The elections in Israel showed that Netanyahu has not only remained politically competitive but has kept Likud as the largest party in the Knesset. It is true that this recovery does not amount to a decisive victory: Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc shrank from 68 seats to 53, falling short of the 61 seats required to form a government. But the attempt to minimize his achievement by lumping together the Arab parties’ record 19 seats and the disappointing 48 seats secured by the opposition into a 67-seat “anti-Netanyahu majority” is misleading. Politics is about more than just arithmetic. The Arab parties and Netanyahu’s Jewish opponents hold conflicting worldviews and represent different interests. The difficulty of reconciling these forces does not stem from the ingrained racism of Israeli society, as so many Haaretz op-eds would have us believe. The precedent of Ra’am’s participation in the 2021 coalition offers little reassurance here: any viable alternative to Netanyahu today would have to rely on the far less accommodating parties of the Joint List. While such cooperation would have been difficult to imagine in times of peace, the intensely suspicious climate following October 7 and the Gaza war, coupled with the explosive situation in the West Bank and on the Iranian front, shifts this scenario from the realm of the unlikely to that of the miraculous.
While the massive Arab turnout ought to be cherished by anyone whose commitment to democracy is more than empty rhetoric, and while it is hard not to be captivated by the vision of Arabs and Jewish moderates uniting against right-wing extremism, it is also worth considering that the assumptions underlying this enthusiasm may themselves be a continuation of the kind of politics that has undermined the opposition’s standing among the Israeli public in the first place.
It is a kind of politics that sees Netanyahu and the Israeli right not as a component or an expression of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but as its ultimate source. It denies the possibility that the main obstacle to an anti-Netanyahu Jewish-Arab coalition is the simple fact that Israel is at war with parts of the Arab world. In the eyes of many Jewish voters, the Arab parties are, caveats and qualifications notwithstanding, connected to that same Arab world which Israel is currently at war with. For them, such a coalition would therefore be incompatible with prioritizing Israel’s national security interests. It would mean, in practical terms, that an Israeli government making crucial decisions concerning Lebanon, Gaza, or the West Bank would depend for its political survival on the support of Balad’s Palestinian nationalists or Hadash’s pan-Arab communists.
Like it or not, these voters have a point. The tendency of liberals and leftists to present the inclusion of the Arab parties in an Israeli governing coalition as natural and uncomplicated rests on the rather simplistic view—frequently and openly expressed in left-liberal discourse—that the conflicts with Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran are not the result of the hard realities of the Middle East, but staged military provocations rooted in nothing deeper than Netanyahu’s cynical opportunism. For these people, Arab hatred of Israel is, at best, a reasonable response to the occupation, at worst, a right-wing myth. It is this mindset—formed by a peculiar combination of arrogant cultural elitism and childish geopolitical thinking—that prevents them from understanding the motivations of so many Israelis who support Netanyahu simply because he can reasonably present himself as the politician most committed to taking a hard line against those who seek to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.
