Across much of the world, we are accustomed to viewing youth as an engine of rupture. From the streets of Nairobi, where young protesters recently faced down tear gas to reject austerity, to the universities of Santiago and the climate marches of Manila, the young tend to agitate for wider horizons. They inherit broken economic models and battered ecosystems, and their instinct, generally, is to demand that the world open up. Yet as hundreds of thousands of young Israelis prepare to cast their ballots, observers are confronted with a different reality: a generation moving decisively, unapologetically toward the far right.
To treat this trend merely as an electoral puzzle or the product of slick social media campaigns is to miss the deeper human tragedy at play. Political imaginations do not form in a vacuum. A teenager coming of age in Israel today has lived their entire life under the shadow of a political consensus that insists the occupation of Palestine is both permanent and costless. They have never known a serious peace process; they have known only walls, iron domes, military checkpoints, and the rhetoric of siege. When a society spends decades constructing physical and psychological barriers to separate itself from the people whose land it controls, it inevitably deforms the worldview of its own children.
For these young voters, adulthood does not begin at university or in the workplace; it begins in uniform. Long before they step into a voting booth, their relationship with the millions of Palestinians living around them is mediated through the sights of an assault rifle, the monitor of a surveillance drone, or the cold routine of a military watchtower. In such an environment, the far right does not sound extreme. It sounds like the only political force honest enough to articulate what the state has practiced for generations: that one group of human beings must dominate another indefinitely for either to survive.
This is a dynamic that many in the Global South recognize with painful clarity. We have seen it before in the final, brittle decades of apartheid South Africa, where young conscripts were taught to see their Black compatriots exclusively as security threats to be managed rather than equals to be embraced. When power is founded upon the denial of another person’s dignity, fear becomes the primary currency of public life. And fear is a soil in which ethnonationalism flourishes with terrifying ease.
Meanwhile, the polite language of international diplomacy continues to treat this militarized reality as an unfortunate side note rather than the core crisis. Western capitals issue communiqués expressing concern over the rise of extremist politicians, yet they continue to provide the weapons, the trade agreements, and the diplomatic shields that make such extremism viable. They speak of Israel as an island of democratic norms, deliberately looking away from the millions of disenfranchised people living under its martial law who have no voice in the elections that determine whether their homes will be demolished or their children detained.
It is impossible to understand the Israeli youth without looking across the concrete barrier at their Palestinian peers. What of the Palestinian Gen Z, born into the open-air prison of Gaza, the fragmented bantustans of the West Bank, or the precarious legal limbo of East Jerusalem? They, too, are coming of age, but in a world defined by displacement, night raids, water shortages, and relentless violence. While political commentators analyze the ideological nuances of Israeli first-time voters, the youth of Palestine are denied the most fundamental right of all: the right to simply exist in safety on their own soil.
Generational change is not an automatic harbinger of justice. Without a radical moral reckoning, young people will simply inherit the prejudices of their elders and sharpen them into deadlier instruments. The drift of Israeli youth toward the far right is the predictable harvest of an occupation that has been allowed to fester without consequence. True peace will never be delivered by an electorate that has been taught to mistake supremacy for security. It will only begin when the world stops coddling the fortress and insists on the shared humanity of everyone living between the river and the sea.