By David K. Shipler
It finally
happened. Enough Arab citizens of Israel, who make up about 20 percent of the
population, voted in consolidated blocs last week to gain leverage over who
governs the country. Now the question is whether Jewish leaders will let them
into a ruling coalition, and whether Arab parties want to join. The answer will
define the scope of Israel’s democracy.
This is a rare moment of
opportunity for Israel, perhaps, to begin to redeem some of the moral authority
it lost in Gaza and reverse its growing repute as a pariah state. It has long
touted itself as the only democracy in the Middle East, but it has not been a
full democracy for its Arab citizens, whose elected members of the Knesset, Israel’s
parliament, have rarely been welcomed into the halls of executive power.
Arabs in Israel belong to families
that stayed in Israel during the country’s 1948 war of independence. They
neither fled the fighting nor were expelled by the Jewish forces. While many now
prefer to be called Palestinians, their Israeli residence and citizenship
differentiate them from the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank—territories
conquered in the 1967 war—who live under Israeli rule but cannot vote in
Israeli elections. Those inside Israel, who can vote, have faced decades of
frustration.
With no single party ever winning a
majority in the Knesset, every government has relied on coalition-building
across a range of religious and political affiliations. But Arab-led parties
have been included only in Israel’s founding government led by David Ben-Gurion
in 1949, and then briefly in 2021. In accepting two Arab members of the
Democratic List of Nazareth (one of whom fought with Jews in Israel’s War of
Independence), Ben-Gurion aimed “to show that Jews and Arabs could coexist in
the new State of Israel,” writes
Zach Rothbart, a journalist in Jerusalem.
Today, however, Arab parties are widely derided
as threats to the state’s security and Jewish identity, so vilified that
political rivals have been willing to join together in Arab-free “unity”
governments or settle for new elections instead of embracing Arab legislators
as fellow cabinet ministers. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is claiming
without evidence that Arab voters were bribed by foreign entities, that the
election was “stolen by Arab parties that support terrorism and the elimination
of the Jewish state,” and that any Jewish party inviting them into a coalition
government will facilitate the “Islamization of Israel.” His son, Yair, called
Arab citizens the second-largest threat after a nuclear-armed Iran.
The current backroom wheeling and
dealing among the parties will be a lesson to Arabs on whether voting is
worthwhile. After decades of boycotts, alienation, and fragmentation, they surged
to the polls out of “frustration and fear” according
to The Times of Israel, and their two parties won a record 19 seats
in the 120-member Knesset. (Netanyahu’s Likud won 27; the party of his main
opponent, Gadi Eisenkot, won 21.)
Arab political leaders campaigned
hard to raise hopes that the system might work for them; the highest turnout in
Israel was in the Arab town of Sakhnin, at 87%. If that hope is dashed during
the Jewish parties’ negotiations, cynicism is likely to deepen and the cause of
democratic pluralism will suffer.
Netanyahu
surely won’t partner with the Arabs, and if he did, he’d lose essential support
from Arab-hating parties farther to the right. If Eisenkot goes with Arabs, he
and his supporting parties are like to pay a political price, especially in
light of the sharpened anti-Arab feelings in a country traumatized by the Hamas
attack and hostage-taking of October 7, 2023.
To be an Arab citizen of Israel is
to suffer crosscurrents of uncomfortable identities: in Israel, disdained as an
Arab; in the larger Arab world, disdained as an Israeli. Polls show large
majorities yearning for complete participation in Israeli society yet
experiencing discrimination. They are simultaneously apart and separate. Many
cannot in good conscience sing the Israeli national anthem, in which “the
Jewish soul yearns . . . An eye gazes toward Zion.” Some stand silently when
it’s played, some stay seated, some walk away.
Yet polling
by the Israel Democracy Institute shows most Arab citizens regard Israel as “a
good place to live,” (62%, compared with 66% of Jews); think Arabs should
integrate and be part of Israeli society (90%, compared with 50.5% of Jews); and
are certain that they want their children to continue living in Israel (66%,
compared with 55% of Jews).
Dramatic Jewish-Arab differences appear in
other areas: Are Arabs discriminated against? Yes, say 82% of Arab respondents
and 30.5% of Jews. Is it better for Jews and Arabs to live separately? Yes, say
25% of Arabs and 48.5% of Jews. For security, is it okay for the state to
monitor what citizens post online? Yes, say 47% of Arabs and 62% of Jews. Are
you proud to be Israeli? Yes, say 44% of Arabs and 83% of Jews.
The percentages of people who say
they’re afraid to express their political opinions rose from 2016 to 2025, from
45% to 70% of Arabs, and from 37% to 53% of Jews, a measure of the intimidation
felt across the society since the October 7 assault.
Strong agreement that “the use of
violence for political ends is never justified” was registered by 49% of Arabs
and 68.5% of Jews. But a significant minority of Arab respondents, 26%, disagreed
strongly or “somewhat” with that rejection of political violence, compared with
just 8.5% of Jews.
Although both Arab parties condemned
the Hamas attack, the Joint List, which won 11 seats, has called Israel’s massive
retaliatory war in Gaza “genocide,” and the status of Palestinians on the West
Bank “apartheid.” Its leaders say that they would vote to support an
opposition-led government headed by Eisenkot but do not want to be in the
cabinet. The more moderate Arab-led party, Ra’am, won 8 seats with a Jewish ex-cop
as second on its list; its Muslim leader, Mansour Abbas has
accepted Israel as a Jewish state and would presumably join a coalition if
invited.
