On election day in March 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu filmed a controversial 28-second video, warning right-wing voters that Arab citizens were going to the polls “in droves.” A week later, after winning against all odds, he apologized, saying he did not intend to offend the Arab sector as a whole.
Eleven years and six elections later, Netanyahu is playing the same game, but on a much larger scale.
Since losing their majority in the October 27 vote, Netanyahu and his allies have made a grave accusation: the election was “stolen” by Arab parties through corruption, foreign financing and fraud. They demand investigations, arrests and, in the most extreme version, even the cancellation of the vote and the holding of a new round of elections.
They have yet to present evidence, but the political goal is clear: to cast a veil of illegitimacy over the Joint List and Ra’am, the two Arab parties that saw record turnout and are likely to play a crucial role in any effort to oust Israel’s longest-serving leader.
“They are doing this because they lost,” Gadi Eisenkot, Netanyahu’s main challenger, said in a video statement Thursday.
Netanyahu did not completely lose the election, nor did he win it. The same goes for Eisenkot. Both fell short of the required majority of 61 seats in Parliament, which has 120 seats, for a clear victory. Israel now faces weeks, if not months, of political uncertainty.
Netanyahu knows the math. His coalition has fallen to 53 seats and has no clear path to a majority. The bloc led by Eisenkot alone has 48 seats. But with the support of 19 seats from Arab parties, it has a clear majority of 67 seats.
The only government to oust Netanyahu – the Bennett-Lapid government in 2021 – included Raam, and it collapsed after about a year. Now, Netanyahu’s main goal after the elections, according to a source close to him, is to delegitimize and prevent any Jewish-Arab political cooperation that could weaken his grip on power.
The efforts began a few weeks before Election Day.
In mid-October, Netanyahu and Religious Zionist Party Chairman Bezalel Smotrich announced plans to deploy around 2,000 observers to polling stations in Arab communities, portraying Arab polling stations as sites of potential fraud.
Early on the morning of the vote, police arrested three Raam activists for an alleged cash-for-votes scheme, in a widely publicized incident. The initial information about the arrests, Israel’s Channel 12 later reported, came from Netanyahu’s chief of staff, who bypassed standard channels to personally contact the police commissioner. Courts have rejected most requests for strict police restrictions, and some suspects have been released. But Netanyahu’s campaign machine seized on the story, amplifying the arrests and claiming it was an attempt to “steal the election.”
As the ballots were counted, the campaign continued and intensified. On Wednesday, Netanyahu’s Likud party said it had submitted hundreds of testimonies alleging bribes, threats, violence and forgery from Ra’am and the Joint List, while pro-Netanyahu Channel 14 reported suspicions of millions of shekels coming from a foreign source.
Then a letter leaked.
The chairman of the Central Election Commission, Deputy Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Noam Solberg, had written to David Zini, the director of the Shin Bet security service, to request an investigation into “serious suspicions” of foreign financing. Israeli media later reported that Zini himself had requested the letter, having apparently met with Netanyahu earlier. Solberg wrote that he could not verify the seriousness of the evidence. But for Likud and other right-wing politicians, this hardly mattered: the letter was seen as confirmation and proof.
Netanyahu’s far-right allies Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir have called for the arrest of Arab party leaders, with Ben Gvir alleging a Qatari-funded effort to increase Arab voter turnout, which Qatar has categorically denied as “ridiculous and dangerous.”
On Channel 14, the story was dubbed “Election Terror”. Likud MK Boaz Bismuth wrote on X that the results of “terrorist parties” should not be recognized until “every stone” has been turned. On Sunday, Netanyahu himself shared a video of a right-wing activist claiming these were massive fakes and calling to “simply invalidate the elections.”
These episodes sparked strong criticism of Israel’s police commissioner and the head of the Shin Bet – both appointed by Netanyahu.
“There is a common denominator between the two cases,” wrote Amos Harel, senior defense analyst at Haaretz. “In both cases, the Prime Minister’s Office acts behind the scenes with the Shin Bet and the police, and Likud immediately exploits the reports in a massive propaganda campaign” intended to delegitimize Arab parties and reduce the opposition’s freedom of action.
Electoral authorities, however, rejected Netanyahu’s speech. The Central Election Commission officially rejected allegations of widespread fraud as baseless and said there was no evidence to allege systematic vote compromise.
On Sunday, the commission chairman appeared alongside the Shin Bet chief and the attorney general in a special statement in which they said the elections were conducted properly. Even if suspicions of foreign funding are true, they said it would not overturn the outcome or undermine the integrity of the process. “Your decision made at the ballot box will be honored,” Solberg said.
Likud remained unmoved, insisting in a statement that a “dark cloud” hangs over the results.
The opposition has largely supported the investigation, but has framed Netanyahu’s allegations as an attempt to undermine the results. Eisenkot called it a “despicable and malicious influence operation” intended to delay the release of the results and delegitimize the 26th Knesset. Yair Golan, the leader of the left-wing Democrats, said this is how “a dictator who refuses to accept defeat at the polls” behaves.
The Joint List, which is the target of the delegitimization campaign, hit back with its own statement.
“No smear campaign will erase the gains of the Arab public, and no attempt to cast doubt on the legitimacy of our vote will change the will of voters,” the party said in a statement last week. “You wanted us small and weak, and you made us big and strong.”
Gn world
