A few days before the election, my Israeli-American niece landed in Israel. Like tens of thousands of Israelis living abroad, she had come to help vote Benjamin Netanyahu out of office. While she waited at John F. Kennedy Airport, New York, CNN was playing on the lounge TV. Once again, it showed harrowing footage of Jewish settlers brutally beating Palestinians in the West Bank, and the peace activists standing with them, whose only sin was harvesting olives on their own land. She hoped her vote would help replace the government that shields these thugs with one committed to peace.
On the road from Ben Gurion Airport to Jerusalem, giant billboards reading “Right or Palestine” leapt out at her. She asked whether the occupation had finally reached the top of the agenda. I had to explain that even the opposition, including the liberal left, barely mentioned it. Not one Zionist party put forward, in its platform, a political solution to the occupation or recognised the Palestinians’ right to self-determination. The most that could be said was that the Democrats, led by Yair Golan, did not rule out a Palestinian state living in peace alongside Israel.
The “Right or Palestine” ad had nothing to do with two states along the 1967 lines. It referred to two communities inside Israel: the Jewish majority and the Arab minority, who have lived side by side for almost eight decades. Netanyahu worked hard to delegitimise the 21 per cent of Arab citizens, and any government that depends on their votes.
Arab vote surge
The results show that this fear campaign cut both ways. The campaign pushed right-leaning Jewish voters, who had flirted with the centre, back into Netanyahu’s fold. But the demonisation, on top of four years of incitement and neglect, drove Arab citizens to the polls in numbers not seen in decades. With Israeli Arabs voting in greater numbers, the Joint List, an alliance of predominantly Arab, secular and left-wing Israeli parties, and Ra’am, a conservative Islamic party that wants peaceful coexistence, together won an unprecedented 19 seats, up from 10 in the outgoing Knesset. Overall turnout, 77.7 per cent, was the highest since 1999.
This is momentous news for Israel’s Arab minority, and every liberal Israeli should have treated it as such. A healthy democracy would see a fifth of its citizens as partners in government, not as a demographic problem.
Zionist Majority trap
Instead, the centre-left walked into Netanyahu’s trap. His surest path to power has always been to brand any alternative government as dependent on Arab votes. His rivals did not reject that premise; they adopted it. All of them - except Democrats party leader Golan - pledged a “Zionist government,” which means a government without Arabs. Even on election night, Gadi Eisenkot, the man most likely to try to unseat Netanyahu, repeated that he would govern only with a Zionist majority. He said he would impose Zionist conditions on the Joint List and Ra’am if he has to accept their support, and they may not agree to such conditions.
Eisenkot’s pledge may decide this election more than any ballot did. A government needs 61 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. Once the Arab parties are ruled out, Eisenkot has no path to that number. His coalition has won only 48 seats, while Netanyahu’s bloc has 53. So, the “Zionist majority” rule leaves only two options, and both options lead to Netanyahu. He can lure one or two parties from the other camp into a “Zionist government” under his leadership, or he can let the stalemate drag Israel to yet another election, which he would oversee from the prime minister’s office. Either way, by adopting his rule, his rivals have handed Netanyahu the key to the next government.
Anti-Arab discrimination
The Zionist parties are practising their anti-Arab discrimination openly. For instance, the ultra-Orthodox parties are not Zionist either, and some of their spiritual leaders are openly anti-Zionist. That has never stopped the Zionist parties from inviting them into their coalitions. The “Zionist” test, it seems, applies only to Arabs.
The Zionists don’t even want to talk to Arab leaders who recognise Israel as a Jewish state. Mansour Abbas, the leader of Ra’am, has declared that he recognises Israel as a Jewish state, and his party fielded a Jewish candidate who served as an IDF combat soldier. When an Arab leader goes that far and is still kept at arm’s length, the problem is not what the Arab parties say on matters of the Israeli state. It is who they are.
The Israeli media also fell into the same trap. Night after night, TV polls left the Arab parties out of the opposition bloc and showed them as a separate slice labelled simply “the Arabs,” as if they were guests in Israeli democracy rather than members of it.
Netanyahu should have gone
By any conventional measure of accountability, Netanyahu should have been finished. Yet with most of the vote counted, Likud again emerged as the largest party, with about 28 seats and well over a million votes, and his bloc leads Eisenkot’s by roughly 56 seats to 45. Some 650,000 double-envelope ballots are still being counted, so the picture may shift. But unless those ballots produce a Jewish majority that no poll ever showed, the arithmetic will not change. Without the Arab parties there is no alternative government, and without an alternative, Netanyahu stays in power.
What more must happen to wake Israelis from the illusion of being the Middle East’s only democracy while ruling millions of Palestinians by force? Three years ago, Israel suffered the worst security failure in its history, on Netanyahu’s watch. Generals and intelligence chiefs accepted the blame; the prime minister refused the one thing a healthy democracy demands after a catastrophe: an independent state commission of inquiry. His judicial overhaul had already torn the country apart, sending hundreds of thousands into the streets and alarming reservists, the security establishment and Israel’s allies.
Then came the promise of “total victory.” Three years and several fronts later, Hamas still exists, Hezbollah survives, and the Iranian regime still stands. Many soldiers have been killed, while the military draft exemption given to ultra-Orthodox Jews remains a festering injustice. Settler violence in the West Bank has escalated, and many argue that the war with Iran ended on terms set in Washington, not Jerusalem.
Meanwhile, the price of isolation keeps rising. In Brussels, a proposal to suspend the trade benefits of the EU-Israel Association Agreement and to sanction extremist ministers and violent settlers is held back by only a handful of governments. Netanyahu’s answer was not to change course, but to prepare the public for siege and blockade, and for an economy with “autarkic features.” The man who once sold Israel to the world as the start-up nation now offers it the future of a garrison state, North Korean style.
Why voters stayed
So why did more than a million Israelis vote for him anyway?
Because they lived through the same years and drew different lessons. To his supporters, Netanyahu decimated Hezbollah’s leadership, struck Iran alongside the United States and brought every surviving hostage home. They blame October 7 on the generals and see a state commission as a weapon the old elites want to aim at the right.
There is also something deeper than policy. October 7 did not make most Israelis more dovish; it made them more afraid, and fear rewards toughness and familiarity. For many, a coalition that might lean on Arab parties was more frightening than another Netanyahu term. And for a large part of Israel, Likud is less a party than a home. Voting against Netanyahu would feel like handing victory to those who have looked down on them for decades.
Whatever the final count shows, the lesson is uncomfortable. Accountability in a democracy is not automatic. Voters decide what failure means, and more than a million Israelis decided that Netanyahu’s failures mattered less than their fear of everyone else, above all of their Arab fellow citizens.
Thanks to the Arab parties’ support for the anti-right bloc, the liberal bloc has a majority in the Knesset. With 19 Arab members behind it, Eisenkot will be the first to receive the president's mandate to form a government. The people who crossed the ocean to support him want a unity government, but not with a right that sees the Palestinians as an enemy. They want unity with those who can partner with them.
After casting her ballot, my niece hurried back to the airport. The “Right or Palestine” billboards were still hanging along the roadside. On the radio, a commentator said Eisenkot could form a government, but only with the Arab parties’ support. He can, but he is afraid. And as long as Israel’s opposition fears its Arab citizens more than it wants to replace Netanyahu, Netanyahu will keep winning, even in the elections he loses.
