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Jamie Dettmer is associate editor and a foreign affairs columnist for POLITICO.
The war in Gaza hasn’t figured much in campaigning for Israel’s upcoming election — despite the likelihood that Israel’s Arab minority, Palestinian by heritage, might well decide who gets to be prime minister.
Israel’s Arabs make up around 20% of the electorate that will be casting ballots in the Oct. 27 parliamentary election. And thanks to complex coalition math, Arab parties might well be the ones to crown Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s main rival, former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, who leads a center-right opposition bloc.
But campaigns by both the Arab parties and Jewish politicians have avoided talking about what the outcome might actually mean for Jewish-Arab relations in the region, for the possibility of a two-state solution and even for U.S. President Donald Trump’s vision for a comprehensive peace-through-prosperity deal between Israelis and the Palestinians.
“The election campaign has been bizarre,” said Michael Milshtein, a retired Israeli army colonel and former head of Palestinian affairs in Israel’s military intelligence agency. “The campaign has been focused on domestic and personal issues, and on Netanyahu.”
That means it hasn’t included “the very deep complicated issue of the critical relations between us and the Palestinians, and what kind of scenarios or solutions are left after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and the Gaza War — for any kind of political settlement,” Milshtein said.
But outside of Israel there’s alarm — especially among Arab leaders — over the absence of any serious debate about how to end the multi-front conflicts Israel is engaged in and what that might foretell, said HA Hellyer, a geopolitical scholar specializing in the region.
“Netanyahu, or not, the Israelis are on a particular trajectory when it comes to foreign and security policies,”Hellyer told POLITICO.
“Opposition politicians blame Netanyahu for Israel’s increasing diplomatic isolation and loss of support in parts of Europe and North America. But when you look at what they’re actually saying, they’re not arguing with the policies when it comes to Gaza. They support the overall settlement project in the West Bank. They support the incursion in Southern Lebanon. Their proposition is that they could have done things in a better way,” said Hellyer, who’s a fellow at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute.
Mentions of the Gaza conflict in election campaigns have been largely limited to clashes over who was to blame for failing to prevent the Hamas attack on southern Israel, which killed more than 1,200 people.The Eisenkot-led Change bloc has focused on Netanyahu’s role in the lead-up to the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre, pointing to the failures of his government and arguing he ignored warnings of a likely big Hamas attack. But the bloc has done little to flesh out its governing policy platform.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s campaign has sought to frame Eisenkot as an appeaser and puppet of Arab party leaders — such as Mansour Abbas, leader of the Islamist Ra’am party, and Ahmad Tibi, leader of Ta’al party — arguing he would compromise on core security issues to persuade them to join or vote with his coalition bloc after the election to give him a Knesset majority.
“The lack of real content is a major problem for such a crucial election,” the Jerusalem Post lamented in an editorial this week.
Few see any chance of a negotiated peace or a two-state solution any time soon. Israelis largely view international condemnation as biased, and say critics of Israel’s conduct in Gaza fail to understand what the country has to do to survive.
People walk past election campaign banners in Jerusalem on Oct. 22, 2026. | John Wessels/AFP via Getty Images
But at some stage or another, Israelis will have to have conversations about peace, and delaying them isn’t going to help the country reduce its deepening isolation or help repair strained ties with traditional allies, including Europeans, who are starting to impose sanctions and considering arms embargoes.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a fierce Netanyahu critic, said that while there has been election debate about how successful the Gaza war has been in degrading Hamas, “it’s true that the main issue of our future with the Palestinians has been ignored.” He added: “Had I been running, I would have talked about it the whole time.”
So why hasn’t peace been on the agenda?
As Olmert sees it, the root lies in “the huge trauma of Oct. 7, along with the perception that public opinion, the mainstream, has shifted from where it was before the massacre and moved further rightward politically.” That isn’t uncommon: When Israel suffers a severe psychological blow, the political center-of-gravity habitually moves sharply to the right, favoring hawkish and nationalist positions and marginalizing more conciliatory perspectives.
“Nonetheless, the perception is that general public opinion has shifted and, therefore, all of the other parties are hesitant to talk about any political process with the Palestinians or about negotiations or about a two-state solution, and so on and so forth, because they worry they’ll lose support,” Olmert said.
Sven Burgsdorff, a former EU representative and ambassador to the West Bank, doesn’t subscribe to Olmert’s view, instead arguing there’s not much difference between Netanyahu and the leaders of the center-right Change bloc when it comes to Gaza or a two-state solution — something Netanyahu dismisses out of hand regularly, saying that Palestinian sovereignty is incompatible with Israel’s security.
“Even if the right-wing Netanyahu coalition were to be replaced by the current opposition, none of its main leaders — Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid and Avigdor Lieberman — question the IDF’s conduct [in] the war on Gaza, nor are they supportive of the idea of Palestinian self-determination. Only Yair Golan of the Democrats and the coalition of Arab parties are in favor of that,” he said in an interview.
Opposition leaders don’t criticize Netanyahu for the conduct of the Gaza war, Burgsdorff continued. Their issue with him is whether he was at fault for not protecting Israel from the 2023 attack. They also accuse him of being set on dismantling Israel’s democratic system and for having no exit strategy for his forays into broader regional conflicts.
Netanyahu has made a long political career out of leveraging external crises to keep his grip on power. And even now, it would take a brave commentator to write him off and suggest that Bibi the Magician, to use one of his nicknames, has lost the magic touch. The Israeli leader has pulled off stunning turnarounds in his long political career, including in the 1990s when he beat Shimon Peres in elections held just months after the assassination of then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Olmert still hopes for a Netanyahu defeat and says if Eisenkot is installed, he might make conciliatory moves like meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of Palestinian National Authority.
“He won’t be able to do anything big or quickly with Bennett and Lieberman in his cabinet. Both of them are completely opposed to the idea of Palestinian sovereignty. They keep saying it all the time. ‘There will never be a Palestinian state,’” he said. “So the political space will be very limited.”
But without some serious movement toward a two-state solution, Israel could risk alienating more of its traditional allies in Europe and the U.S.
On Thursday, President Donald Trump posted to his social media website a headline from the Wall Street Journal: “More oil is now coming out of the Persian Gulf than before the Iran War.” While this is indeed what the Journal used as a headline in a recent story, the president did not link to the article or give more info beyond that. As the report reads, “Middle East oil flows, including shipments through Hormuz and alternative routes across the region, averaged more than 24 million barrels a day in the week through Oct. 18, surpassing prewar levels of 23.3 million, according to ship tracker Kpler.”
Those details reveal a difference of roughly 700,000 barrels of oil, which is a lot of oil to be sure, but only 3% more than the 23.3 million before Israel and the U.S. launched a war against Iran on Feb. 28. So we’re basically back to where things were before the fighting started.
Regardless, it doesn’t appear that this 3% increase is going to bring down oil prices any time soon. On Friday, the price of Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, reached more than $117 a barrel, the highest level since April, and close to the highest levels since the war began, according to the New York Times. This is in spite of Trump desperately trying to bring down the cost of diesel, which averaged an all-time high of $6.52 per gallon on Sept. 22 and as of Friday, sits at an average of $6.31 per gallon. Regular unleaded is averaging about $4.29 a gallon.
Among other moves, Trump has slashed rules for truckers, offered farmers $8 billion in relief and struck a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to ease fuel sanctions, a move critics have said may be illegal. On Friday, the first shipment of Russian oil departed on a tanker headed to the U.S.
None of this is predicted to change the cost of oil any time soon, according to experts. “The president tends to discount long-term losses over short-term gain, and I am skeptical if there is any short gain to be had here,” said Chris Borick, a pollster and political scientist at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, told Reuters Friday.
Meanwhile, fighting in the Middle East continues, with at least seven commercial oil tankers damaged by either Iranian attacks or naval mines in the Strait of Hormuz on one night alone, which may possibly be the largest single-day number of vessels damaged in the waterway since the war started.
Yet there seems to be no close end to the war. In fact, the U.S. could still be stuck in a stalemate with Iran a year from now, according to Mike Waltz, Trump’s U.N. ambassador to the UN. In an interview with the Financial Times published Friday, Waltz said “the president and the U.S. Navy can maintain this blockade [on Iranian ports] for the foreseeable future,” he said, adding that the Trump administration is “tightening” its economic pressure on Iran. “I’m not going to put out hypotheticals. One would hope that they’ll come to the table in a meaningful way before that,” Waltz said.
The first folding iPhone Duo is here, alongside the 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max, but they’re not your only options. We have all the details on Apple’s smartphone lineup to help you find the right model.
KYIV — Ukraine and Russia both swapped 270 prisoners of war Friday in the third stage of the process that started on Aug. 19.
Kyiv returned home 261 military personnel and nine civilians, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a statement.
“Most of those released are warriors who defended Ukraine in Mariupol. Defenders from the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Kyiv, Mykolaiv, and Chernihiv sectors are also returning. Many were illegally convicted in Russia. Among those returning are five people who were believed to have been killed in the Russian terrorist attack in Olenivka in July 2022,” Zelenskyy added. “A very important result.”
Moscow’s defense ministry also confirmed the exchange in a statement, saying Friday that the 270 exchanged Russian prisoners were in Belarus.
A prisoner exchange deal was brokered by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration in May. The process is expected to involve 2,000 prisoners of war in total, Zelenskyy said at the time. The latest wave of exchanges took place soon after the end of another round of negotiations in Oslo and St. Petersburg.
“We express our gratitude to the United States of America and the United Arab Emirates, and in particular, we thank everyone who contributed to the release of Stephen Hubbard — a 74-year-old English teacher from Izium who was unlawfully convicted and subjected to torture by the Russians,” Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War said in a statement.
Most of the military personnel handed over to Ukraine had been detained since 2022, authorities said. Some had even been captured in 2018 and 2020, during the war in Donbas.
CES 2026 loved these innovative headphones that transform into a Bluetooth speaker. After living with them, I’m impressed by the engineering, but less impressed by the sound.
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