Jerusalem’s Municipal Elections Produce a Council Dominated by Religious Jews; the City’s Palestinians Stay Home

Jerusalem voted in municipal elections on February 27, 2024. Due to Israel’s war on Gaza, the elections had been postponed twice from their originally scheduled date of October 30, 2023. Despite the postponements, the drawn-out war was still ongoing at the time the elections occurred, which likely was a key reason for the relatively low turnout. Only 31.5 percent1 of the 690,707 eligible voters2 participated. Anyone who had registered by the deadline (47 days before the originally scheduled elections) and was aged 17 by the originally scheduled Election Day was eligible to vote.3

The public was asked to elect two things: a mayor and a municipal council.

Mayor Moshe Lion, first elected in 2018, was reelected with 81.5 percent of the vote.4 He is strongly supported by the Haredi parties, notably Shas, which originally brought him into Jerusalem politics.5 His only challenger, Yossi Havilio, a more secular candidate, received 18.5 percent of the vote.6

According to Israeli law, Palestinian residents are not allowed to run for mayor, only Palestinian citizens are. Although earlier in the year a Palestinian citizen, Walid Abu Tayyeh, had put himself forward to run for mayor, he withdrew in light of the war on Gaza, leaving the field of mayoral candidates with only Israeli Jews.

No Palestinian has served as mayor of Jerusalem since Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967; before that, no Palestinian had served as mayor of Jewish West Jerusalem since 1948 (see Representation).

Fifteen lists ran for the 30 seats on the municipal council (the 31st is for the mayor).7 The minimum number of votes needed to secure one seat was 7,500.8 Eleven of those parties won seats.

More significant than the individual parties are the blocs of parties that will make coalitions to work together and push their agendas ahead. In this regard, a bloc of religious Jewish parties won a clear majority of seats (16), as follows:9

The share of the council seats the Haredi bloc received is quite disproportionate to their demographic share of the city, which is about 32 percent. Another 8 percent are ultra-Orthodox Jews who do not vote.10

Additionally, another bloc of nationalist right-wing extremist parties won a bloc of six seats as follows:

This bloc will likely work together with the Haredi bloc on issues over which they are aligned, giving them a solid majority of 22 seats together. A religious Jewish majority on the council means that the community will have control of key committees, such as planning and construction, finance, and education, and will move all those municipal decisions in the direction of meeting the needs of their own constituents.

On the other side of the spectrum, the so-called (in Israeli parlance) “non-extremist” (Zionist) secular and religious parties that were elected to the council include:

Israel’s Hebrew daily Haaretz called the municipal election results “a flashing warning light for Israel.” Referring to all local elections across the country, the paper’s editorial said:

If this is the overall trend, Jerusalem seems to be marching in lockstep—even leading the way.

The only list with Palestinian members, the Arab-Jewish list Kol Toshaveha headed by Palestinian citizen Sondos al-Hout, failed to win a single seat and received only a little over 2,000 votes, “most of which came from her Jewish supporters,”12 according to a short report in the Jerusalem Post. It’s not yet clear which neighborhoods those votes came from or what exact percentage of them was Palestinian versus Jewish.

It’s worth pointing out that the city had declined to set up any single polling station to serve the Palestinian neighborhoods beyond the Separation Wall, even though they are home to at least 150,000 Palestinians, an estimated one-third of all the Palestinians in the city (see Neighborhoods beyond the Wall). There was not even a polling station at the checkpoint. Since crossing the checkpoint these days can take hours, this effectively meant that one-third of the city’s Palestinians were not likely to even try, even had they been inclined to do so.

What is clear is that once again, the 40 percent (and likely higher)13 of Jerusalem who are Palestinians did not vote, and once again, they are left without any political representation (see Who Represents the Palestinians of Jerusalem?). Rather, they wholly reject participating in a political system that is so unfailingly designed to marginalize, exclude, and erase them.