with the catastrophe and blame him for it. Netanyahu will continue trying to deflect blame and highlight Israel’s subsequent achievements in Gaza and in fighting other regional adversaries like Hezbollah and Iran.
Those issues are important — and they are also backward-looking. Other questions that are more squarely focused on the future will also take up airtime, such as whether and how to draft Haredi men into the military, and the ongoing debate over the Netanyahu government’s effort to weaken the judiciary.
There’s another half-dozen burning topics that are sure to dominate political messaging in the coming months — including Qatargate and the establishment of a state commission of inquiry into October 7 — many of which come down to a referendum on Netanyahu’s leadership.
The so-called “Palestinian question” isn’t one of them.
The future of Gaza will continue to be at the heart of Israeli politics for some time and, obviously, what happens there will determine the fates of a large share of Palestinians. But US President Donald Trump’s administration has indicated that he’s the one calling the shots in Gaza, not the occupant of the prime minister’s residence.
And either way, neither candidate for prime minister has purported to present an overarching vision for how to relate to the Palestinians.
Right to left: Then-Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz seen during a discussion and a vote on the ‘West Bank bill’ at the Knesset on June 6, 2022. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
The reasons for this are clear, but before laying them out, it’s worth noting how unusual this is.
Two previous cataclysms in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — the First and Second Intifadas — were each followed by elections in which the winner pursued a game-changing approach to solving the conflict. While the ideas ended up being unsuccessful, voters at least were given a choice on the matter.
The Oslo process kicked off after Yitzhak Rabin’s 1992 victory, leading to years of peace negotiations. After Ehud Olmert’s 2006 win, and on the heels of the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, he pursued an abortive attempt at unilateral withdrawal from swaths of the West Bank, then followed that up with Oslo-style talks with the PA. Neither approach succeeded.
October 7 and its aftermath have been, for everyone involved, far bloodier and costlier. They have transformed this part of the world. But unlike in 1992 or 2006, they haven’t led to a transformative proposal for how Israel is to live alongside, or with, or without its millions of Palestinian neighbors. Those ideas exist at the ends of the political map but not in its mainstream.
The Democrats party leader Yair Golan speaks at a memorial rally marking the 30th anniversary of the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in Tel Aviv on November 1, 2025. The banner reads “Yes to Peace. No to Violence!” (Noam Amir / Pro-Democracy Protest Movement)
Why is that? The answer is that it’s a mix of ideological uncertainty and political realities. In other words, no one really knows what to do, and even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to do it.
It’s a political axiom in Israel that the Oslo process failed, with successive rounds of direct, final-status negotiations bearing little fruit and Palestinian leaders walking away from two Israeli conflict-ending offers. Since 2015, Netanyahu has been openly against full Palestinian statehood.
Today, Jewish Israeli support for Palestinian statehood has cratered, and anyway, the “center-left” camp most likely to pursue this kind of plan is led by Bennett, who is himself a resolute opponent of Palestinian statehood. One of his would-be junior partners, Golan, leads the remnants of Israel’s left wing, but almost certainly won’t be able to achieve a left-wing vision for solving the conflict if he’s in Bennett’s cabinet.
More recently, with the right in power, senior lawmakers and ministers have pushed for annexing parts of the West Bank, and in a previous campaign, Netanyahu made a promise to that effect. But even with a staunchly right-wing government in place for three years, annexation hasn’t happened, though Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich trumpets the idea and has taken a series of steps he has touted as “de facto sovereignty.”
In large part, that’s because Trump explicitly vowed that annexation wouldn’t occur. The UAE also issued a stark warning against annexation. And if annexation can’t happen under Trump, seen as a robustly pro-Israel president with Mike Huckabee, a historically pro-settlement ambassador, in Jerusalem, it’s hard to see it happening at all in the coming years.
US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee (center) and the Palestinian mayor of the village of Taybeh, Suleiman Khourieh (center-left), tour the fifth-century Church of St George in the Palestinian Christian village of Taybeh, northeast of Ramallah in the West Bank, on July 19, 2025. (JAAFAR ASHTIYEH / AFP)
Absent those choices, no one is putting forward a grand idea for what to do, which has itself created a kind of strange consensus across Israel’s fractious society.
“Among the Israelis who identify with the center-left, there prevails a position that it’s impossible to withdraw from the territories and establish a Palestinian state,” Israeli thinker Micah Goodman wrote in Ynet in June. “Israelis who identify with the right say it’s improper and undesirable to withdraw from the territories and establish a Palestinian state.”
He continued, “What’s the practical difference between ‘impossible’ and ‘improper?’… Since the practical implications of this debate have shifted from the present to the remote future, it has lost its ability to divide Israel.”
A recent poll by the Israel Democracy Institute gives some shape to this ideological stalemate. Taken in October 2025 regarding the future of the West Bank, it found that 32.7% of Israelis overall prefer reaching a diplomatic accord with the Palestinians, and 35% support annexing the territories. Among Jewish Israelis, the split is 27% for a diplomatic deal and 41.1% for annexation. Neither received a majority, let alone enough of a supermajority to justify a major policy change.
IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir (left) meets with officers in the West Bank city of Hebron, January 21, 2026. (Israel Defense Forces)
The future of the West Bank is sure to show up in other ways during the campaign. Settler violence has been at a high tide for months, including multiple attacks this week that reportedly injured Palestinians, torched property and damaged olive trees. Politicians have been speaking out about it and it’s penetrating the broader Israeli discourse.
On the diplomatic front, any move toward normalization in the region will necessarily include some reference to the Palestinian issue, as Saudi Arabia and other countries have pushed for progress toward statehood. But there are signs, for the time being, that Israel may have reached its limit when it comes to normalization, now that Saudi Arabia is signaling a move away from it.
This will indeed be a pivotal election. It may determine the future of the state’s social contract, its mandatory draft, its governmental balance of power and the legacy of the bloodiest day in Israeli history.
But whether Netanyahu stays or goes, the “Palestinian question” will probably remain unanswered.