What choices are available to Israeli voters heading to the polls on Tuesday, October 27? On the surface, everything seems to set apart the two main figures around whom the legislative campaign has revolved. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, now 77, is trying to cling to power despite his responsibility in the security disaster that led to the massacres of October 7, 2023, carried out by Hamas.

The prime minister's belligerence, illustrated over the past three years by wars without victory on Israel's borders, even extending into Iran, has led to an unprecedented deterioration in the country's global image. Israel is also paying the price for the destruction of Gaza, whose ruins are now largely reoccupied by the Israeli army and subjected to bombings that almost daily shatter the illusion of the ceasefire announced a year ago.

This deterioration has also stemmed from Netanyahu's open alliance with a far-right, supremacist and racist bloc. This bloc has orchestrated an unprecedented campaign of ethnic cleansing against Palestinians in the West Bank, with the tacit consent of the occupying army. After two soldiers died near Hebron on Friday, Netanyahu vowed to establish new settlements.

Facing the prime minister is centrist and former general Gadi Eisenkot, who burst onto the political scene only a few months ago, projecting a sense of individual morality his rival abandoned long ago. Eisenkot's victory, if he can end Netanyahu's long tenure, would put a stop to an illiberal drift that has undermined Israel's foundational values and would ease the international isolation that has seen Israel expel major humanitarian organizations and diplomats, and bar foreign journalists it finds objectionable.

On the overlooked yet central issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, nothing in Eisenkot's platform marks a major break from the ruling coalition he seeks to replace. The former military leader, whose name remains linked to a doctrine of disproportionate use of force tested in Lebanon in 2006, also promises to crush Hamas, a goal that three years of massive bombardments and systematic destruction in Gaza has failed to achieve.

Eisenkot has pledged the army would oppose the terror imposed by West Bank settlers and opposes the E1 settlement project that would cut in two the largest Palestinian territory, but he is just as firmly against the creation of a Palestinian state as Netanyahu. He therefore embodies a false status quo that, as the past decades have shown, always results in more settlement expansion and the erosion of any prospect for such a state.

There are few defenders left for this prospect in what was once Mandatory Palestine. The gap between this legitimate aspiration and the reality on the ground has grown too wide for Palestinians to maintain hope, and since October 7, Israelis have been convinced it would pose an existential threat. Still, separation remains the only solution that might, one day, allow two peoples locked in their respective traumas to contemplate coexistence.