Australian olim on their first Israeli election

Emily Gian moved to Israel three months before October 7. Danny Lamm arrived four weeks ago. Both will take part in their first Israeli election on October 27.

Gian, 43, who works in social media for the Zionist Federation of Australia but spoke in a personal capacity, said the national mood pulled in two directions.

“There’s a real mood of people want change,” she said. “There hasn’t been an official inquiry into October 7, and the heads of everything seem to have gone home, except for the prime minister. So there’s a feeling that some sort of responsibility needs to be taken.”

Against that, three years of war had repeatedly pulled attention away from domestic politics.

“There have been outside influences that have made people focus for certain periods of time less on the political situation,” she said. “Now it feels like, okay, now the elections.”

She cautioned against any assumptions that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is finished.

“When you’re in Tel Aviv it feels as if nobody would be voting for Bibi,” she said. “But I live in a small town in the centre of Israel, and the majority of the posters I see up around our town are Bibi posters.

“From what I see, if my small town is an example, it’s not as clear cut as we think.”

Gian has not decided how to vote, and said the 3.25 per cent electoral threshold was also shaping her thinking, with friends drawn to smaller parties reconsidering on the basis they may not clear it.

“Every vote matters, and it’s really important that my vote doesn’t get thrown into the bin. So it needs to go somewhere strong,” she said.

Lamm, a former president of both the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) and the ZFA, said what struck him was how completely security dominates.

“It’s three years after October 7, people have been very burnt by that — the tremendous loss of life, and the loss of life subsequently of soldiers and wounded people and people with PTSD,” he said.

Lamm hopes to see Netanyahu returned, saying he works well with US President Donald Trump and the economy has performed well. But he predicted the anti-Netanyahu bloc would finish ahead without reaching a majority.

“But I don’t think there’ll be a 61 [seats]. There’ll be a 52, a 54, a 56 against a 50 or something like that,” he said.

That could produce a minority government relying on Arab parties abstaining on supply and security votes rather than joining a coalition, he said.

On Haredi enlistment, which Gian said was shaping the decisions of religious Zionist friends who had served, Lamm was blunt. “It’ll be the next election. This election is focused on who should run the country.”

Both doubted a change of government would alter how Israel is seen abroad.

“It doesn’t much matter who Israel’s leader is going to be after these elections,” Lamm said. “The countries and the governments that are antagonistic to Israel will not change.”

Gian said, “Let’s just say Eisenkot is able to form a coalition. It’ll be really interesting to see how the rest of the world, who always says ‘Bibi’s the problem’ — how they react to a different government, knowing that in terms of security, not a lot is going to change.”

Asked whether Israelis share the diaspora’s sense that this election is existential, Gian was candid about her own vantage point.

“I feel like this is much bigger, because of what the country’s been through in the last three years,” she said.

“But I’m saying that from the perspective of a 43-year-old new olah that hasn’t experienced elections here before. It could be that we are overstating how important these elections are.”