Israel’s election: The main issues in the words of the leading candidates
From judicial reform to conscription, here's where candidates stand on the key issues dominating the campaign.
For an election often billed as the most consequential in Israel’s history, many issues that outsiders might expect to divide the candidates are, in fact, points of consensus among the frontrunners.
None of the leading contenders in Tuesday’s election has questioned the case for unleashing a genocide on Gaza in response to the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, or the wars that have followed, including the one on Iran. Nor have most candidates for the premiership offered a clear path towards implementing a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict that was envisaged in the 1990s, or towards an equitable settlement with the Palestinians whose territory Israel occupies.
Instead, the points of division centre almost exclusively on Israel’s internal politics and how voters see the future character of their country. The choice is between the hard-right government of incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, unconstrained by the judicial oversight he has railed against, and the future outlined by the disparate coalition of his opponents, which promises a broadly similar policy agenda but within the confines of the law and without the more extreme elements of the current governing coalition.
Days after taking office in 2022, Netanyahu’s government unveiled a plan to curb the powers of Israel’s courts, which triggered months of mass protests in 2023 before the war on Gaza paused the fight.