When Israelis elect a new parliament on Oct. 27, the nearly three million Palestinians of the occupied West Bank will have no vote in choosing the government that runs their daily lives. The some 700,000 Jewish settlers living across the same territory, in about 300 settlements and outposts, will.
In Jabal al-Baba, a Bedouin community of about 450 people east of Jerusalem, Israel decides who can build a house, a street or a school, Al Jazeera reported. Most residents belong to the Jahalin tribe, whose families were expelled from the Naqab desert region by Israeli authorities in the years after the 1948 war Palestinians call the Nakba. The community sits in Area C, under the Oslo Accords the part of the West Bank, about 60 percent of it, that remains under full Israeli military and civil control.
“They treat us like something that doesn’t exist,” said Atallah al-Jahalin, the community’s representative. “You don’t have the right to vote. You don’t have the rights that you would have in a democratic state.” He said the community has gone through more than 100 demolition operations in recent years. “We were constantly rebuilding our homes.”
Israel says it demolishes structures built without permits, which Palestinians can almost never get. Bimkom, an Israeli rights group, found that more than 99 percent of Palestinian building permit applications in Area C were rejected between 2021 and 2024. Settlement construction, illegal under international law, proceeds at a record pace: in April the security cabinet approved 34 new settlements in one decision, including outposts legalized retroactively, according to the watchdog group Peace Now.
“There is an Israeli plan to displace the people who are here,” Mr. al-Jahalin said. “All of this is a means of pressure. We have to leave these areas for the benefit of the settlement projects.”
In the election, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and the far-right coalition it leads are running neck and neck in polls with an opposition alliance that has named no leader; Gadi Eisenkot, a former army chief from the centrist Yashar party, is seen as its likeliest candidate for prime minister. Neither bloc appears headed for a majority, and most opposition leaders have ruled out governing with the Arab-led parties that represent the Palestinians who make up about 20 percent of Israel’s own population.
Many Palestinians doubt a change at the top would matter. Jamal Juma’, who coordinates the Stop the Wall campaign, noted that it was Israel’s center-left Labour Party that began building settlements after 1967.
The sharpest test for Jabal al-Baba is E1, a strip of land between Jerusalem and the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim. Building there would cut the West Bank in two and threaten 18 Bedouin communities, including this one, with forced displacement. In August 2025 Israel gave final approval to 3,401 settler homes in E1, a project Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said would “bury” the idea of a Palestinian state; a month later Mr. Netanyahu declared “there will be no Palestinian state.” This year the government put the land up for sale in two tenders timed before the vote. The attorney general has moved to delay parts of the process until after the election, and Mr. Smotrich is challenging that in court.
Mr. Eisenkot has called the idea of a Palestinian state “delusional” and spoken of “strengthening” settlements. Asked in August about the E1 tenders, he said, “Not now” — advancing the project, he said, was a mistake with an international cost. That is a dispute over timing, not over settling the West Bank.
“There may be a democracy, but only for Jewish people,” said Kareem Jubran, field research director at B’Tselem, the Israeli rights group that describes Israel’s rule over Palestinians as apartheid. “Even if the governments change, the system remains.” Mr. Juma’ said Israel had built a gate at the entrance of every Palestinian city and village and warned of fragmentation. “It will be like open prisons, like Gaza,” he said. “But here we have different Gazas.” Mr. Jubran said only international pressure could stop E1. “As long as it is not, E1 will go ahead.”
Mr. al-Jahalin said his family was driven out of the Naqab once already. “I am not ready to live the life of my father,” he said. “I, as a Palestinian, will stay, whether I die or live on this Earth.”