Whether Palestinians can vote in Israel comes down to legal status. Palestinians who are Israeli citizens vote in Knesset elections on the same terms as anyone else. Palestinians who are permanent residents of Israel, almost all of them in East Jerusalem, can vote only in municipal elections. Palestinians living in the West Bank or Gaza have no voting rights in Israel at all.
Palestinian Citizens of Israel
About two million Palestinian Arabs hold Israeli citizenship. Under Israel’s Basic Law: The Knesset, every citizen aged 18 or older can vote in parliamentary elections, and every citizen aged 21 or older can run for office.1Knesset. Electoral System in Israel The law makes no distinction on the basis of ethnicity or religion. Arab citizens vote at the same polling stations and on the same ballots as Jewish citizens.
Several Arab-majority parties compete for Knesset seats, and Arab candidates also appear on mixed Jewish-Arab lists. Turnout in the Arab community has swung widely between election cycles, sometimes falling well below the national average and sometimes rising sharply when coalition math gave Arab parties real leverage.
A practical point that catches many voters out: Israel does not allow absentee ballots. With narrow exceptions for diplomats, consular staff, and soldiers stationed abroad, you have to be inside Israel and cast your ballot in person on election day.2State of Israel Government. Elections in Israel – November 2022 Registration is automatic through the Interior Ministry’s national registry, so there is no separate sign-up before each election.
When Parties and Candidates Can Be Kept Off the Ballot
The right to vote is one thing; the right to run is qualified. Section 7A of the Basic Law: The Knesset lets the Central Elections Committee disqualify a candidate list whose goals or actions deny Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state, incite racism, or support armed struggle by a hostile state or terrorist organization against Israel.3State of Israel Government. Summary of Laws Related to Elections Right-wing committee members have used this section repeatedly to file disqualification motions against Arab parties and individual Arab candidates. The Israeli Supreme Court has overturned nearly all of them, applying a high evidentiary bar, but each motion still costs time and money to fight.
East Jerusalem: Permanent Residents, Municipal Vote Only
After Israel captured and annexed East Jerusalem in 1967, it offered the Palestinians living there permanent residency rather than citizenship. Most accepted, and the vast majority still hold that status today. Permanent residency comes with an Israeli identity card, national health insurance, access to social services, and tax obligations. It does not come with the right to vote in Knesset elections, which is reserved for citizens.4State of Israel Government. Basic Law: The Knesset
Permanent residents can vote in Jerusalem municipal elections. Israeli law extends local voting rights to all permanent residents regardless of citizenship. In practice, fewer than one percent of eligible Palestinian residents cast ballots. The boycott has held since 1967, on the reasoning that voting in city elections would amount to recognizing Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem, which Palestinians claim as the capital of a future state.
Losing Residency Through the Center-of-Life Rule
Permanent residency in Jerusalem is not permanent in the way citizenship is. Israel requires residents to prove that their “center of life” remains inside the city. Moving abroad, relocating to the West Bank, or taking citizenship elsewhere can trigger the Interior Ministry to revoke the status. Between 1967 and the end of 2016, Israel revoked the residency of at least 14,595 East Jerusalem Palestinians. Revocation takes the identity card, the social services, and the municipal vote with it.
The pressure is constant. Studying abroad for several years, working across the border, or moving to a West Bank suburb a few miles away can start a review. The burden of proving Jerusalem is still the center of one’s life sits with the resident, and challenging a revocation is slow and expensive.
West Bank and Gaza: No Israeli Vote
The roughly three million Palestinians in the West Bank and two million in Gaza hold no Israeli citizenship or residency. They cannot vote in any Israeli election, national or municipal.5United States Department of State. Israel, West Bank and Gaza: West Bank and Gaza This holds even in Area C of the West Bank, which is under full Israeli military and civil control and covers about 60 percent of the West Bank’s land. Residents there live under Israeli authority in most practical respects but have no say in the government that runs their daily lives.
These populations are nominally eligible to vote in Palestinian Authority elections for a president and legislative council. The last such elections were held in 2006, when Hamas won a legislative majority. In 2021, President Mahmoud Abbas called off scheduled elections, citing Israel’s refusal to allow voting in East Jerusalem. Gaza has been under Hamas control since 2007. No Palestinian in the territories has had the chance to cast a ballot in nearly two decades.
Routes That Would Change Status
Two legal questions shape whether a Palestinian without full voting rights can gain them: naturalization, and marriage.
Naturalization
Palestinian permanent residents, mostly in East Jerusalem, can apply for citizenship through naturalization. The Citizenship Law requires the applicant to have lived in Israel for at least three of the five years before applying, to show some knowledge of Hebrew, to declare an intention to settle permanently in Israel, and to renounce any other citizenship.6Population and Immigration Authority. Apply to Be Naturalized if You Are a Permanent Resident7United Nations Legislative Series. Nationality Law of Israel 1952 – Book 4: Laws Concerning Nationality 1954
On paper the process is straightforward; in practice it isn’t. Applications from East Jerusalem face long delays and are rejected in most cases. In 2019, a record year, Israel granted citizenship to about 1,200 East Jerusalem applicants and denied roughly 1,360. Approvals in earlier years hovered around 400. The renunciation rule complicates things further for applicants holding Jordanian travel documents, since surrendering that document before Israel decides on the application can leave a person without any valid nationality in the interim.
A successful naturalization grants full citizenship, an Israeli passport, and the right to vote in Knesset elections. The low approval rate and multi-year timelines mean this path stays more theoretical than practical for most East Jerusalem residents.
The Family Unification Bar
The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law, first passed in 2003 as a temporary order and renewed ever since, blocks the family-unification route to citizenship when one spouse is Israeli and the other is a Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza. If a Palestinian citizen of Israel marries a Palestinian from the West Bank, the West Bank spouse generally cannot gain Israeli residency or citizenship through the marriage.
Narrow exceptions exist: women over 25 and men over 35 from the territories can apply for temporary permits in limited circumstances, but these permits do not lead to permanent status. The Knesset has renewed the law repeatedly, most recently extending it through at least 2024. No comparable restriction applies to Israeli citizens who marry foreign nationals from other countries. The practical effect is to close off what would otherwise be the most common path from the territories to a vote in an Israeli election.
Losing Citizenship or Residency
A 2023 law lets the Interior Minister ask a court to revoke the citizenship of anyone convicted of a terrorism offense who also received financial compensation in connection with the act. If the court agrees, the person loses all political rights and can be deported to the West Bank or Gaza at the end of a prison sentence. A parallel provision applies to permanent residents. This built on an earlier “breach of loyalty” track for citizenship revocation. A court has to sign off, and the individual can argue special circumstances against removal, but the legal machinery for stripping citizenship, and with it the right to vote, now exists in a form it did not before 2023.
One boundary worth flagging: the 2018 Basic Law defining Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, though heavily debated, did not change who can vote or run for office. Arab citizens kept their full political rights when it passed, and the Supreme Court upheld the law when it was challenged.