THE WASHINGTON POST: A record Arab vote brings a painful dilemma for Israel’s opposition

Israel’s opposition parties woke up Wednesday morning with a parliamentary majority within easy reach. They just have to be willing to use the votes of Palestinian citizens of Israel to claim it.

That’s not going to be easy.

The results of Tuesday’s national election, with final results not expected until Thursday, stripped Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition of its majority but left the collection of opposition parties short, as well.

In their case, standing by are two Arab-led parties that share their determination to oust Netanyahu and control more than enough seats to do it.

On paper, that makes them kingmakers. In the reality of Israeli politics and the deep ambivalence many feel about the place of Arab citizens in a Jewish state, the seats that could end Netanyahu’s rule are the ones his main opponents are most reluctant to touch.

Tuesday’s results were a historic high-water mark for Israel’s 2 million Palestinian citizens, about a fifth of the population. Turnout in this demographic was estimated at nearly 80 per cent, a surge driven by anger at Netanyahu and his cabinet in Arab towns and Bedouin encampments.

The turnout rewarded the two major Arab parties, Ra’am and the Joint List, with a total of 19 seats, nearly double the 10 they held in the outgoing Knesset and well above the previous record of 15, set in 2020 when all the major Arab parties ran on a single slate.

“Whoever proposes a substantive alternative to the Netanyahu government will have to talk to us,” said Yousef Jabareen, head of the Joint List.

To some Jewish lawmakers, the math - and the morality - is simple. “We can no longer accept Netanyahu’s racist distinction between Jewish and Arab votes,” Yair Golan, leader of the left-wing Democrats party, said on X, hailing the “opportunity to form a change government in partnership with Israel’s Arab citizens.”

For the leaders of the larger opposition parties, it is less straightforward. Their voters lean further right, and many have long rejected any government propped up by Arab lawmakers, a hostility that deepened after the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks. One poll found that a majority of Israelis supported barring the Arab parties from running.

Opposition leaders spent the campaign rejecting the idea or avoiding the question. Former prime minister Naftali Bennett, who leads the Together alliance, and Avigdor Lieberman, head of the nationalist Yisrael Beytenu party, both ruled it out.

The position of former military chief Gadi Eisenkot - Netanyahu’s closest challenger - is harder to pin down. He declined to rule out the Arab parties explicitly. But he also set conditions for any party to join his coalition that many Palestinian lawmakers haven’t met: recognizing Israel as a Jewish state and declaring Hamas a terrorist organization that must be dismantled.

The parties in the Joint List have long rejected Israel’s definition as a Jewish state, calling instead for a “state of all its citizens.”

Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas, a dentist from northern Israel, has gone further than any other Arab party leader in accepting Israel’s Jewish character and condemned the October 7 attack, positions that drew fierce criticism from Palestinian leaders and some of his own allies. But he has resisted Israeli demands to declare that Hamas must be destroyed, calling them loyalty tests.

But for all the maneuvering around the issue, the long taboo over inviting Arab parties into a governing coalition has already been broken. In June 2021 Abbas joined an eight-party coalition, the first time an independent Arab party had joined an Israeli government.

That move allowed the group of parties opposing Netanyahu to take power, putting Bennett in the prime minister’s office for about a year, and then his governing partner Yair Lapid for about six months more.

Many Israelis point out that not only did the plagues of Egypt fail to descend, but the government delivered record investment to Arab towns and a rare stretch of cooperation across Israel’s deepest divide.

“When Mansour Abbas was part of the government, they made progress on addressing the issues affecting our community,” said Atiyeh al-Asam, the head of an advocacy group for Bedouin villages and encampments in the Negev desert.

Several of those communities, which are often bulldozed for permit violations, gained official support and spending at the time, Asam said.

Abbas said then, as he does now, that crime, housing and budgets mattered more to his voters than grand questions of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The coalition partners agreed to set aside the most divisive issues, including Palestinian statehood and peace talks, and pledged not to disturb the status quo where they disagreed.

In return, the cabinet approved a $US9.4 billion plan for Arab communities in October 2021, a level of investment with little precedent in Israel. The government collapsed after about a year, undone by defections from its right flank.

Netanyahu’s coalition parties condemn any suggestions that Arab parties should get another chance to serve in government. His Likud party campaign slogans equated voting for any of his opponents with turning Israel into “Palestine.” And Netanyahu flooded social media with dozens of Election Day posts warning of “emergency” rates of Arab citizens voting.

“If Eisenkot, Lieberman and Bennett try to form a government with the Arab parties, it will be the end of their political careers within a very short time,” Netanyahu’s culture minister, Miki Zohar, wrote on X Tuesday night as results came in.

But it was Netanyahu and his allies who were the first to explore it. In 2021, facing a fourth election in two years, Netanyahu courted Arab voters in their towns and boasted of being “Abu Yair,” the traditional Arab honorific of calling a man by his eldest son’s name.

Netanyahu opened a semipublic channel to Abbas, who had split from the Joint List to run independently. When the vote left Netanyahu short, Zohar, then coalition chairman, sounded a very different note on the possibility of an alliance with an Arab party.

“It is our duty to do everything we can to prevent a fifth election,” Zohar told Ynet then. “All the existing political options must be exhausted.”