Vote your conscience: Five reasons why Israelis should forget the electoral threshold - opinion

Every Israeli election season, the same warning shows up on schedule: don’t waste your vote. Don’t throw it away on a small party. Stick with the names the polls say are safe.

With five weeks left before we go to the ballot box on October 27, I want to make the opposite case: vote for the party you actually believe in, and let the electoral threshold take care of itself. Here are five reasons why.

1: Polls are wrong 

In 2006, Gil, the Pensioners Party led by former Mossad legend Rafi Eitan, spent nearly the entire campaign looking like it would never enter the Knesset. Only the very last published poll gave it two seats.

On election night, it won seven, powered largely by young protest voters in Tel Aviv, and went straight into Ehud Olmert’s coalition.

Fifteen years later, the polls missed in the other direction. In January 2021, Naftali Bennett’s Yamina was polling at 14 seats, with some surveys giving it 16. It won seven, and Bennett was sworn in as prime minister.

If the polls could see neither of those outcomes coming, and have made plenty of other mistakes in between, why should they decide your ballot today?

2: Polls are political instruments used to manipulate you

Someone commissions every one of these polls, whether a news channel with an editorial line or a party trying to manufacture momentum, and the results tend to reflect who paid for the poll.

Two weeks ago, Channel 12 showed the two main blocs tied at 52 seats apiece. Channel 14 released its own numbers, giving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc a commanding 63-to-44 lead.

Both claimed to be measuring the same electorate in the same week. When the “science” swings by 11 seats depending on who is asking, treat it as campaign material, because that is often exactly what it is.

2.5: The slant begins before a single question is asked

Some 38 parties submitted slates for this election, yet almost no poll asks about all of them. Most offer respondents a dozen or so familiar names and fold everyone else into “other,” so the majority of lists on the ballot never receive a number at all.

A party that is never listed can never be seen to grow.

Then comes the second move: pollsters and the channels that air their results announce that this or that new party won’t cross the threshold, which is a polite way of telling voters to stay away.

Debate organizers take the cue and leave those parties off the stage, and editors point to the same numbers to justify ignoring them.

The effect is a closed loop that protects the traditional parties, the ones most resistant to change, from any real competition, and shrinks the national conversation down to the familiar faces who brought us to where we are.

3: Large segments of the population never make it into the sample for the poll

Soldiers on active duty, about 165,000 people, are off limits to pollsters. That alone is enough votes to carry a party over the threshold.

Then come the voters pollsters struggle to reach: more than 66,000 new olim (immigrants) casting their first Israeli ballot; parts of the Arab community, where over 118,000 young people will vote for the first time; and the largest wave of first-time voters in the history of the state.

One recent analysis from The Jerusalem Post puts that group at close to 600,000 people, mostly between 18 and 22.

Many are in uniform. Many have just finished their service or are in national service. None of them has ever voted for a traditional party, and they carry no old loyalties to break.

4: Remember what so many of us said after October 7?

On social media and around kitchen tables came the demand to send all 120 MKs home. That anger was earned.

Yet a vote for the established parties that pollsters rate safely above the threshold is, for the most part, a vote to return those same people to the Knesset. Some lists have added fresh faces, but most sitting MKs are running again.

Gadi Eisenkot, whose Yashar now leads the polls, resigned his seat in July 2025. He was still an MK before and during October 7, and he sat in the war cabinet afterward.

If you want genuine renewal, look at the new parties built without any former Knesset members, such as People of Israel, Haredi Public, and others.

5: Look at what most of these parties are selling

The outgoing Knesset is organized by sector: Haredi against secular, religious-Zionist against liberal, Jew against Arab, Left against Right. Pro-Netanyahu vs anti-Netanyahu. Stop me if you’ve heard this before.

Parties raise money and turnout by convincing their base that the other side is the enemy. Very few are doing the harder work of building bridges or repairing the rifts that opened so dangerously before the war and have only deepened since.

They double down on their own voters and leave the country as a whole to fend for itself. Every vote that keeps that model profitable guarantees four more years of it.

Where I stand

So here is where I stand: I will not be voting for any party that sat in the outgoing Knesset and helped create the schisms, the divisiveness, and the hatred aimed at one sector of Israeli society or another.

I will be voting for one of the new parties that is looking to take responsibility for Israel’s shortcomings, working to build connections throughout our society, and wants to bridge the gaps between us rather than entrench them further.

I want a party that will work to heal a nation still suffering from the trauma of October 7 and everything that followed.

I haven’t yet decided exactly which party gets my vote. I have narrowed the field to those that meet that standard.

I’d urge you to learn about the parties and their platforms, set your own standard, and then vote for the party that you believe in, regardless of what any polls say.

The writer works in Communications and PR. He has been a journalist, spokesperson, ghostwriter, theater director, and storyteller for nearly 2 decades. He has an MA in Jewish history, is a volunteer first responder, and has served in the IDF. While originally from Canada, he has lived in Israel since 1999 and is a concerned citizen who loves Israel and its people.