Israelis Fly Home to Vote as Accountability Drives Election

Eitan Berechman and his parents spent $6,000 on plane tickets to travel from the Boston suburbs to Israel and vote in the October 27 election. For the 22-year-old musician, it’s his first Israeli vote. He calls it “the most consequential in Israeli history.” He says the election will decide “whether it will be democratic or whether it will be with Netanyahu and never-ending war.”

Berechman isn’t alone. AID Coalition, a nonpartisan U.S. nonprofit focused on Israeli democracy, estimates that 53,000 Israelis living abroad will travel home to vote. The group extrapolated that figure from an August survey of 17,500 respondents. Its CEO, Batell Vallentine Blaish-Sultanik, said no comparable data set exists for earlier elections. Israel allows absentee voting only for diplomats and emissaries posted abroad, which means every other expatriate must be in the country on Election Day.

Voices From the Diaspora

Networks formed during the 2023 protests against the government’s judicial overhaul now drive the travel effort. Anti-government Israelis in New York began demonstrating in January 2023, after the newly elected government announced its plans. Protests at the UN General Assembly that September, including in Times Square, broke what the account described as a longstanding taboo on Zionist and Jewish protests against the Israeli government in the United States. WhatsApp groups grew to thousands of members in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia and San Francisco.

After Hamas’s October 2023 invasion, the networks shifted their focus. They raised funds, shipped supplies to soldiers and civilians, and campaigned for the hostages taken to Gaza. The final hostages were released last year. Since then, activists have returned to Israeli politics, organizing phone banks, surveys of expatriate voters and Zoom information sessions.

Maya Ben-Meir, an Israeli musician who moved to the United States 13 years ago, said people in her circles were talking about returning to vote. “We’re really good at organizing,” she said. The impetus, she said, was “absolutely because of Netanyahu,” whom she faulted for opposing a state commission of inquiry into October 7 and for not taking personal responsibility for the attack. “Whoever’s in charge in Israel affects Jewish life all over, throughout the globe,” she said.

The cost is real. Flights have become unpredictable and expensive amid recent wars and airline cancellations, and AID Coalition’s survey found price and availability were the most cited obstacles. Some families are sending one spouse while the other stays home with the children. Ben-Meir lowered her fare with a long layover in Spain.

The groups aren’t uniform. Israelis for Peace in New York focuses more on Palestinian war casualties, while UnXeptable concentrates on Israeli politics. Pro-Netanyahu activists demonstrate in the United States too. Organizers admit that standard Israeli polls don’t survey expatriates flying in, leaving their impact uncertain. A December 2025 Israel Democracy Institute survey found that Jewish Israelis on the left and center, and those more dissatisfied with “Israel’s situation,” were more inclined to move abroad.

Pressure on the Right’s Small Parties

Inside Israel, the final week has turned on a different arithmetic. Netanyahu met Moti Leitner, head of the new ultra-Orthodox Charedi Public party, in Petah Tikva on Tuesday night, according to Ynet and Haaretz. He reportedly offered to advance policies the party cares about and name Leitner special adviser for ultra-Orthodox affairs if he quit the race. Leitner has said he feels no “moral right” to withdraw. His party is expected to fall well below the 3.25% electoral threshold, leaving its voters unrepresented.

Netanyahu and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich also met Rabbi Eli Sadan, spiritual mentor of Ofer Winter, to press for Winter’s People of Israel party to drop out. Winter refused. “We are not giving up. We will be a big surprise,” he wrote, adding that he would back only a government that drafts Haredim. Messages from a Likud activists’ WhatsApp group, obtained by Walla, showed dissent over the pressure campaign. One participant warned: “If he doesn’t cross the threshold, the Right won’t have a government for the next four years.”

A separate fight centers on Itamar Ben Gvir. His Otzma Yehudit party says it remains “100% committed” to Netanyahu but accuses Likud of planning to shut him out in favor of a coalition with Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party. Likud insists Ben Gvir “is a senior minister in our government, and he will remain so in the next government” if the pro-Netanyahu bloc wins, and accused him of “friendly fire.”

The Accountability Argument

In an opinion article, Daniel Goldman, founder of The Institute for Jewish and Zionist Research, argued that the vote is about responsibility for October 7. He wrote that Netanyahu gave Smotrich a free hand in the West Bank, which, alongside settlement expansion, created conditions for ideologically driven vigilante violence aimed at driving Palestinians off their land—a violence that “too often went unchecked and unpunished.” For three years, he wrote, calls for accountability met the answer “not now.” That postponement, he said, had ended. He argued that Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Liberman deserved a chance to form a government.

Why This Matters: Overseas voters, threshold fights and coalition feuds all point to the same question: who answers for October 7, and what comes next in Gaza and the West Bank? The West Bank violence Goldman describes—settlement expansion paired with unpunished attacks on Palestinians—bears directly on whether any negotiated settlement remains possible. A government’s approach to a state commission of inquiry, the judiciary and settler violence will shape civilian life on both sides of the Green Line for years. Turnout, thresholds and the pull of a few thousand flights may decide the outcome. The election will show how much appetite Israelis have for accountability, and whether the next government treats the occupation’s human cost as a problem to solve or a cost to carry.