Few certainties have emerged from the Israeli parliamentary elections. Israel’s diverse, self-described “Zionist” opposition coalition still lacks a majority. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud appears to be the largest party, but its voting bloc failed to secure enough seats to form a government.
What is beyond doubt, however, is the strong turnout of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, which has made the Arab parties a central bloc in Parliament, potentially capable of determining which of the rival camps will form a government, whether either is willing to work with them.
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Anger over Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and what analysts described as the overt racism of the governing coalition helped push Israel’s Palestinian citizens to the polls in large numbers.
An estimated 80 percent of eligible Palestinian voters in Israel turned out for Tuesday’s elections, marking an increase in participation from a community that makes up about 21 percent of the population.
The turnout gave the two main electoral lists representing Palestinian citizens of Israel – the Joint List (Ra’am) and the Joint List – a total of 19 seats in the 120-member parliament, potentially giving them a decisive role in determining the next government.
However, rather than recognizing this groundswell of support, leading Israeli politicians have sought to either delegitimize their vote – attributing it to foreign interference – or somehow portray the Palestinians’ exercise of their democratic rights as an “attempt to steal the election.”
Arab votes don’t count
Presenting the result as an attempt to ensure the “Islamization of Israel,” Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party went so far as to call on Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, to investigate the possibility of foreign interference in large-scale Palestinian electoral participation. In doing so, they appear to have called into question the legitimacy of the Arab vote and tainted any future attempts by the opposition to ally with Arab parties.
Despite denouncing Netanyahu’s government as corrupt, incompetent and damaging to Israel’s international reputation, much of the Jewish-led Israeli opposition remained reluctant to accept support from Palestinian parties to remove him from power.
Left-wing Democrats have been most likely to cooperate with Palestinian parties, while other opposition figures have either resisted such an alliance or failed to reject allegations that foreign actors contributed to increased Palestinian voter turnout.
On election night, former Prime Ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid ruled out sitting alongside Palestinian parties in government, despite having counted on their support during their brief 2021-2022 government.
On Thursday, another prominent opposition member, Avigdor Lieberman, the far-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 moniker and invoking Ahmad Tibi, leader of the Ta’al party – part of the Joint List – as a replacement for the wider Palestinian bloc.
“It was clear from the campaign that there would be a high turnout,” said Orly Noy, who represented the Palestinian-dominated Balad party. “The (government) coalition had shown that there were no red lines in Gaza and Palestinians in Israel felt they could be next. People simply could not cope with a new wave of crime and a police force led by (far-right National Security Minister) Itamar Ben-Gvir.”
“The few rights that Palestinians had have been lost since October 7. The last tool they had in their toolbox – the one thing they had that was equal to everyone else’s – was their vote, so they used it in large numbers, but even that now seems to be undermined and delegitimized,” she said.
Once all the ballots are 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 do the opposition and the press view this as a three-way split? In any other rational democracy, people would view this as a landslide victory for the opposition and a rejection of Netanyahu, but we don’t,” Noy said.
“Instead, we hear elements of the opposition talking about joining Netanyahu in some kind of national unity government. This shows both how racist these parties are, when they do not align with the Arabs to form a majority, and how deeply undemocratic they are,” she said.
Different visions
Political differences exist between an opposition that deliberately presents itself as Zionist and a Palestinian minority whose demand for equal national and civil rights is seen by some as a rejection of this. But this disagreement is based on a fundamentally different vision of Israel’s future, according to political analyst Nimrod Flaschenberg.
“Given that much of Israel’s mainstream politics is based 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 say has been part of state policy since the 2018 Nation-State Law, which enshrined the right to national self-determination as exclusive to the Jewish people.
“There are very different ideas at play about what it means to be a citizen of Israel and how Israel should be governed and for whose benefit,” he said. “These are, of course, fundamental differences, but they cannot mask the racism that underlies them.”
“They want to form a government with only Jewish votes,” said Mauricio Lapchik, Hebrew campaign director for the Joint List. “If the numbers of these results were in another country, in a democratic country, I think it would be crazy to think that they would not be able to say that they won the elections, with this majority. But only in Israel, because the voice of the Arabs does not count like the voice of the Jews, we cannot speak of victory.”
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