Israelis go to the polls on October 27, 2026 to elect the 26th Knesset — the country's first national election since October 7, 2023 — and a wave of academic conferences scheduled just before Election Day is flying tens of thousands of Israeli expatriates home, many of them with a ballot in mind as much as a paper to present.
59 conferences, one election
The Mind-IL initiative, working with the Israel Young Academy, has scheduled 59 academic conferences for October 25 and 26 under the banner of "Israeli Science and Academia Week," covering mathematics, the natural sciences, law and the humanities. Hundreds of faculty members from every Israeli university are involved, and organizers say the dates were chosen deliberately "to leverage the fact that many Israelis will in any case be coming for the election" — aiming to strengthen Israeli academia, deepen collaboration between researchers at home and abroad, and fight brain drain.
The timing is politically charged. Polls show a tight race widely seen as a referendum on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his hard-right government, with the Oct 7 intelligence failure, the hostages and Gaza, the judicial overhaul and ultra-Orthodox conscription dominating the campaign. Five opposition leaders signed a non-aggression pact in late September, but neither the governing coalition nor the opposition's "Change Bloc" has a clear path to the 61 seats needed to govern.
The expat vote could be decisive
Israel is one of a handful of democracies with no absentee voting (diplomats excepted), so expats must physically return to cast a ballot. The US-based AID Coalition projects more than 53,000 expats will travel home to vote — enough, in a knife-edge race, to move the needle.
Research suggests those votes will skew against the government: a 2023 Hebrew University study found right-wing support declines as education, income and median age rise, matching the profile of the flying-in scholars. That assumption is widely shared in Israeli politics — Likud even filed suit against the AID Coalition's Fly&Vote initiative, which runs group flights from New York, Los Angeles, London, Berlin and Melbourne, before withdrawing it under a compromise brokered by Central Elections Committee chair Justice Noam Sohlberg.
The legal line around the effort is delicate. Israeli election law bars financial incentives to influence voter participation, and some scholars are having travel covered by private institutions. Assaf Shapira of the Israel Democracy Institute told the Times of Israel that legality "depends on the circumstances and intent": "They are not convincing people to come to vote... They are taking advantage of the fact that they are coming to vote."
Why they are coming back
For the travelers, it is personal. Jeremy Sarnat, an Emory University researcher studying the health effects of air pollution, rescheduled an academic meeting to October specifically so he could vote. "Like all Jews who care about Israel around the world, I view these particular elections as being particularly pivotal," he said. Liran Naaman spent 800 euros (nearly $900) to fly from Amsterdam, where he has lived 11 years: "The way that our government is conducting itself is harming me personally and the rest of the Israelis abroad." Paris-based Sylvie Lidgi, who last voted in Israel in 1973, says the country faces "two opposing visions of the world: either the Torah as a constitution, or a liberal democracy."
An AID Coalition survey found 84% of Israelis abroad consider the Oct 27 vote "critical," and the scale of the diaspora's pull is growing: a Tel Aviv University study found 270,000 Israeli citizens left the country for at least three consecutive months between 2023 and 2025, many highly educated professionals leaning center-left.
The takeaway: academia insists its October conferences are about science, not ballots — but in an election this close, 53,000 flying-in voters could matter as much as any manifesto. On October 27, the departure boards will be part of the story.
Watch: Al Jazeera English reports on why Israel's expat voters could be decisive in the October 27 election.
Music in this post's reel: Kevin MacLeod - Long Road Ahead B (incompetech.com), licensed under CC BY 3.0
Sources: The Times of Israel, Haaretz, eJewishPhilanthropy, ynetnews.