AS I write, it looks very much like former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is about to return to power.

If there’s a certain feeling of deja vu about this, then it’s hardly surprising given that we’ve been here many times before with “Bibi” as he is sometimes known in line with Israelis’ proclivity towards nicknames.

This has been Israel’s fifth trip to the polling booth in less than four years and Netanyahu – despite currently standing trial in three corruption cases and being arguably the country’s most polarising politician – is again about to take office.

It might seem like a familiar story and the past four elections certainly didn’t change much in terms of Israel’s sustained political gridlock.

But this time around there is a different and seriously discomfiting dimension to this re-enactment of the last few elections. In short, it is the inexorable rise of Israel’s far-right upon which Netanyahu and his Likud Party would have to rely on to form a coalition government.

Just as Tuesday’s vote appears to have shown a reduction in support for the current Prime Minister Yair Lapid and his allies, so Netanyahu – with the help of his far-right allies – has gained seats.

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For a politician like Netanyahu, it’s never really mattered who he must do deals with to stay in power. In this instance, he’s running with far-right politicians Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who are both a part of Israel’s Religious Zionism Alliance.

What makes Netanyahu’s choice of political pals especially noisome this time though is that even by the standards of Israel’s right wing, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are considered extreme. Up until last year, many simply considered Ben-Gvir little more than a fringe Palestinian-hating rabble-rouser.

The bottom line here is that this is a wholly unpleasant and arguably dangerous man. A man who makes Netanyahu look almost liberal by comparison. It wasn’t that long ago of course that Netanyahu was insisting Ben-Gvir was “not fit” to be a minister – but then that was at a time when Bibi didn’t need him as he does now.

When not advocating for Palestinians in Israel to undergo “loyalty tests,” with those deemed “disloyal” expelled from their ancestral homeland, Ben-Gvir has – as reported by news organisations – been convicted of incitement to racism, destroying property, possessing a “terror” organisation’s propaganda material and supporting a “terror” organisation.

That “terror” organisation which Ben-Gvir joined when he was 16 was the outlawed Kach group run by an American-born Israeli, Rabbi Meir Kahane, an ultranationalist politician.

It was another Kahane follower, Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians in a 1994 shooting spree in Hebron, though this never deterred Ben-Gvir from having a photograph of him adorning his living room wall.

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Ben-Gvir’s number two in Israel’s Religious Zionism Alliance, Bezalel Smotrich, is cut from a similar political cloth. Both are politicians who not only seek to illegally annex the West Bank but recently announced plans to render Israel’s judiciary subservient to its political majority.

These then are Netanyahu’s two main partners and it speaks volumes about the current complexion of Israeli politics that Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, have come to the fore alongside what is likely to be the country’s next prime minister.

That many Israeli commentators themselves are warning of what The Times of Israel described in a recent headline as risking “a catastrophic lurch to extremism” says it all.

Op-eds in several mainstream Israeli newspapers share such concerns talking of “fateful decisions” a return to the “Dark Ages”, and “their enormous potential for destruction.”

Some commentators have even gone as far as to suggest that while Netanyahu can return to power by running with the far-right, he will remain a bit player given the current trajectory of the country’s politics and those that have become its kingmakers and brokers.

“He (Netanyahu) is a marginal figure in the story today,” observed veteran Israeli political analyst Meron Rapoport this week.

“Instead, driving Israeli politics is Religious Zionism … this is a party that has influenced Likud, which has adopted its language to a large extent, and it is also a party that is thinking of eliminating democracy at its base,” Rapoport told the online news website Middle East Eye.

Writing in the left-leaning daily Haaretz, journalist Gideon Levy shares a similar view saying: “It’s not easy to say this, it’s hard to write it, but any vote for a Zionist party is a vote for a continued tyranny posing as a democracy.”

Some political figures on the left like Meretz leader Zehava Galon have even said that the outcome of the elections would “determine whether there will be a free country here or a Jewish theocracy.”

All this of course would be sure to have potentially profound repercussions for Israel’s international standing and relations with allies. Washington will be watching closely to see whether the likes of Ben-Gvir or Smotrich will receive senior positions in Netanyahu’s coalition government after both men have made clear that’s what they expect.

Given such an outcome and the possibility of the far-right becoming a permanent fixture on Israel’s political landscape, relations between the US and Israel could be tested in ways rarely seen before. Then of course there is that pressing question over how having such men in power would impact those 4.5 million Palestinians living under Israeli military rule or blockade in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the besieged Gaza Strip and are not accounted for in Israeli elections.

Many Palestinians have long since held the view that they will be on the receiving end no matter what the political stripe of an Israeli government. But even such resignation cannot hide the concerns among Palestinian officials these past days who say the ultra-nationalist complexion of Netanyahu’s alliance, can only mean even worse times lie ahead.

“The Palestinian people will get nothing from this government except war, destruction, killing, bloodshed, house demolition, razing of land and the building of more settlements at the expense of the Palestinian people,” was how Youssef Khattab, a TV director in Gaza summed it up speaking to the Reuters news agency.

It’s a view doubtless shared by countless Palestinians, but Israel’s lurch to the far-right should concern us all.