The search for a decolonial way out: The electoral impasse between the river and the sea
Awad Abdelfattah writes in The Palestine Chronicle on 16 August 2026:
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 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.