Will Arab-led parties hold key to Israel’s future?

Arab parties could reshape the political landscape of Israel after securing a record number of seats in Tuesday’s bitterly fought election.

With most of the votes counted, the left-wing Joint List, which includes Hadash, Balad and Ta'al, alongside the socially conservative Ra’am party led by Mansour Abbas, are on course for 18 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. In response, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party has accused Israel’s Arab parties of electoral fraud, filing complaints with election authorities and police. The party has not publicly presented evidence to support its allegations.

With neither PM Netanyahu or his main rival, former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, close to securing a majority on their own, the Arab parties’ strong showing could make them “kingmakers”, said Liam Stack in The New York Times. “But building a governing coalition with Arab participation remains a fraught exercise in Israel.”

Palestinian Israeli citizens make up around 20% of the country’s population, but “have traditionally voted at lower rates than Jewish Israelis”, said Al Jazeera. Many have boycotted elections in protest at their perceived second-class status and the conduct of the Israeli state in Gaza and the West Bank.

Their success at the polls poses an “urgent and fundamental challenge to the country’s mainstream opposition: either cooperate with Arab Israelis or hand Benjamin Netanyahu a roadmap to political survival”, said Julian Borger in The Guardian.

“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. This, he said, is an “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 tend to “lean further right, and many have long rejected any government propped up by Arab lawmakers”, said the Post.

Eisenkot’s position is “harder to pin down”. He has not explicitly ruled out working with the Arab parties but the conditions he has set for any party to join him are so stringent they may make any partnership impossible.

Then there are the concessions the various Arab factions would demand in return for power-sharing. “Abbas wants Ra’am to participate in government” as it did in the short-lived coalition in 2021-22, said Zvika Klein in The Jerusalem Post.

The more progressive Joint List has “offered to negotiate support from outside a government that replaces Netanyahu”. Its leader, Yousef Jabareen, has “demanded a funded and monitored plan to combat crime, while setting red lines over national issues, including war and settlement budgets.

“Cooperation would have to survive those disagreements. A shared interest in replacing a prime minister does not settle what comes afterwards.”

If no bloc secures the 61-seat threshold once the final result is announced, it falls to Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, to decide who he asks first to try to form a government. They then have six weeks to cobble together a coalition, after which the challenge is passed on to the next option.

Although Netanyahu and Eisenkot are “unlikely to enter a formal coalition with Arab parties”, which would result in another election, the record Arab turnout is still “significant”, said Nada AlTaher in The National. “The Arabs are not going to be kingmakers, but they still have a huge achievement,” said Danny Citrinowitz, from the Institute for National Security Studies.

With Netanyahu’s chances of forming a majority government all but over, he would be forced into putting together a unity government. This would have to include members of the opposition, potentially pushing extreme figures such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich out of a future cabinet.

It’s “not the outcome” Arab voters, or indeed those fundamentally opposed to Netanyahu staying in power, will have hoped for, said Citrinowitz, but it could at least force him towards a more moderate position.