For readers outside Israel, the words “right” and “left” can be misleading when applied to Israeli politics. In Europe or the United States, those labels are usually organised around taxation, welfare, labour, immigration, race, religion and the size of government. Israel has versions of these debates, but they do not structure its party system in the same way.

For decades, the Israeli divide has centred on a different set of questions: the Palestinians, territory, security, settlements, the meaning of Zionism and the tension between the Jewish character of the state and its democratic institutions. Economic and social policy still matter, but they often cut across the camps rather than defining them. A politician can favour state intervention in the economy and still be treated as firmly right-wing; another can be socially liberal and remain inside the nationalist camp.

Historically, the divide had a stronger economic and institutional dimension. The Israeli left was identified with Labor Zionism and the bodies that built the state: the Histadrut, the kibbutz movement, state-led development and a relatively collectivist model of growth. The right, rooted in the Revisionist tradition and later organised around Likud, challenged Labor’s long dominance and placed greater emphasis on Jewish historical claims to the land, a more nationalist idea of sovereignty and, over time, a more market-friendly economic outlook. That divide did not disappear, but it ceased to be the defining one.

After 1967, and more clearly after Oslo in the 1990s, Israeli politics increasingly centred on the territories and the Palestinians living in them. The left became associated with territorial compromise, negotiations and the claim that some form of separation from the Palestinians was needed if Israel was to remain both Jewish and democratic. The right became associated with opposition to a Palestinian state, support for settlement and the claim that withdrawal would produce new security threats rather than settle the conflict.

The second Intifada did more than any single economic debate to weaken the left among Jewish voters. For many, the violence of the early 2000s was read as proof that the Oslo Accords had failed, or at least that concessions did not reliably produce peace. The withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Hamas’s takeover and the rounds of fighting that followed hardened that reading. The October 7, 2023 attacks did not create the shift. It accelerated a movement already under way, making security and Jewish identity even more central than they had been in the years after Oslo.

What it means to be “right-wing” in Israel today is above all to take a harder line on Palestinian national claims, security and territorial control. That can include rejecting a Palestinian state altogether, or accepting only a very reduced form of Palestinian self-rule that falls well short of sovereign independence. Illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are no longer treated across this camp as a temporary bargaining chip that can be easily traded away. For parts of the right, it is a security asset; for others, it is also a national and religious project. The Jewish nation-state is not a side issue here. It is the frame.

This right is not automatically a US-style conservative bloc on the economy. Likud still presents itself as relatively market-oriented, but Israeli right-wing politics can live quite comfortably with subsidies, public employment, housing support and large transfers when they serve coalition needs or particular constituencies. The right is more unified around security, sovereignty and the Jewish character of the state than around a single theory of markets.

Likud remains the main vehicle of that camp. It mixes nationalism, scepticism towards Palestinian statehood and a strong security posture, while drawing secular voters, traditional Jews, religious Jews and people whose first identity is nationalist rather than theological. To its right sit parties such as Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit, where nationalism is joined to a more explicitly religious reading of the land. For those currents, settlement is not only strategy. It can be understood as the fulfilment of a historical and religious claim, making territorial compromise harder to treat as a technical matter.

The same currents have been more willing than the older Likud establishment to confront the Supreme Court, the attorney general and parts of the security elite when those institutions are seen as blocking an elected right-wing majority. The fight over judicial reform before October 7 grew out of that suspicion, with supporters arguing that elected politicians should recover power and opponents warning that the reform would weaken one of the few remaining checks on government. The argument did not disappear after the war. It was postponed, then returned in a more crowded field of security and identity questions.

The Zionist centre and what remains of the Zionist left sit differently within this political landscape, though not as differently as some outside observers expect. They are generally more open to a political settlement, or at least to some form of separation from the Palestinians, and they defend the courts, the professional civil service and civil liberties more forcefully than the current right. They are also more uneasy about turning temporary military control into a permanent political order. But the old peace-camp vocabulary has thinned.

Benny Gantz, Gadi Eisenkot and other former senior officers can support major military operations and still present themselves as guardians of institutions and advocates of a more cautious approach to annexation or permanent rule. In today’s Israel, the gap between centre and right is often less about whether force should be used and more about what that force is supposed to produce, how much institutional restraint should survive, and whether a future political arrangement with the Palestinians should remain possible.

The Zionist left is much smaller than it was in the Labor years. Parties linked to the peace camp have struggled to persuade voters that negotiations or withdrawal can still deliver security. There are still Jewish Israelis who want an end to the occupation, a Palestinian state, stronger civil rights protections and more egalitarian economic policy. But they are electorally weaker, and operate in a political climate in which several assumptions that once belonged to the respectable centre-left have lost standing among large parts of the Jewish public.

The word “left” itself has become, in much Israeli Jewish discourse, almost a stain rather than an ordinary political label. After the second Intifada, it already carried the suggestion of naivety on security. After October 7, that charge became heavier. “Leftist” is often used not to describe a position on taxes or welfare, but to imply softness towards Palestinian claims, distance from mainstream Jewish nationalism, or a tendency to place institutional and universal principles above the immediate demands of security.

Yet there is a social and economic left in Israel that argues for housing, labour protections, public services and a less unequal society without necessarily endorsing the territorial formula of the 1990s. There is also a left defined primarily by the Palestinian question: occupation, a Palestinian state, equality between Jewish and Arab citizens and a more civic reading of the state. The two are not the same, and treating them as such is one reason the label has become so easy to weaponise. The imported vocabulary does not capture that easily, and Israeli political discourse has not tried very hard to keep the two meanings apart.

The Haredi parties show how quickly the conventional left-right axis starts to wobble. Shas and United Torah Judaism are conservative on religion, family, gender roles and the public place of Judaism. Their economic positions are not simply right-wing in the Western sense. They press for public funding of religious institutions, welfare for large families and state support for their communities. Coalition choices are driven less by a fixed position on the Palestinians than by budgets, education, religious autonomy and military exemptions. In recent years, they have usually aligned with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc, placing them politically alongside the right, but that alignment does not make them nationalist-right parties in the mould of Likud or Religious Zionism.

Parties representing Palestinian citizens of Israel sit even further outside the Zionist right-left map. Hadash has long combined a socialist economic language with Jewish-Arab partnership and opposition to occupation. Ra’am is socially conservative and Islamist in origin, but it has also pursued a pragmatic path into coalition politics around civic and economic demands. Balad puts Palestinian national identity at the centre and calls for a more basic redefinition of Israel as a state of all its citizens.

To call all of them “left” simply because they oppose occupation or support Palestinian rights obscures the differences between them. They are not a wing of the Zionist left, but a separate political field that does not fit neatly within the Jewish majority’s political spectrum, even when some of their social attitudes look conservative or some of their economic language looks left-wing.

The coming election on October 27 will still be described, in Israel and abroad, as a contest between right and left. That description is not empty. But the more useful question is whether the Israeli political centre of gravity has moved far enough to the right that many of the most consequential arguments now take place within a broadly right-leaning field. On security and the Palestinians, a large part of Jewish Israeli politics already works from assumptions that would have been treated as right-wing a generation ago: deep suspicion of a sovereign Palestinian state, a high tolerance for prolonged military control, and a stronger insistence on Jewish sovereignty as the starting point rather than one value among others.

The disputes that remain are often about how far that shift should go: whether military control is temporary management or a path to permanence; whether settlements are a strategic fact or a national-religious mission; whether the courts should still restrain an elected majority; and whether Palestinians are primarily a population to be managed or a political community with national rights. These disagreements can still decide coalitions, courts, budgets and the character of the state. They are, however, disagreements that increasingly happen after the older centre has already moved.

The Israeli left and right still exist. But the terms no longer describe two mirror camps competing over the same list of questions. They describe different answers to a more specific Israeli argument about territory, power, security and institutional restraint. And a large part of that argument, heading into this election, is now taking place inside the right itself.