Kazim AlamThe numbers game has intensified in the run-up to next month’s general election in Israel, seen as one of the most consequential in the country’s history.
Pre-election public polls show Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ultra-right bloc is unlikely to win a 61-seat majority in the 120-member parliament, known as the Knesset, to form a government.
The Zionist opposition, led by former chief of Israeli occupation forces Gadi Eisenkot and ex-premier Naftali Bennett, is also expected to fall short of the 61-seat threshold required for government formation.
In other words, basic arithmetic shows either political bloc will need support from Arab parties – which are typically backed by Palestinian citizens of Israel comprising one-fifth of the country’s population of 10.3 million – to form a government.
According to a Channel 12 survey, Netanyahu’s allies are projected to win 52 seats, while the anti-Netanyahu camp is expected to win 57 seats. Arab parties are likely to win 11 seats.
This shows the Arab parties – long treated by Zionist parties as radioactive – may hold the key to government formation after the October elections.
Israeli elections are based on nationwide proportional representation, which means voters don’t vote for a particular member of the Knesset.
Instead, they vote for a “list”, which is the official slate of candidates that a party submits to the election-holding body.
A party winning 10 seats means the first 10 names on that party’s list will become members of the Knesset.
Sometimes, several parties make an alliance and contest polls under a “joint list”. The strategy helps small parties reduce the risk of falling short of the 3.25 percent vote threshold – the minimum percentage of total votes that a party must receive to enter the Knesset.
Gokhan Batu, a Levant studies analyst at the Ankara-based Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, tells TRT World that Arab parties have little chance of formally joining the new cabinet.
“There is almost no prospect of the Arab parties, either individually or through a joint list, formally joining the government,” he says.
Two main Arab-majority lists are contesting the October election.
The first is a Joint List representing an alliance of three mostly Arab groups – Hadash, Ta'al, and Balad.
These parties merged to avoid falling short of the electoral threshold of 3.25 percent total votes.
The other is the United Arab List or Ra'am, which is led by Mansour Abbas.
According to Batu, Ra’am “clearly supports the opposition bloc” and does not appear at risk of falling below the 3.25 percent threshold.
The Hadash-Ta’al-Balad joint list is also expected to safely cross the threshold, he says.
“Together, the Arab parties could win around 10 to 12 seats,” he adds.
Nimrod Goren, president and founder of the Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies (Mitvim), tells TRT World that the Arab parties will be “of importance” if current polling numbers materialise on election day.
“But not in the sense of picking either side (Netanyahu or an opposition leader) to form the coalition,” he notes.
Supporting Netanyahu is something that Arab parties are “not considering at all”.
He says the real question is whether Jewish opposition parties will accept Arab support – or even abstention – to sustain a minority coalition government, one that is formed by a political bloc that collectively holds fewer than 61 seats.
“Arab parties aren’t likely to actually join the coalition. At the moment, the opposition is split on the issue,” Goren says.
Are Arab parties radioactive?
Zionist parties don’t usually treat Arab parties like ordinary coalition partners. In fact, opposition groups use the inclusion of Arab parties in the cabinet as a weapon to delegitimise the ruling coalition in the name of national security.
After the October 7, 2023, attacks, there is even less appetite among most Israeli Jews to include any Arab parties in a coalition.
Batu says the issue is more complicated than a simple refusal by Zionist groups to cooperate with Arab parties.
“Netanyahu himself previously sought Ra’am’s support,” he notes.
Ra’am joined the 2021-22 Bennett-Lapid government as a coalition partner, becoming the first Arab party in decades to join a ruling coalition.
“Ra’am’s participation also became one of the main political vulnerabilities of the Bennett-Lapid government in 2021,” Batu notes.
“Arab support may be strategically valuable when forming a coalition, but it can also carry a considerable political cost,” he says.
“The main obstacle lies in the attitudes of the wider public and the parties’ electoral bases,” he notes.
Bennett, the former premier and one of the main opponents of Netanyahu, has said that any future government that he leads will include only Zionist parties. This is despite the fact that his previous coalition included Ra’am.
Similarly, Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the right-wing party Yisrael Beitein, has ruled out forming a minority government that would depend on Arab votes.
According to Goren, the Arab parties are motivated first by a desire to remove Netanyahu and his ultra-nationalist partners.
“Some of the leading Arab politicians indicated that they will be ready to do whatever it takes politically to enable a different coalition to be formed,” he says.
“So, it is not likely that there will be much give-and-take on policy issues to enable it,” he adds.
What’s on Arab parties’ agenda?
One common assumption is that Arab seats, seemingly indispensable for government formation, would force Zionist parties to extend concessions on Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Both experts disagree.
“Frankly, a coalition established with Ra’am’s support would be unlikely to produce meaningful gains concerning Gaza or the occupied West Bank,” Batu says.
That’s because Ra’am doesn’t treat these issues as the “central purpose of its participation”.
Abbas of Ra’am justified joining the 2021-22 Bennett-Lapid government to his electorate purely in terms of the benefits it could secure for the social, economic and infrastructure needs of Arab citizens of Israel, Batu notes.
Israeli-Arab parties advocate for a two-state solution. They view the establishment of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel – based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital – as the only viable path to lasting peace.
Parties like Hadash, Ta'al, and Balad consider this solution as a core ideological and national goal.
Even the more pragmatically focused Ra'am party believes that Palestinian self-determination in Gaza and the occupied West Bank is essential for resolving the broader conflict.
Both Bennett and Lieberman currently rule out a coalition with Arab parties anyway, Batu notes.
“The situation is, therefore, considerably more complicated than the parliamentary arithmetic alone suggests,” he says.
Given that the immediate goal of Arab parties seems to be the end of a Netanyahu-led government, any room for bargaining over headline issues like Gaza and the occupied West Bank is limited.
“The right thing to do is to have Jewish-Arab cooperation within the opposition, to enable Israel a better government and prospects for a brighter future,” Goren says.
