Israel’s Jewish Opposition Cannot Defend Democracy While Excluding Arab Parties

Israel’s election has exposed a contradiction that the country’s Jewish political establishment has avoided confronting for decades. Arab citizens are expected to participate in elections, respect democratic institutions and accept the decisions of elected governments. Yet when their votes become decisive, their representatives are deemed unacceptable partners in determining who should govern.

The extraordinary Arab turnout in last week’s election has made this contradiction impossible to ignore. After years of political disillusionment, Palestinian Arab citizens voted in unprecedented numbers, a dramatic increase from the 52.5 per cent turnout in the previous election. Arab parties are expected to secure 19 seats in the 120-member Knesset. Neither Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc nor the Jewish opposition has won a majority.

The Arab vote reflects deep frustration with the government’s treatment of Arab citizens, the devastating levels of organised crime in their communities, persistent discrimination and the deterioration of Jewish-Arab relations. But it also reflects something more encouraging: a renewed belief that political participation can change their circumstances.

Arab voters have not simply expressed their opposition to Netanyahu. They have demanded a meaningful role in shaping Israel’s future.

The political leadership of the Arab community has also changed its approach. Ra’am, which joined the Bennett-Lapid coalition in 2021, has already demonstrated its willingness to participate in government. More significantly, the Joint List has now expressed its readiness to support the formation of an alternative government from outside the coalition. This opens a realistic parliamentary path: a minority government including Ra’am, with external support from the Joint List.

Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman, who asked Israelis to vote for political change, must now decide whether they are prepared to pursue it. Their continued reluctance to cooperate with Arab parties risks preserving the very political order they promised to replace.

No law prevents such cooperation. What stands in the way is a political convention that Jewish party leaders have been unwilling to challenge.

There is, moreover, a precedent that should be familiar to anyone who remembers Yitzhak Rabin’s second government.

In 1993, after losing its parliamentary majority, Rabin’s government survived with the external support of Arab parties. The arrangement enabled the government to advance its political agenda while giving Arab representatives influence over decisions affecting their communities. Rabin understood that parliamentary cooperation did not require agreement on every national question.

Thirty years later, Ra’am’s participation in the Bennett-Lapid coalition went a step further. That government was fragile and ultimately collapsed, but it demonstrated that Jewish and Arab parties could share responsibility for governing Israel.

The same principle is already familiar in local politics. Across mixed Jewish-Arab municipalities, elected representatives already cooperate on budgets, planning and public services, despite profound disagreements on national questions. What works in local government should not be dismissed as impossible at the national level.

Significant differences remain between Jewish Zionist parties and Arab parties, particularly concerning the occupation, Palestinian national rights and Israel’s identity. These cannot be brushed aside. But a parliamentary agreement to establish a government does not require ideological agreement on every issue. It requires a workable understanding of shared priorities and the willingness to negotiate differences.

For British Jews concerned about Israel’s democratic future, the implications extend beyond the immediate question of who becomes prime minister.

The struggle over Israel’s democracy has rightly focused on the independence of the judiciary, the rule of law and the erosion of democratic institutions. But there is another question that deserves equal attention: whether Israel’s Palestinian Arab citizens can exercise political influence commensurate with their numbers and their citizenship.

A democracy cannot claim to have overcome its crisis while continuing to regard the elected representatives of one-fifth of its population as inherently unfit to participate in government.

The alternative to Jewish-Arab political cooperation is familiar: another government arrangement designed to avoid dependence on Arab votes, or

another election, despite the clear preference of so many citizens for political change.

Either outcome would carry a cost. Hundreds of thousands of Arab citizens have invested renewed faith in the ballot box. Their participation should produce political influence, not another demonstration of the limits imposed upon it.

Eisenkot, Bennett and Lieberman can continue to exclude Arab parties and risk perpetuating Netanyahu’s rule, or they can accept the parliamentary reality and work towards a government based on Jewish-Arab cooperation. The election has created an opportunity that Israeli politics has rarely offered. Wasting it would be a decision, not an inevitability.

Amnon Be’eri-Sulitzeanu is Co-CEO of The Abraham Initiatives, an organisation promoting equality and Jewish-Arab partnership in Israel.