Jonathan Cook’s column for Middle East Eye argues that Israel’s October 2026 general election proves the country is a sham democracy. He points to the fact that Arab-led parties won a record 19 of the 120 Knesset seats, holding the balance of power, yet the Jewish-led opposition hesitates to partner with them to oust Benjamin Netanyahu. Cook uses this moment to draw a straight historical line from 1948 to the present. He argues that the state’s demographic majority was engineered through expulsion, maintained by martial law, and cemented by the 2018 Nation-State Law. In his view, Palestinian citizens are allowed to vote only because their votes are structurally powerless.
Cook highlights realities that defenders of the state routinely ignore. You cannot evaluate Israel’s political system without confronting the military rule over millions of Palestinians in the West Bank since 1967. A state that rules over a disenfranchised population for half a century operates with a massive democratic deficit. Cook also correctly identifies the historical scars of military government, noting that from 1948 to 1966, Arab citizens lived under a rigid permit system while enduring state violence, such as the 1956 Kafr Qassem massacre where border police killed dozens of villagers breaking an unannounced curfew. The contemporary legal landscape is equally stark. The 2018 Nation-State Law formally reserves national self-determination exclusively for Jews, establishing a clear ethnic hierarchy in constitutional law.
The hostility from the Israeli right following the election only reinforces the grim picture. Likud politicians branded the electoral success of Arab parties a terror attack on democracy, while Netanyahu floated baseless claims of a stolen election. Haaretz’s editorial board noted that the current government is actively trying to criminalize the Arab vote. If Cook’s argument were simply that Israel is a deeply flawed, ethnically stratified state maintaining an authoritarian grip on occupied territories, his essay would be unassailable.
But Cook goes further, insisting the entire democratic apparatus is a facade. Here, his own evidence betrays him. A sham democracy is an authoritarian theater where incumbents cannot lose, the press is muzzled, and the central elections committee takes orders from the executive. The October 27 election was the exact opposite. Turnout hit 77.9 percent, the highest in decades. Roughly 840,000 votes went to the two Arab-led lists, a 64 percent surge from 2022. These parties nearly doubled their representation from 10 to 19 seats. As a direct result, the incumbent prime minister’s bloc collapsed from 68 seats to 53, losing its majority. The independent Central Elections Committee shrugged off the government's fraud investigations as irrelevant to the final tally, and the domestic press aggressively condemned the ruling coalition’s rhetoric.
Calling Arab votes irrelevant decoration while acknowledging those exact votes just dismantled the ruling majority is a profound contradiction. Cook rushes to declare the outcome a closed door days before the new Knesset is even sworn in on November 10. He assumes the opposition bloc, led by Gadi Eisenkot, will inevitably reject a coalition with Ra’am or the Joint List. While several key figures like Avigdor Lieberman refuse to rely on Arab votes, parliamentary negotiations are fluid. Options like an Eisenkot minority government supported from the outside by Ra’am remain on the table. To dismiss a democratic process as a sham because coalition building is ugly and prejudiced misses how parliamentary systems actually function.
Cook also ignores recent history to make his case look stronger. He insists Arab parties always sit on the sidelines. He omits that in 2021, Ra’am made history by joining Naftali Bennett’s governing coalition. Mansour Abbas, Ra’am’s leader, has openly stated his intention to join a government again. When you claim minority exclusion is a permanent, structural absolute, ignoring a major precedent from less than five years ago is intellectual malpractice. Cook similarly marginalizes Yair Golan’s Democrats, ignoring Golan’s explicit calls for a governing partnership with Arab parties and his public rejection of Netanyahu’s racist segregation of Jewish and Arab votes.
This flattening extends to how Cook describes the Israeli public. He claims there is an absolute Jewish consensus for turning the country into a Middle East Sparta and an overwhelming demand for total war in Gaza. While 2025 polls did reveal disturbing levels of support for mass displacement among Jewish Israelis, reducing seven million people to a monolith is both analytically lazy and morally flat. A society that just endured two years of mass protests and delivered a hung parliament is fractured, not uniform. Applying universal human dignity means refusing to flatten any population into a singular, bloodthirsty caricature, a tactic Cook rightfully condemns when right-wing politicians use it against Palestinians.
Ultimately, Cook’s framework is structurally unfalsifiable. When Arab voter turnout drops, critics cite it as proof that the system is broken. When turnout surges and the Arab parties secure unprecedented leverage, the resulting right-wing backlash is cited as proof that the democracy is a sham. If the opposition refuses to partner with Arab parties, the exclusion proves the sham; if they do partner, it is dismissed as cynical window dressing. An argument that metabolizes every possible outcome as proof of its own premise is an ideology, not an analysis.
Real emancipation and human freedom require an accurate map of power. Israel’s political system is severely compromised by ethnic privilege and the ongoing subjugation of the West Bank and Gaza. But dismissing the electoral machinery inside the Green Line as a complete fiction strips agency from the hundreds of thousands of Arab citizens who just utilized that machinery to unseat a hostile government. Acknowledging that victory does not erase the injustices they face, but denying it obscures the very real political power they possess and the tangible shifts happening on the ground.
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