Candidates always say it, but this time it’s true. When Israel goes to the polls on 27 October, it really will be the most important election in the country’s history – and not just for Israelis. I saw that for myself this last week, in a visit that served as a sharp reminder of both what is at stake – and the role of those watching from afar.

More than one voter I spoke to voiced the fear that, if the coalition headed by Benjamin Netanyahu is returned to power next month, 27 October will not merely be Israel’s most important election: it will be its last. They were not referring to the absence of democracy in the occupied territory of the West Bank – which we’ll come to – but rather to Israel’s internationally recognised, pre-1967 borders: what you might call Israel-proper. There, the last four years have seen a sustained assault on the machinery of liberal democracy by the most rightwing government since Israel’s establishment in 1948 – a committed, focused attempt to remove the checks and restraints on its own power, installing instead a kind of elective dictatorship.

Democratic norms are breaking down all the time. While I was there, Netanyahu joined calls to strip two Israeli film-makers of their citizenship, as a livid mob surrounded the home of the parents of one of the two directors. The film in question is NAZA, produced by the Guardian, which features interviews with two dozen Israeli intelligence personnel, their identities disguised, and which is named for the acronym used by the Israeli military when calculating the number of civilians it expects to die in an airstrike. Unlike everyone protesting against it, I have actually seen the film: I have some misgivings about specific choices it makes, but that is irrelevant. A country true to its self-designation as the only democracy in the Middle East would not threaten with expulsion or violence those who say what its rulers do not want to hear.

But such egregious behaviour is becoming commonplace. Last month, Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, implied, without evidence, that Yair Golan, leader of the left-leaning Democrats party, had inside knowledge of the 7 October 2023 attacks that saw the massacre of 1,200 Israelis and the abduction of 251........

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