Anyone who expected the elections to be decided by the Arab public was right. The victory of Netanyahu and the bloc of right-wing parties is a direct result of the voting patterns and the decisions of the Arab parties, which affected not only themselves, but also the partnership in the bloc.
● How will the economy survive with an extremist government? Ben Gabir and the ultra-Orthodox will come closer to a consensus Weekend column
● Ahead of the coalition negotiations: the battles that lie ahead for Netanyahu, and what he will not give up | Weekend column
● In the USA, the Netanyahu government is defined as “a heavy weight on the right leg” | Weekend column
● High Court Channel 14: The Supreme Court on Saturday as a writer of opinion columns for the newspaper | Weekend column
Arab society surprised everyone and went out to vote this week with a higher percentage than expected. For more than two months since the announcement of the elections, the turnout in Arab society did not exceed 40%. However, on election day itself, the Arabs flocked to the polling stations, at a rate that according to speculation reached 54%. This is an increase against all odds. There were no shortage of reasons for the percentages to remain low: the Arab public’s frustration and anger over the split in the parties, the general despair created as a result of crime and violence, including the fact that it is the fifth election – does not make the Arabs feel like voting, either.
Two historical events
The increase can perhaps be attributed to Ben Gabir’s various shows near the elections. Ben Gabir, who provoked the Arab society in opposition to the Likud’s policy that constantly strived to anesthetize the area, came to Sheikh Jarrah with a drawn gun, declared that he would work “to equalize the prayer rights of Jews and Arabs” in the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex, and if all this was not enough, Rabbi Otzma Yehudit officially stated, two days before the elections, that he would demand the case for internal security. Of course, this is the most critical office for the Arab society, which every few days wakes up to another murdered in its streets.
This round of elections created two historic events in intra-Arab politics. First, since its establishment in 1996, for the first time the Balad party does not pass the threshold of the blocking percentage and remains outside the Knesset, and some will say (even within the party) that it will remain outside it forever. The second event: Ra’am established its position as the largest Arab party in Israel with five mandates and closed the door to Hadash, which for decades was defined as the largest and oldest party that dominated the Arab political discourse.
The split also brought down Meretz
But all this did not help the main goal of the center-left bloc: to block the Netanyahu government. The bloc, headed by Lapid, lost for one major reason – he lost more than 270,000 votes that are divided between Balad and Meretz. We will get to Balad yet, but the hidden reason that led to Meretz’s downfall is not only the irresponsible campaign of Yesh Atid , but also the very low number of votes the party received in Arab society in relation to previous rounds of elections.
How many thousands of votes that Meretz could have received in the Arab settlements would have changed the equation and given Meretz the transition, so where did these votes go? Here, too, the answer lies in the split between the Arab parties. As much as there is internal competition between the parties in Arab society, the votes flow less from the Arab parties to the Zionist parties, and in this case – the triple split that the head of the bloc did not prevent, and did not try to prevent. Thus Lapid’s failure and Netanyahu’s victory passed under the radar of Yesh Atid people. If Lapid had exerted his pressure on the heads of the cooperative, it is likely that he would have softened them and helped keep Balad on the list, and save more than 130 thousand votes that were burned.
Admittedly, such a scenario would reduce the competition in Arab society, and return the voting patterns to their normal order, meaning, voting at a lower rate but also a vote of about 15% for the Zionist parties. In this situation, both Meretz and the joint venture would have been saved, and with them the entire bloc.
The day after the elections, the Arab parties realized the extent of the failure. So much so that Hadash-Ta’al chairman Ayman Odeh called in an interview with Nas Radio for the first time to reach an agreed outline for cooperation with Ream in order to “stand up to the Netanyahu-Ben Gabir government”. To this day Odeh and Tibi have avoided any such public call because of the bitter rivalry between them and Mansur Abbas. The latter does not remain indebted. Those around him say that he feels great frustration and concern for the future of the economic plans he formulated in the previous coalition, chief among them the plan to eradicate crime and violence. Abbas fears that Smotrich and Ben Gabvir will cancel any budget intended for the Arab society. The fear and frustration was clearly heard in his response to Oda: “Now do you remember? We are already in the opposition.”