Arab parties on track to win record seats in Israel election, polls show

Hind Al Soulia - Riyadh - JERUSALEM — One of the most striking results from the election in Israel on Tuesday was the unusually strong showing by two leading Arab parties, whose voters turned out in record numbers to express their opposition to the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to The New York Times.

Exit poll data suggested that the leading Arab-led parties, the left-wing Joint List and the conservative United Arab List, orRa’am, could hold a record combined 19 seats in the 120-member Knesset.

Polls estimated voter turnout among Palestinian citizens of Israel at around 80 percent, historic numbers that break 1999 records.

Mansour Abbas, the leader of Raam, told a television interviewer that the turnout showed that Arab voters, who make up about 20 percent of Israel’s population, had channeled their “frustration and despair” into “hope.”

He said he wanted to replace Netanyahu’s government “in every possible way” and that his first priority was to “ensure that there is a chance of forming a government” that achieved that goal.

Most Arab citizens are the descendants of Palestinians who remained in their homes during the 1948 Arab-Israel war at the time of Israel’s independence.

Many Arab voters said they were furious at Netanyahu for his treatment of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and for policies that they feel treat Palestinians in Israel as second-class citizens. Indeed, throughout the campaign, Netanyahu made overt appeals to anti-Arab prejudice.

Of the two Arab parties that did well on Tuesday, only Raam has joined a coalition government in the past. That happened in 2021, when it joined the short-lived anti-Netanyahu coalition of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.

Raam’s participation in that government outraged many right-wing Jewish voters, and when it collapsed after roughly one year, they backed Netanyahu, who went on to form the most hard-line government in Israel’s history.

With more than one-third of votes counted, the Joint List was winning over 9 percent of votes. The opposition bloc led by former Israeli military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party was trailing the coalition led by Netanyahu’s Likud party, though the votes were preliminary.

The Arab parties’ strong showing may make them kingmakers. But building a governing coalition with Arab participation remains a fraught exercise in Israel. Many Israeli Jews believe that a parliamentary majority should not rely on the support of Arab lawmakers.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli ambassador, said creating a government might prove difficult for parties such as Eisenkot’s because they promised not to form coalitions with Arab parties during the campaign.

“There’s a price to pay,” Pinkas said, because the “Arabs can’t be kept outside and only being considered and co-opted when you need their votes”.

He added that the Arab-led lists will make demands that a Jewish-led coalition government may not support.

Netanyahu and his far-right coalition made last-ditch efforts on Tuesday to get their supporters to the polls, warning of surging voter turnout among Palestinian citizens of Israel, a tactic Arab politicians denounced as racist and inflammatory.

Cars flying Netanyahu’s Likud party flags drove through Jerusalem blaring the Islamic call to prayer and urging supporters to cast their ballots because “Arabs are voting”, witnesses said.

In social media posts, the embattled prime minister highlighted long queues at polling stations in Arab communities and published an image that 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’ll find ourselves with a government of Mansour Abbas and Ahmad Tibi,” he said, referring to two leading Palestinian members of the Knesset.

Overall voter turnout was also historic, reaching its highest level since 1999 with 77.7 percent casting ballots in Tuesday’s election, the Central Elections Committee reported. Palestinian citizens of Israel make up about 21 percent of the country’s population of 10 million and have traditionally voted at lower rates than Jewish Israelis.
Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, called the election “an existential moment for Palestinian-Israelis”.

She noted the record turnout among what has emerged as a key voting bloc, which drew “even [voters] who would usually boycott elections, who didn’t believe it would amount to any kind of influence, that it would change their reality, that it would alter the systemic discrimination that they face”.