Welcome to +972’s Sunday Recap!

If there are any clear takeaways from Israel’s election on Tuesday, one is the historic turnout by Palestinian citizens of Israel: At 80 percent of eligible voters, it was the highest in decades and even surpassed the national average in this election. 

For Local Call’s Baker Zoubi, Israel’s far right, led by Ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, helped produce this outcome by bringing national politics into every Arab home. And on election day, Palestinian citizens proved that fear and despair need not mean silence.

Yet as Rami Younis argued, even if Palestinian citizens are the big winners of Israel’s election, it ultimately doesn’t matter: The historic result for Arab parties is rendered meaningless by an Israeli opposition that appears unwilling to partner with them to depose Netanyahu.

Ahead of the election, Amos Brison reported on the battle for Jewish votes among Israel’s Palestinian parties. While the Joint List and Ra’am achieved a record number of Knesset seats, they offered very different answers on how far to bend in pursuit of Jewish support. Shortly after the final results came in, he wrote about the secret to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political longevity – abandoning commitments that get in his way – and why it’s time for his opponents to do the same.

Among the outgoing government’s most consequential feats over the past four years has been its transformation of the West Bank — the subject of a new report by Shatha Yaish, Oren Ziv, and Basel Adra. Expanded land seizures, military restrictions, mass displacement, and over 100 new Jewish settlements have reshaped an already fragmented territory, and the very fabric of Palestinian life.

Nowhere was this transformation clearer in recent days than in the West Bank city of Hebron, where Netanyahu has been turning displacement into an election spectacle. As resident Issa Amro wrote, after an attack on Israeli soldiers on Oct. 23, Israel expelled 4,000 Palestinians from the city in four days — destroying many of their homes and engineering a new reality that locals fear will become permanent.

And Ahmed Dremly detailed a recent visit to the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, where he felt the ghosts of Gaza: while the relics of Pompeii survived centuries buried under lava and ash, he fears the Gaza he knew will survive only in his memories.

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