‘Arab voice doesn’t count’: Jewish Israeli blocs reject Palestinian support

Few certainties have emerged from Israel’s parliamentary elections. The diverse coalition of Israel’s self-styled ‘Zionist’ opposition remains short of a majority. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud appears to be the largest party, but its electoral bloc has not secured enough seats to form a government.

What is not in doubt, however, is the surge in turnout from Palestinian citizens of Israel, which has established Arab parties as a pivotal bloc in the parliament, potentially one able to determine which of the rival camps forms a government, if either is willing to work with them.

Anger over Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, and what analysts have described as the overt racism of its governing coalition helped drive Palestinian citizens of Israel to the polls in large numbers.

An estimated 80 percent of eligible Palestinian voters in Israel turned out for Tuesday’s election, marking a surge in participation by a community that accounts for about 21 percent of the population.

The turnout has given the two main electoral lists representing Palestinian citizens of Israel – the United Arab List (Ra’am) and the Joint List – a combined 19 seats in the 120-member parliament, potentially giving them a decisive role in determining who forms the next government.

However, rather than acknowledge that groundswell of support, Israel’s leading politicians have sought to either delegitimise their vote – attributing it to foreign interference – or somehow cast Palestinians exercising their democratic right as an “attempt to steal the election”.

Arab votes don’t count

Framing the result as a bid to secure the “Islamisation of Israel”, Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party has gone so far as to call on Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, to investigate the possibility of foreign election interference into the large-scale Palestinian turnout. In doing so, they appear to have thrown the legitimacy of the Arab vote into question and tainted any future attempt by the opposition to ally with the Arab parties.

Despite denouncing Netanyahu’s government as corrupt, incompetent and damaging to Israel’s international standing, much of Israel’s Jewish-led opposition has remained reluctant to embrace the support of Palestinian parties to remove him from power.

The left-wing Democrats have been the likeliest to cooperate with the Palestinian parties, while other opposition figures have either resisted such an alliance or stopped short of rejecting allegations that foreign actors helped engineer the surge in Palestinian voter turnout.

On election night, former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid ruled out sitting alongside Palestinian parties in government, despite having relied on their support during their brief 2021–22 government.

On Thursday, another leading member of the opposition, Avigdor Lieberman, the hard-right leader of Yisrael Beytenu, also ruled out forming a coalition with Palestinian parties. He said he would sit alongside “neither Bibi nor Tibi”, using Netanyahu’s established nickname and invoking Ahmad Tibi, leader of the Ta’al party – part of the Joint List – as a stand-in for the wider Palestinian bloc.

“It was clear from campaigning that there was going to be a large turnout,” said Orly Noy, who stood for the Palestinian-dominated Balad party. “The [governing] coalition had shown there were no red lines in Gaza and Palestinians in Israel sensed they might be next. People also just couldn’t face another term of soaring crime and a police force headed by [far-right National Security Minister] Itamar Ben-Gvir.”

“What few rights Palestinians had have been slipping away since October 7. The last tool they had in their toolbox – the only thing they had that was equal to everyone else – was their vote, so they used that in massive numbers, but even that now seems to be being undermined and delegitimised,” she said.

With all ballots counted, the pro-Netanyahu bloc has 53 seats, while the anti-Netanyahu Jewish opposition bloc has 48. However, with the 19 seats held by Palestinian parties, the majority in parliament is against Netanyahu.

“Why are the opposition and the press even thinking of this as a three-way split? In any other rational democracy, people would be framing this as an overwhelming victory for the opposition and a rejection of Netanyahu, but we’re not doing that,” Noy said.

“Instead, we’re hearing elements of the opposition talking about joining with Netanyahu in some kind of National Unity government. That’s both a measure of how racist these parties are, when they won’t align with Arabs to form a majority, as well as how profoundly undemocratic they are,” she said.

Different visions

Political differences do exist between an opposition that deliberately frames itself as Zionist and a Palestinian minority whose claim to equal national and civic rights is seen by some as a rejection of that. But underlying that disagreement is a fundamentally different vision of Israel’s future, according to political analyst Nimrod Flaschenberg.

“Given that much of Israel’s mainstream politics rests on the assumption of Jewish supremacy, I think it’s understandable that the Arab vote is seen as a challenge,” he said of a sentiment that many argue has been state policy since the 2018 Nation State Law, which enshrined the right to national self-determination as exclusive to Jewish people.

“There are very different ideas at play of what it means to be a citizen of Israel and of how Israel should be governed and for whose benefit,” he said. “These are fundamental differences, of course they are, but they can’t disguise the racism underpinning all.”

“They want to form a government with only Jewish voices,” said Mauricio Lapchik, Hebrew campaign director for the Joint List. “If the numbers of these results were in a different country, in a democratic country, I think it would be crazy to think that they will not be able to say that they won the elections, having this majority. But only in Israel, because the voice of the Arabs do not count as the voice of the Jews, we cannot talk about a victory.”