Let's call it what it is: Israelis voters said yes to continuing Gaza genocide

All the regular ballot boxes in Israel's 26th Knesset election have been opened. The Netanyahu bloc has 53 seats, the opposition 48, and the Arab parties 19 seats, a historic record. No one reached 61. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz ran its analysis under this headline: "Israel's worst election ever: no clear winner, no clarity, no chance of change."

In the middle of this uncertainty, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir's party, Otzma Yehudit, won 7 seats.

I will share a few more statistics with you. Because the figures at hand will help us clarify a matter.

Turnout in the Israeli elections was 77.7 percent. This is the highest rate since 1999. When 90 percent of the votes had been counted, Otzma Yehudit had reached 284,000 votes. Its vote share was 5.5 percent. When the remaining ballot boxes are added at the same rate, we can say that there are more than 300,000 Israeli voters behind Ben-Gvir.

While everyone is discussing Netanyahu's bloc failing to reach a governing majority, the opposition failing to deliver the expected explosion, and the Arab parties' gains that overturned all calculations, I have very important reasons, concerning all of humanity, for doing such detailed arithmetic about Ben-Gvir.

More than three hundred thousand votes… And this is support coming from no small segment of the Israeli people, before the eyes of the world. While examining the results, I was also thinking about this article, and it crossed my mind: "A genocide referendum was held in Israel by applying all the rules of democracy, and the genociders received approval from the ballot box."

Besides, Ben-Gvir is not someone who hides who he is. He openly displays a personality in which he blends his psychopathy with recklessness and kneads his hatred with his faith. That is how he builds his political showcase too.

In June 2025, the states of Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway imposed personal sanctions on Ben-Gvir on the grounds that he incited violence against Palestinian civilians.

He paid no attention to any of it. Two months later, in August 2025, he entered the cell of Marwan Barghouti, who has been imprisoned since 2002 and is considered one of the symbolic figures of the Palestinian struggle, with a camera and said, "We will erase anyone who touches the people of Israel." When Barghouti's wife looked at the video, she could not recognize her husband at first. Those images were not a leak; Ben-Gvir himself published them. Because those images were in fact the advertising film of his political campaign.

In May 2026, more than 430 activists from the Sumud Flotilla carrying aid to Gaza were abducted and detained in Ashdod. Ben-Gvir walked among the handcuffed civilians with an Israeli flag and mocked them, saying, "Now look at their state." France banned his entry into the country after this.

On the first flotilla, he had come over to where we were and, foaming at the mouth, hurled insults at us. We responded. We said whatever came to our mouths at that moment. He was not ashamed; on the contrary, he showed those around him the satisfaction he took from the reaction he received. Afterward, he gave the order for us to be physically tortured.

Ben-Gvir is the spokesman of the genocide in Gaza. He put his political office on the line to stop the entry of humanitarian aid into the city. He advocated the expulsion of Gazans. He withdrew from the government in January 2025 because of the ceasefire. When the bombardment began in March, he returned to his seat. We are talking about a political cobra that feeds on the death of the innocent.

Why did I tell you all this?

Ben-Gvir is, of course, not someone worth writing about. But we need to talk about what he represents. Netanyahu, who did not get the votes he expected in the election, called Ben-Gvir the night before last. The words reported in the Israeli press were as follows: "We are together and we will continue to stay together."

In other words, Ben-Gvir will continue his genocidal ways with the support of his people and through democratic means.

According to a poll conducted on behalf of Penn State University in March 2025 and published by Haaretz, 82 percent of Israeli Jews support the forced expulsion of the people of Gaza. And 47 percent say that in Gaza, which the army has captured, they should be treated as in Jericho as described in the Torah. In other words, nearly half of Israeli Jews say "yes" to putting the people of Gaza to the sword. This rate rises to 58 percent among those under 40.

So the more than 300,000 votes Ben-Gvir received are the part of the iceberg above the water. The millions who think like him vote for more "polite" parties.

In any case, Ben-Gvir's power comes from the savagery having seeped into Israeli society. The era of "crimes committed by a handful of far-rightists" in Israel has in fact long since ended. Even the Zionism-backed global media has come to be ashamed of Ben-Gvir. But this situation is not a crisis for him and his supporters. On the contrary, they are motivated by it. Ben-Gvir is a subject. He is the representative of both his country and his people.

Now let us go back to the beginning and call it what it is: This election was in fact a vote in which the Israeli people officially, openly, and knowingly declared that they are complicit in the Gaza genocide. And the results show that this great crime has been assumed.

If there is a crime, a criminal, and accomplices, then a court will also be established. Today the election, tomorrow a fair trial. Humanity will not forget this theater stage, this democratic massacre.