Bar Luzon, an Israeli citizen living in Cambridge, Mass., never considered herself “a political person.” An assistant professor of linguistics and philosophy at M.I.T., she had not voted in an Israeli election since she came to the United States for graduate school eight years ago. But after the events of Oct. 7, 2023, she said, she could no longer sit on the sidelines.
“It feels like the country is not functioning, in a scary way,” Ms. Luzon, 32, said. She cited Israel’s failure to quickly stop the Hamas-led attack, a lack of vision beyond “war until the end of times” and recent efforts to ban Arab parties from the upcoming elections. “I’m very afraid of how racist my government is, how much it hates its own citizens,” she said.
She now plans to vote against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies when Israelis go to the polls on Oct. 27. But there’s a catch. Unlike many democracies, Israel does not allow most citizens to vote absentee from abroad. So Ms. Luzon will be canceling classes and crossing an ocean to try to make her voice heard.
She is far from alone in making the trip.
Uriel Guy, a software engineer in New York, recalled that at a Rosh Hashana dinner he attended last month, “out of the seven Israelis there, all of them were going to vote.” It will be Mr. Guy’s first time voting in Israel since moving to New York in 2013. He has asked his siblings there to pick for him among the different opposition parties, because they are the ones “who will have to actually live with the consequences.”
According to the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research, some 630,000 Israeli citizens live abroad, the equivalent of about 6 percent of the country’s population. The American-Israel Democracy Coalition, a U.S.-based group helping Israeli voters living elsewhere with logistical support and chartered flights, announced last week that it expected more than 50,000 to return and cast ballots.
In such a tight contest — polls show a dead heat between the governing coalition and its opposition — those voters could prove pivotal.
In 1996, Mr. Netanyahu, who is often referred to by the nickname Bibi, won his first term as prime minister by a single percentage point. One political consultant later chalked up the victory in part to conservative voters who flew in at the time to support him. This past June, Peru’s presidential election was decided by votes from abroad.
What’s more, in a chaotic parliamentary system like Israel’s, small swings can have outsized impacts. In 2022, the parties that made up Mr. Netanyahu’s hard-right coalition won 48.4 percent of the vote but obtained 64 of the parliament’s 120 seats because two anti-Netanyahu parties — one leftist, one Arab nationalist — fell just shy of the electoral threshold for making the Knesset. The government that was in place on Oct. 7 and oversaw Israel’s response to the attack had come to power by the thinnest of margins.
For many who did not vote in Israel’s last election, the events of that day and its aftermath have served as a wake-up call. “Israelis abroad typically lived in their own bubble,” said Jonathan Barsade, president of the AID Coalition, which is nonpartisan in its current messaging but has supported protests against the Netanyahu government in the past. “Since Oct. 7, all of a sudden, they came out of that bubble.”
In theory, far-flung Israelis of any political persuasion could attempt to tilt the electoral outcome by returning to vote. But secular and more educated Israelis, who tend to lean left, are more likely to have moved abroad for work opportunities — or as an act of political protest — and are more likely to be able to afford the trip back. Many of those outside the country are also more aware of and alarmed by its deteriorating international standing.
Yael Shomer, a political scientist at Tel Aviv University, said that Israelis who departed the country in recent years — well over 100,000, according to official data — tended to have advanced degrees and hail from liberal areas, like Tel Aviv.
“The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics actually analyzes the characteristics of those Israelis who left,” she said, “and we know from other research that those characteristics are correlated quite strongly with center-left leaning voters who support the current opposition parties.” In other words, the composition of the Israeli community abroad has changed, and so has who it benefits when they vote.
In recent interviews with The New York Times and other outlets, many Israelis living elsewhere said they intended to vote against Mr. Netanyahu and his allies.
Among them was Amit Stern, a 51-year-old dual American-Israeli citizen who moved to the United States when he was six and has gone back and forth since. After watching the Hamas attack unfold from his New York living room, he returned to Israel in 2023 to assist his former army unit, patrolling the Gaza border for several weeks. Three years later, Mr. Stern will be returning to cast a ballot against the country’s leadership.
“There is huge dissonance between the Israelis as a population and the government that is managing them,” he said. He hopes that the election will empower a new government composed of “people with more integrity,” he said, not divisive leaders who “scare people, as Bibi often likes to do.”
Some Israelis abroad feel compelled to vote out of civic duty. Others express a deep sense of foreboding about Israel’s future if the country does not change course.
“I have five grandchildren and there won’t be an Israel for them,” said Susan Lax, a co-owner of the Israeli footwear brand Na’ot, who grew up on a kibbutz and lost a friend on Oct. 7. She and her partner split their time between New York and Tel Aviv, and will be returning to Israel to vote against the current coalition.
Guy Ben-Aharon, an Israeli in Boston, is currently deciding between the two main Arab parties, in part because he does not feel that the Jewish opposition parties “speak openly enough against the occupation and the apartheid reality and the war in Gaza,” in which tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed. “Do I think that a change of regime in Israel is going to change everything I care about?” he said. “Not at all. Do I think it’s important to vote Bibi out? Very much so.”
If the current leadership manages to stay in power, “I’m afraid that thousands of Israelis will leave,” said Danny Peleg, a former Israeli special forces captain living in Boulder, Colo. “Israel will no longer be a democratic state, and I’m afraid that the decisions will be led by a person who has the fear of going to jail” — a reference to Mr. Netanyahu’s ongoing corruption trial — “and wars will continue forever.”
Mr. Peleg and his wife have two children living in Israel, and another who works at an Israeli embassy in Europe. He bought plane tickets as soon as the election was called.
Israelis abroad are not a political monolith.
Ricki Alon, an entrepreneur from Los Altos Hills, Calif., who arrived this week to vote in Israel, said she will vote for Mr. Netanyahu despite significant misgivings. She said she considers him the most qualified to run the country out of the available options, adding that he has “the most experience, ability, and skills to manage this crisis.”
Last month, one former Israeli chief rabbi ruled that religious expats — who tend toward the right — could use certain charity funds to fly to Israel to vote for one party in Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition. But in practice, both the Israeli government and opposition understand that voters abroad these days are most likely to support the challengers.
“When we look at the profile of those coming this time, the profile is liberal Israelis living abroad,” Yaron Deckel, a former regional director of the Jewish Agency, an Israeli nonprofit that operates in 65 countries, said at an Israeli political conference last week.
“That’s why it worries Likud so much,” Mr. Deckel said, referring to Mr. Netanyahu’s party, as opposed to “in the past when ultra-Orthodox Jews from New York came to vote, because they were more identified with parties that support the right.”
Mr. Netanyahu’s allies have criticized efforts to increase international turnout. “The left is now trying to bring in masses of people from abroad,” Shlomo Karhi, Israel’s communications minister, told a radio program in August. “Anyone who doesn’t live here in the country shouldn’t come.”
In May, Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud Party threatened legal action against the AID Coalition, and later filed a petition against it, alleging that the group’s neutral veneer concealed a partisan purpose. Likud withdrew the suit this month after the AID Coalition agreed to several restrictions on its work.
None of these machinations have deterred Ms. Luzon, the M.I.T. professor. “I have to do the only thing I can do, even though its effect is minuscule,” she said. “I want to be there to celebrate if we manage to replace this horrible government.”
And if that fails? “I spent a lot of time crying in the last three years. I’d rather do it with my friends in Israel than do it here alone.”
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