The vast majority of Palestinian residents of Jerusalem are expected to boycott Tuesday's municipal elections. The polling booths of east Jerusalem will be empty. To cast a vote is to acknowledge the legitimacy of the occupation, or so it is argued. "Participating in the process merely gives [the Israelis] political cover," insists Hanan Ashrawi, from the PLO's executive committee. "They want to create a reality where the Palestinians participate in the occupation of their own country." This argument has been the dominant one since Israel annexed the eastern part of the city in 1967. Which is why, in the last municipal elections, in 2008, only 2% of Palestinians voted.

But this year, for the first time ever, there is a Palestinian candidate. Fuad Saliman, a hospital technologist, is running as a part of an Israeli coalition of leftwing parties. Given that Palestinians make up well over a third of the city's population, their participation in the political process could transform a political landscape that has allocated only 10% of the local council's budget to 37% of its people. Were all such voters to make a tactical judgment to vote – bracketing out the larger question of the legitimacy of Israel's occupation – things could be very different. No one is disputing that this is a very big could. And no one is holding their breath that this is going to happen any time soon – not just because there is no political appetite for such a shift but also because there is no political leadership on the Palestinian side capable of achieving it.

As a thought experiment, however, it is fascinating. Extrapolating from the local situation in Jerusalem, what if all Palestinians made a strategic decision to seek full voting rights within the reality that is Israel, rather than demanding a separate Palestinian state? In other words, what if they transformed their struggle from a nationalist one into a civil rights one? It was a former mayor of Jerusalem, and former prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, who warned that if the two-state solution collapsed Israel would "face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, and as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished."

Of course, Palestinians don't all have the same access to the ballot box. But far from looking to exert their electoral presence on the national stage, those who do have the right to vote have been exercising it less and less. Seventy-five per cent voted in the 1999 elections. Ten years later, it was 54%. The fact that it didn't dip below half earlier this year was put down to a last-minute intervention by the Arab League urging the million or so Palestinians living in Israel to get out and vote [see footnote]. Amid deepening despair as to the viability of a two-state solution, this is an option that is only going to attract more attention.

• This footnote was appended on 23 October 2013. The text refers to "the million or so Palestinians living in Israel". To clarify: the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics puts the numbers at 1.658 million.