Even Without Netanyahu, the Settlement Machine Keeps Running
An upcoming Israeli election will likely remove a leader, not the decades-long architecture of dispossession his governments have built — and mainstream coverage is not grappling with that distinction.
Israeli voters will head to the polls in the months ahead in a contest framed, in much of the Western press, as a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu. The framing is convenient: a long premiership, a corruption docket, a war in Gaza that has cost tens of thousands of Palestinian lives — all of it can be folded into a single personality and a single ballot box. The framing is also, on the evidence now accumulating, dangerously incomplete.
Writing in Middle East Eye on 23 June 2026, independent journalist Antony Loewenstein set out a thesis that should be at the centre of every election brief filed in the run-up to the vote. The political era of Netanyahu, he notes, has been the longest in the country's history. His vision for the occupied West Bank and Gaza has been to crush the ambitions of the Palestinian people. Replacing Netanyahu, Loewenstein warns, will not end that project — because the project is no longer the work of one man. It is the work of a state.
The election is real. The machine is older.
The forthcoming Israeli election is, as Loewenstein writes, still far too early to call, with political posturing continuing on all sides. Coalition math, the hostage file, the military campaign in Gaza, the relationship with the Trump administration in Washington — each of these will move the needle in the weeks ahead. None of them, on their own, will dismantle the apparatus that has grown up around the occupation over decades.
That apparatus includes the settler movement's deepening hold on West Bank land through planning committees, settlement-expansion tenders, and the routine demolition of Palestinian structures. It includes a military-judicial system in which Palestinian residents of the occupied territories face a separate legal regime. It includes a diplomatic posture, supported across multiple Israeli governments of different stripes, that treats Palestinian statehood as a deferred conversation rather than a binding obligation under international law. None of these features were invented in the past two years, and none of them will be dismantled by a single transfer of the prime minister's office.
Where the mainstream framing falls short
Coverage in much of the Western wire press has, in recent weeks, treated the election as a binary: Netanyahu in, Netanyahu out. That framing suits the news cycle because it produces clean images and clean sentences. It flatters the assumption that liberal democratic procedure can resolve a conflict whose material conditions lie in land, housing permits, water allocation, and the legal status of millions of people under military rule.
Loewenstein's intervention is useful precisely because it refuses that convenience. He names what the wire tends to soften: that the agenda being pursued in the West Bank and Gaza is not the personal eccentricity of one leader, however long his tenure, but a policy consensus with deep institutional roots. The settlers who now number in the hundreds of thousands are not a fringe; they are voters, organised, represented in successive coalitions, and increasingly integrated into the machinery of the state. Treating their project as incidental to Israeli politics is, at this point, an editorial choice rather than a factual one.
The structural picture, in plain language
Two structural facts are worth holding in mind alongside the campaign coverage. First, Israel's settlement enterprise in the occupied West Bank has expanded under governments of the left, the right, and the centre, in roughly equal measure over the past three decades. The rate has varied; the direction has not. Second, the Gaza campaign now entering its third year has been conducted under the operational direction of a security establishment whose senior figures have, in several documented cases, publicly resisted any post-war arrangement that leaves Hamas-like armed Palestinian capacity intact.
These two facts point in the same direction. A change of prime minister reshuffles the cabinet table. It does not, on the available evidence, alter the balance of forces inside the security establishment, the settler movement, or the broader Israeli political class on the fundamental question of Palestinian political rights. To argue otherwise is to mistake a change of personnel for a change of policy.
Stakes — and what the sources do not yet tell us
The stakes of getting this analysis right are not abstract. For Palestinians in Gaza, where the war has produced catastrophic humanitarian conditions documented by UN agencies and wire correspondents on the ground, an election in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is meaningful only insofar as it changes the material conditions of daily life: the entry of aid, the conduct of military operations, the architecture of any post-war arrangement. For West Bank Palestinians facing settlement expansion, home demolitions, and settler violence, the election matters chiefly as a signal to the settler movement about how much of its agenda the next government will fund, ratify, or restrain.
The honest caveat is that the available public reporting does not yet allow a confident forecast of how a post-Netanyahu government — assuming one emerges — would behave on any of these files. The opposition remains internally divided, has offered limited public detail on its plans for Gaza, and has, in the case of some of its leading figures, its own history of supporting settlement growth. What can be said with more confidence is that the structural conditions Loewenstein describes — a bipartisan settlement consensus, a security establishment with its own institutional imperatives, a Palestinian population denied self-determination — are not artefacts of one premiership. They will, on current trajectory, outlast it.
This publication framed the question around the durability of the settlement and occupation project rather than the personality contest that much of the wire has foregrounded. The distinction is not stylistic; it is the difference between an election and a transition.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://x.com/middleeasteye/status/2069328175071666176