With Israeli elections on the horizon and sovereignty advocates pressing the government to act, a new poll released by the Sovereignty Movement delivers numbers that its champions are calling a political mandate. Conducted by Direct Polls under pollster Tzuriel Sharon, the survey of 489 Jewish Israelis found that 59% support applying some form of Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, and 71% oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state in any form. The Sovereignty Movement says the results create not just an opportunity but an obligation for the current government to advance the issue before the next election.
The coalition breakdown is where the numbers become striking. Among Shas voters, 90% support sovereignty, including 85% who favor full sovereignty. Voters of Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit register 87% support, with 76% backing full sovereignty. Likud voters match that exactly — 87%. The poll also reached across the aisle: 49% of Yisrael Beiteinu voters and 46% of Blue and White voters expressed support for either full or graduated sovereignty. Among traditionally observant (masorti) Jewish Israelis, 82% support sovereignty overall, with 67% favoring the full version.
When respondents were asked about specific policy options, 25% supported applying sovereignty over the entire country while encouraging Arab emigration. Another 20% favored sovereignty over the Jordan Valley and Palestinian Authority areas of Judea and Samaria, while 10% supported applying sovereignty only in Area C. The survey’s margin of error was plus or minus 4.4 percentage points at a 95% confidence level.
The Sovereignty Movement stated plainly that support at this scale among coalition voters creates a political and moral obligation — not merely a platform plank — for the government to move before the campaign season fully takes hold.
The political ground beneath the two-state solution — long promoted by Western governments, international bodies, and Israeli opposition leaders — is collapsing. The new poll is not an anomaly. It is the end point of a decade-long trajectory that October 7 accelerated into a straight vertical line.
The pre–October 7 polling data tells the story of the shift in raw numbers. In 2012, Gallup found that a majority of Israelis — 61% — supported a two-state solution. A decade later, before the massacres, that support was already eroding. In surveys conducted in June through August 2025, only 27% of Israelis backed a two-state solution while 63% were opposed — numbers that had been stable since 2023 but contrasted sharply with 2012 levels. The July 2024 joint Israeli-Palestinian survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found the collapse even sharper: twice as many Jewish Israelis supported applying sovereignty over Judea and Samaria without granting Palestinians equal rights (42%) as those who supported a two-state solution (21%) — the lowest level recorded since comparable questions were asked in the early 1990s.
The June 2026 Sovereignty Movement poll, conducted by Direct Polls under pollster Tzuriel Sharon, puts flesh on those bones. Among coalition voters, support for sovereignty is overwhelming. Shas voters back it at 90%, including 85% favoring full sovereignty. Voters of Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit support it at 87%, including 76% favoring full sovereignty. Likud voters register the same — 87%. Even across the opposition, the numbers hold: 49% of Yisrael Beiteinu voters and 46% of Blue and White voters express support for either full or graduated sovereignty. Among traditional (masorti) Jewish Israelis, 82% support some form of sovereignty, and 67% favor full sovereignty.
The Sovereignty Movement states plainly that these numbers create an obligation — not just a political opportunity — for the current government to advance the issue before the next election.
The Two-State Solution would create an unprecedented militarized Arab state inside Israel’s borders, ethnically cleansed of Jews, with its capital in an exclusively Muslim Jerusalem. This would require a return to the ceasefire lines drawn up after the defensive 1967 Six-Day War that are considered to be indefensible against an Arab threat. The UN resolution violates the Oslo Accords which require any resolution concerning Judea and Samaria to be the result of bilateral negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. The two-state solution is based on the disastrous land-for-peace process which inevitably leads to war.
The two-state argument always rested on the assumption that Palestinians wanted a state alongside Israel, not instead of it. That assumption has never been reliably true. According to analysis of Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research polling over multiple years, an average of 53% of Palestinians rejected the two-state outcome across the full period under review, with rejection peaking at 71% in March 2023 — before October 7. When West Bank Palestinians were asked to choose between territorial alternatives in a September 2025 survey, 28% backed a single Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, excluding Jews. A separate INSS survey from March 2025 found that 24% of the Israeli public supports a two-state solution — while 24% supports full annexation of the territories without granting Palestinian residents civil rights.
Advocates of the two-state solution in the West spent decades arguing that Palestinian rejection was the product of Israeli occupation, and that a generous offer would unlock a deal. The data does not support that argument. It never did.
On the Israeli political map, the parties championing sovereignty are the governing coalition parties: Netanyahu’s Likud, Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit, Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism, and Shas under Arye Deri. In the Knesset’s July 2025 vote on a non-binding motion calling for applying Israeli sovereignty to Judea, Samaria, and the Jordan Valley, the resolution passed 71-13, with six votes coming from the opposition Yisrael Beiteinu party, while Yesh Atid and Blue and White absented themselves from the vote entirely. Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana declared after the vote: “This is our land. This is our home. The Land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel.”
The opposition is now coalescing around a new joint party, Beyachad (“Together”), formed on April 26, 2026, by former Prime Ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid. Bennett is categorically opposed to Palestinian statehood, while Lapid has supported a two-state solution in theory but with conditions so extensive that any resulting Palestinian entity would be shorn of genuine sovereignty or territorial contiguity. At their joint press conference in Herzliya, Bennett declared that his government would “safeguard the lands of our country and will not hand over a single centimeter to the enemy.” That is a meaningful rightward pivot for Lapid, who spent years as the public face of the Israeli center-left position on peace negotiations.
The politician most identified internationally with the two-state framework on the Israeli side was, historically, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who offered the most far-reaching territorial concessions in 2008 negotiations — and was rejected. Prime Minister Ehud Barak made a similar offer at Camp David in 2000. Both were rebuffed. In the United States, the two-state architecture was championed by every administration from Clinton through Biden, reaching its institutional apex in the Biden administration’s Security Council Resolution 2735 in June 2024, which embedded a two-state framework into UN law. Trump has moved in the opposite direction, treating Gaza and Judea and Samaria as separate territorial entities and signaling he will veto future Security Council resolutions calling for Palestinian statehood.
Israel’s next scheduled elections are set for October 27, 2026 — the first national elections since the October 7 massacre. Many analysts assess a strong likelihood of earlier elections, driven by coalition strains over the state budget and other pressures that could force dissolution by summer. Sovereignty is already shaping up as a defining issue, with the Sovereignty Movement arguing that the polling data creates a political and moral obligation on the current coalition to act before the campaign begins in earnest.
