Did We Vote for Hate?

On May 11, 2021, a brick thrown by Arab criminals struck the head of Yigal Yehoshua, a fifty-six-year-old electrician, as he was heading home in Lod. Yehoshua died on May 17th, and his family honored the organ-donor card he had signed while he was alive. One of his kidneys went to Randa Aweis, a Christian Arab from Jerusalem and a mother of six, who had waited nine years for a transplant and was operated on by two Muslim surgeons at Hadassah Ein Kerem. In those same days, Itamar Ben-Gvir summoned his followers to Lod, and he would later explain that he had called them there to protect people who had been attacked and beaten in the streets. According to press reports, Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai told Netanyahu that the man responsible for that intifada was Ben-Gvir.

On November 1, 2022, eighteen months after the brick, the list that carried Ben-Gvir won 516,470 votes and fourteen seats in the Knesset, and on December 29th he was sworn in as Minister of National Security, the ministry in charge of the police; the commissioner who had accused him served under his command until July, 2024. On October 27th, the polls open again, and before then I want to work out, with the reader and without sparing either side, whether we voted for hate.

The official count offers a first answer, one that comforts without absolving, because those 516,470 votes amounted to 10.84 per cent of the valid ballots, one voter in ten, and the four parties that would form the coalition took 48.4 per cent of the total, less than half of us. The Israel Democracy Institute concluded that the two blocs finished about thirty thousand votes apart, less than a single seat is worth, and called the result a tie in practice, a tie the system converted into sixty-four seats for Netanyahu and his partners.

The conversion began in my half of the country, where 289,000 votes went to parties that fell below the electoral threshold of 3.25 per cent and failed to elect a single lawmaker. The threshold dated from 2014, when Avigdor Lieberman pushed it through with the aim of keeping the small Arab parties out of the Knesset, according to analysts at the Carnegie Endowment, and the next year those parties answered with the Joint List, which won thirteen seats and became the third-largest force in parliament. On September 15, 2022, minutes before the registration deadline, Balad walked out of the alliance and ended up with 2.91 per cent. Meretz finished with 150,793 votes, some four thousand short of the line, and fell out of the Knesset for the first time since its founding, in 1992.

Back then, Yair Lapid had offered reserved places on the Yesh Atid slate, along with ministries, in exchange for a joint ticket of Labor and Meretz; Zehava Galon had accepted the idea, and Merav Michaeli had refused, out of sheer high-handedness and a lack of political vision. That attitude left Labor with four seats, the worst showing in its history. This half of the country cast not one vote for hate, and, even so, our arrogance and the four thousand votes that Meretz lacked handed Netanyahu’s bloc the majority it could not have won on its own.

On the other side, Netanyahu treated the votes of his camp with a care that our side could not muster, and on August 23, 2022, he posted a video asking Ben-Gvir and Smotrich to run together again and saying that he could not take the risk. On August 26th, he hosted the two at his house in Caesarea and stitched the deal together for the third time since 2019, taking care not to be photographed beside Ben-Gvir, whose votes he wanted and whose picture he did not. Bezalel Smotrich is the man who shouted at Arab lawmakers on the floor of the Knesset that their presence there was a mistake, because Ben-Gurion had not finished the job and driven them out in 1948. Netanyahu hailed the Caesarea deal as the guarantee of a stable national government for the next four years, and the voter who insists that he chose Likud and no one else is right only as far as the door of that house, because, before the first ballot box opened, the government promised there already carried the names of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.

The right-wing reader has a serious objection to all this, and although I do not agree with it, I respect it. Many of those votes were born of fear, which is not the same thing as hate, and on November 5, 2022, the New York Times tied the far right’s advance to anxiety and dread. Ben-Gvir promised law and order to those Israelis, and weeks after the vote the historian Gil Troy observed that support for him had quadrupled in the mixed cities, the same ones that had burned in May, 2021. The fear had its reasons, and whoever turned it into votes should be judged by what he delivered.

Ben-Gvir has had nearly four years with the police in his hands, interrupted only by two months in 2025, when he quit the government in protest against the ceasefire in Gaza. According to the Abraham Initiatives, homicides in Arab society rose from 116 in 2022 to 244 in 2023, his first year in the ministry, a jump that the minister’s own office acknowledged, and the killing has not returned to its earlier level, with 230 dead in 2024, 252 in 2025, the bloodiest year on record, and 150 by the beginning of July, 2026, against 128 at the same point the year before. In February of this year, police officials told a Knesset committee that in 2025 there had been at least 241 homicides among Arabs and 47 among Jews, in a country where Arabs make up about a fifth of the population.

Calling the killing a clan war does not absolve the minister, because disarming the criminals in those clans and bringing them to trial is precisely the job of whoever commands the police. In the same organization’s annual survey, Lod has the highest number of Arab victims in the country for the third year running, in 2025 alongside Nazareth. There, the fear so many Jews had of their Arab neighbors helped elect the minister of law and order, and it ended in Arab funerals.

These murders, the work of Arab criminals, happen in towns that many of us know only from a road sign, and distance makes it easy to treat the struggle of Tamra and Sakhnin as another country’s business. The night of January 31st of this year shortened that distance, as some forty thousand Jews and Arabs filled Habima Square in Tel Aviv, a few hours after Omar al-Shamali, twenty-five, was shot dead in Lod. In the Times of Israel’s coverage of the rally, Gilad Kariv, a Knesset member from the Democrats, said that if a mother in Umm al-Fahm or Sakhnin is afraid to let her child go to the playground in the afternoon, we cannot feel safe in Tel Aviv either.

On February 10th, victims’ families and a Jewish-Arab movement for equality called a national day of disruption; the water in fountains in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Beersheba turned red, and at midday dozens of doctors and nurses in white coats left their wards to stand outside Rambam, Haifa’s largest hospital. One of the voices on that sidewalk belonged to Dr. Nira Beck, the Jewish head of the ultrasound unit, who called her Arab colleagues Israeli citizens abandoned by the state and said that we have an obligation to stand by them.

In 1948, the Declaration of Independence described the country I still want to build, one with complete equality of social and political rights for all its inhabitants, irrespective of religion, race, or sex, the very promise that Smotrich treated on the Knesset floor as Ben-Gurion’s mistake. Yigal Yehoshua’s family showed us that country in 2021, when a kidney from the man killed by the brick reached the body of an Arab woman, and Habima Square and the sidewalk outside Rambam showed it again, without waiting for October, because a democracy wears down and is rebuilt every day, long before Election Day.

In 2026, the excuses of 2022 are no longer at hand, because Labor and Meretz merged in July, 2024, and are contesting the election as the Democrats; the three Arab parties that had broken up the Joint List signed an agreement on August 19th to run on the same slate again, under pressure from their own voters; and Bennett and Lapid have combined their tickets into one alliance. The threshold still stands at 3.25 per cent, but this time it will find far less carelessness on our side to swallow, and the risk that remains is a quieter one.

In 2022, according to the Israel Democracy Institute, half of all eligible Arab voters did not vote, whereas in 2020, with the parties united on a single list, their turnout had reached 64.8 per cent. In an election in which thirty thousand votes separated the two blocs, those who stayed home also chose a government, and to get hate out of the Ministry of National Security we are going to need everyone, Jews and Arabs, those who vote in every election and those who have given up on voting.

In the other camp, Ben-Gvir suspects that the Prime Minister prefers Gadi Eisenkot as a partner after the election, and he may be right, but in September, according to ynet, Netanyahu called him to promise that, should Likud form the next government, it will be built on the current coalition and its principles. Tally Gotliv has traded Likud for Ben-Gvir’s fascist party and is urging right-wing voters across the country to vote for Otzma Yehudit to keep Netanyahu on the right.

I return to the question in the title with the only answer the facts allow me to give, and it comes in two tenses. In 2022, hate governed without most of us voting for it. If it governs again after October 27th, it will be because we voted for hate, with our ballots or with our silence.