Israel’s Arab parties are expected to win 19 seats in Israel’s parliament, according to exit polls, after voting among Israel’s Palestinian citizens reached its highest level in decades.
Exit poll data from Tuesday’s vote suggests that the main Arab parties, the Joint List and Ra’am, could hold a record total of 19 seats in the 120-member Knesset.
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With more than a third of the votes counted, the Joint List received more than 9 percent of the vote. The opposition bloc led by former Israeli army chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party lagged behind the coalition led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, although the votes were preliminary.
Polls put the turnout rate of Israel’s Palestinian citizens at around 80 percent, historic figures that break records from 1999, Israel’s Channel 12 reported Tuesday.
Raam, or Joint List, leader Mansour Abbas said he hoped the final election results would allow the anti-Netanyahu bloc, including his party, to win the 61 seats needed to form a government.
“With the numbers we have now, there is no government,” Abbas told Israel’s Channel 12 before the preliminary votes came in.
Abbas, whose Ra’am party currently holds five seats in the Knesset and joined the coalition that governed Israel from 2021 to 2022, added that the two main blocs contacted his party before and after the elections.
“The Arabs cannot stay outside”
Speaking to Al Jazeera, Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli ambassador, said creating a government could prove difficult for parties such as Eisenkot’s – which previous exit polls had placed narrowly ahead – as they promised not to form coalitions with Arab parties during the campaign.
“There is a price to pay,” Pinkas said, because “Arabs cannot stay on the outside and be counted on and co-opted only when you need their votes.”
He added that the Arab-led lists will make demands that a Jewish-led coalition government might not support.
Netanyahu and his far-right coalition made last-ditch efforts Tuesday to get their supporters to the polls, warning of high voter turnout among Israel’s Palestinian citizens, a tactic Arab politicians have denounced as racist and inflammatory.
Cars flying the flags of Netanyahu’s Likud party drove through Jerusalem blaring the Islamic call to prayer and urging supporters to vote because “Arabs vote,” witnesses said.
In social media posts, the embattled prime minister highlighted long lines at polling stations in Arab communities and posted an image he said showed Arab voters, including women wearing the niqab, a veil that covers the lower half of the face, waiting to vote.
“If we don’t wake up now, we will end up with a government of Mansour Abbas and Ahmad Tibi,” he said, referring to two Palestinian leaders in the Knesset.
Overall turnout was also historic, reaching its highest level since 1999 with 77.7 percent voting in Tuesday’s election, the Central Election Commission reported. Palestinian citizens of Israel make up about 21 percent of the country’s 10 million population and have traditionally voted in lower proportions than Israeli Jews.
“Existential moment”
Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, called the election “an existential moment for Palestinian-Israelis.”
She highlighted the record turnout among what emerged as a key voting bloc, which attracted “even (voters) who would usually boycott elections, who didn’t think that this would amount to any form of influence, that it would change their reality, that it would alter the systemic discrimination that they face.”
The Knesset has passed more than 100 laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel, who also face discrimination in obtaining public funds, Odeh said.
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