In northern Israel, the election campaign is more palpable than anywhere else, but the focus is on maintaining the status quo.

Kiryat Shmona, from our correspondent. One egg, one vote. More eggs, lots of votes. But in northern Israel, not all eggs are the same, and there are those who have chosen whom to vote for by carefully considering the place of origin from which the eggs will come in the coming years. It is a battle that has now been raging for over five years; it dates back to the Israel of before 7 October – a country that still exists, living beneath the surface of collective trauma, breathing in unison, and whose demands are precise, practical and unresolved. Israeli farmers do not want to open the market to imports; they want Israeli eggs; and seven years ago, in the unrecognisable world emerging from the first waves of Covid, they clashed with the last government led by Naftali Bennett, gathering together under a tent in the moshav of Zar’it and threatening to remain there until the reform – which provided for a reduction in import duties on agricultural products – was withdrawn. Today, as if nothing had happened, they still think back to that tent and will vote for the eggs – and thus for the status quo – and therefore for someone who promises not to touch their market, such as Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud. 

It is a contradiction for a liberal party, but the Prime Minister pays no heed to contradictions; he never has, not even when it comes to eggs.

Kiryat Shmona is also voting on eggs, but that is not all: in this small town, which has spent months in shelters protecting itself from Hezbollah attacks, which has been deserted, and which has accused the government of abandoning it, the upcoming elections do not necessarily have to bring about change. It is a transit hub, one of the towns closest to Lebanon, and when, in recent months, Hezbollah’s rockets and drones reached Israel, many were headed for Kiryat Shmona, which retains the chaotic atmosphere of a transit hub – a place to pass through, devoid of beauty or care, with a large, half-finished mammoth statue placed in the centre of a roundabout on a main road. Some buildings are covered in fishing nets, just as entire streets are in Ukraine; Hezbollah’s war now centres on drones, which have struck buildings, civilians and soldiers here. Kiryat Shmona exudes a sense of incompleteness, like many towns in Israel, as if everything were designed to change and shift in a short space of time, and as if architecture were an art form not destined to take root here – it would be superfluous, a sign of a desire for a settled life that is out of place in a country founded on perpetual movement.

“Until a few months ago, this place was completely empty, and it will be empty again if the war starts up again,” says a woman wandering around the deserted shopping centre. Her name is Talia; she will not be voting based on the egg issue – she is still undecided – and she is part of that very large swathe of undecided voters on whom every candidate’s election campaign is focusing. “My husband and my son will vote for Winter; I still don’t know. I might follow their lead, or vote for Eisenkot, or the Likud.” Whilst Tel Aviv seems shrouded in pre-election apathy – there are few campaign posters, most candidates are avoiding the city, and the same is true of Jerusalem – Kiryat Shmona is in the thick of the election campaign, and as you drive along the road leading to the Hula Valley, at the foot of Mount Hermon, it is clear that the contest will be between shades of the right.

Billboards featuring Ofer Winter, leader of the Amcha Yisrael party – a nationalist right-wing party that could join forces with Netanyahu in a future government – are on display. “My son is voting for Winter because of the issue of compulsory military service; he’s a soldier, he’s been to Lebanon, and he can’t stand the fact that other young men his age are allowed to stay safe, with their protection guaranteed at the expense of others’ lives,” says Talia. If Winter clears the electoral threshold and does indeed join forces with Netanyahu, however, he will have to put up with the presence of the ultra-Orthodox parties, with whom any reform of conscription is impossible. Itamar Ben-Gvir’s face also appears on the election posters; he looks very serious alongside his local candidate, but this is not the part of Israel where the current Minister of National Security, leader of Otzma Yehudit, wins the most votes: he dreams of becoming a national force, but Kiryat Shmona and the surrounding moshavim and kibbutzim do not follow him; they have their own agenda and their own priorities.

Netanyahu is the king of election posters in the north; he has bought advertising space, his face appears on billboards and he is focusing entirely on his enemies. His campaign has a slogan: ‘Yamina or Palestine’ – the right or Palestine. On the enormous election posters, his face stands out against the darkness from which internal enemies emerge – Gadi Eisenkot, Ra’am party leader Mansour Abbas, Naftali Bennett, and Democratic Party leader Yair Golan – as well as external enemies, both living and dead: New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the head of the Palestinian National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and the surviving leader Naim Qassem. Netanyahu’s presence on the streets of the north seems to shout: I am the alternative to ensure that nothing changes; I am the guarantee that everything will remain as it is – even the eggs.

The perpetual 7 October that paralyses Israel is present here too; yellow posters bear the inscription 7/10, sometimes altered to 27/10, the day of the election. Before Hamas attacked the kibbutzim around the Gaza Strip, there were fears that Hezbollah would strike the north, targeting Kiryat Shmona and the surrounding communities. Yet voters do not base their decisions solely on trauma: “We always remember it, but the more I talk to people, the more I realise how complex this election is. Many vote with the coalition that might emerge in mind, not just the party itself. Then there’s Lebanon,” says Gadi, who is also strolling through the shopping centre that feels like the town centre, gesturing towards the neighbouring country. It is not Gaza; for Israelis, relations with the Lebanese are possible – indeed, necessary. Hezbollah is not seen as an extension of Lebanon; Lebanese civilians would not storm into the country to kidnap and kill; for Israelis, they are a different story.

Eisenkot’s face can be seen in the fields along the roads of the north, pinned to the odd fence. On the main street of Kiryat Shmona, his poster is positioned at a safe distance from those of Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir; Gadi hopes he might even form an alliance with the former, but not with the latter. On the border with Lebanon, Eisenkot forged his reputation as a general, formulating the doctrine of disproportionate force to flush out the enemy. “I’ll be voting for Eisenkot; he spent a lot of time in Lebanon, and Netanyahu accuses him of having held back the offensive against Hezbollah. I don’t believe that; I trust him. But there are those who trust Netanyahu, and the trouble with this election is that we’re trapped in a bubble. If you’re on the government’s side, you watch one TV channel; if you’re against it, you watch another. Every channel tells a different story,” says Gadi. For him, the ideal solution would be a government of national unity, without right-wing extremists and without Arabs, who, even in this part of Israel, make up a significant proportion of the population. “Of course, I don’t want to exclude them, but they don’t vote for the Arab parties either.”

Adam is Arab; he doesn’t know who he will vote for, but he suggests that trust in the Arab parties is not high. Nor is his trust in the others particularly high, and Adam, like so many Israelis, is part of that 30 per cent of the population who must decide and can change everything – and who are forcing party leaders into a campaign of legwork and canvassing, a final sprint in which emotion plays little part; it is more a matter of calculation. “This is our home; elsewhere they call us traitors, but we’ve earned this status – we’ve fought for it and now we feel like Israeli citizens. We are. I live in a mixed kibbutz; in the Upper Galilee there are Jews, Muslims, Christians and Druze, and often living separately is simply a matter of habits and routines.” Then we work together, we vote together. “On 7 October, Hamas killed everyone; it made no distinction between Jews and Muslims. For many of us, this has strengthened our sense of belonging to this country, where we speak our own language as well as Hebrew, and where all road signs are also in Arabic. No, we are not traitors; my family has fought to stay here,” Adam says proudly. He will vote – he doesn’t know who for yet – but on 27 October he will make a choice that concerns both himself and his country. “Jews have so many public holidays; we Muslims do not. It often happens that when everything is closed for their holidays, everything remains open here; so they come to the Arab villages to do their shopping, and this keeps the economy going and helps us get to know one another.” Everything in Israel seems to be based on a balance that is renewed every day, and the electoral promise lies in whether to nurture that balance or to break it. The philosophy behind the vote is divided between those who believe that everything is sacrosanct – that the familiar path, with its guarantees, is best, just like with eggs – and those who, on the other hand, believe that the balance is like a wooden bridge: it needs maintenance, it needs to be rebuilt; it needs change. In Kiryat Shmona, the vote seems to be a matter of habit rather than of existence.