The strong showing would be the best ever for Arab parties in the 120-seat Knesset. Exit polls gave the left-leaning United List 10-11 seats and the moderately Islamist Raam, led by Mansour Abbas, seven. Almost all other parties had ruled out working with them before the vote.
Raam lawmaker Iman Khatib-Yassin told the daily Israel Hayom that the problems of Arab citizens were her party’s priority. She also backed a Palestinian state and a resumption of the peace process, positions hard to reconcile with those of nearly all potential partners.
United List leader Yousef Jabareen said his group “cannot be ignored in any political scenario”. He listed fighting crime, discrimination and demolitions of Arab homes, and improving housing, among his priorities.
Raam broke a political taboo in 2021 when it joined Naftali Bennett’s government, the first Arab party in an Israeli ruling coalition.
Avigdor Lieberman, head of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party, had firmly ruled out working with Arab parties before the vote but did not repeat that stance in his post-election speech.
Arab citizens sidelined
Palestinians make up about one-fifth of Israel’s population. Most are descendants of Arabs who stayed after the 1948 war and received citizenship. They have the same political rights as Jewish citizens but have faced discrimination and inequality for decades.
Arab towns often receive less funding for infrastructure and services, residents have poorer access to healthcare and bomb shelters, and building extensions is restricted. Police are often accused of not doing enough to combat crime.
Cooperation with Arab parties provokes distrust among much of the Jewish electorate, a feeling deepened by the October 7 attack, although Arab citizens were among the victims and those abducted to Gaza. Israeli Arabs as a community have no links to Hamas.
Far-right parties have sharpened anti-Arab rhetoric and announced the “Judaisation” of the Galilee and Negev regions, which have large Arab populations, partly through expanding Jewish settlement.
After the exit polls, Moshe Feiglin of the far-right Jewish Power list called the Arab parties’ result a “political October 7” and said Arab citizens are Palestinians, not Israelis, though for some residents the two identities are not contradictory.
French daily sees one winner
France’s Le Monde said Arab parties were the election’s only winners, as their roughly 18 seats brought their representation close to their 18 percent share of the electorate for the first time.
“Israeli Arabs want from now on to take their place” in politics, it said, adding that Arab parties with 18 seats would count for more than far-right leaders Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich or the ultra-Orthodox parties.
Election day
Turnout was 77.7%, the highest in more than two decades and about seven points above 2022, the Central Elections Committee said. It was the first national vote since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage, and the wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran that followed.
With more than half of votes counted, the Times of Israel reported, Netanyahu’s bloc was on 55 seats in the 120-member Knesset, the opposition alliance on 50 and Arab parties on 15, against the 61 needed to govern. Counting is continuing and the tally is expected to shift. Earlier exit polls had put the two main blocs level at around 50, with Likud the largest single party in both.
Final results are due on Thursday or Friday. President Isaac Herzog will then consult the parties and task the politician he thinks most likely to command a majority with forming a government. Israel held five ballots between April 2019 and November 2022 amid a similar impasse, and negotiations after past elections have dragged on for weeks or months.
Netanyahu, who has led Israel for almost 19 of the past 30 years, ran while on trial for corruption and under fire over the security failures that preceded October 7. Eisenkot campaigned on his military record while presenting himself as a centrist on domestic issues.
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Source: PAP