Israel’s opposition fear of Arab partners

Israel’s opposition has a majority. Its fear of Arab partners may keep it from using it

This time, we don’t need to call the maid

Israel’s election on 27 October — the first since the 7 October 2023 attack and the war in Gaza, and in essence a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu and his assault on the judiciary — has produced a political paradox. The results are at once a biopsy of Israeli politics and a signpost pointing to where Israel might begin to recover from one of its gravest ailments. Netanyahu’s bloc has won 53 seats, the opposition bloc led by former army chief Gadi Eisenkot 48, and the Arab parties 19 — a historic high, nearly doubling their representation in the outgoing Knesset. Taken together, the opposition and Arab parties hold a potential majority of 67 seats in the 120-member parliament. It is an arithmetic majority, not yet a coalition. But it means that the possibility of forming a government committed to the principles of equality and democracy proclaimed in Israel’s Declaration of Independence now depends on something within our own power: the willingness of elected representatives to recognise one another as legitimate political partners.

And yet, among those who see themselves as part of the “camp for change”, as Netanyahu’s opponents call themselves, a mood of despondency has taken hold, as though the election had ended in defeat. This time, the problem is not powerlessness. The parliamentary strength is there. The question is whether we are capable of using it, and with whom. Avigdor Lieberman has already announced that he will recommend Eisenkot as prime minister, while ruling out any government that depends on Arab support. Has the deeply ingrained fear of political partnership with Arab citizens become stronger than our capacity for reality-testing — our ability to recognise the immediate danger of Netanyahu’s continued rule?

Eleven years ago, following the 2015 election, I wrote in Haaretz about one of Freud’s strangest and most moving case histories. A woman told Freud of an irresistible compulsion to summon her maid again and again, each time on a different pretext. The ritual never varied: she would run into the adjoining room, stand at a particular spot beside the table in the middle of the room, which was covered with a stained tablecloth, and ring for the maid. Freud traced the symptom to the woman’s wedding night, when her husband had proved impotent. At dawn, ashamed and desperate, he had spilled red ink onto the bedsheet, so that at least the maid would not know. But the stain had landed in the wrong place.

My point then was that my political camp, having once again failed to act politically, had been left with petitions and appeals to the international community. All it could do was call the maid, hoping she would notice the shameful stain and do something about it.

In 2026, the picture has been reversed: the camp that once lacked the power to act now has it — and behaves as though it did not.

It is worth returning to Freud, because there is a detail in the case history that is easily overlooked. Freud did not merely suggest that the patient was showing the maid the stain. In his account, she identified with her husband, and her ritual retrospectively corrected what had happened on their wedding night. Through her compulsive repetition, she sought, as it were, to prove that her husband had not been impotent and had no reason to feel ashamed. The symptom was not simply a repetition of a painful event. It was also an attempt to undo it and protect her husband from shame.

The political depression that has descended on the camp for change may serve a similar defensive function. Israel has moved so far away from its Declaration of Independence that any opportunity to move even slightly closer to its principles arouses a fear that the liberal-Zionist worldview might fall apart — a worldview in which hostility towards the Other has become a source of psychological sustenance. Depression can serve to ward off that fear. Lamenting the “defeat” protects this self-image from the shame involved in recognising that the possibility of bringing about democratic change in Israel, and fundamentally reshaping its political map, runs through its Arab citizens. Is it preferable to mourn a victory that was not achieved than to acknowledge a victory achieved with the “wrong” partners?

Arab voters have done their part. They turned out in unprecedented numbers, after years of being told that their votes did not count, and following an attempt to disqualify their parties that was blocked only by the Supreme Court. The question of whether the future of Israeli democracy also depends on Arab voting patterns has already been answered. The question that remains concerns the Jewish majority: can it recognise these votes as the legitimate votes of equal citizens? Since the election, both Arab parties have signalled their readiness to help replace the Netanyahu government — Ra’am by joining a coalition, the Joint List by supporting it from outside.

This brings us to a question that the Declaration of Independence itself left unresolved. It promises “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex”, while also proclaiming the establishment of a Jewish state. For decades, we have lived with this tension through an unspoken compromise: equality is promised, but political power is regarded as the preserve of Jews. Arab citizens may vote, but they are not supposed to participate in deciding the country’s future. This was one of the foundational conventions of Israeli “normality”. The occupation and the protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict provided a rationalisation for this arrangement. The fear that the liberal-Zionist worldview might now unravel is not necessarily a fear of the Arab parties themselves, or of their voters’ identification with the Palestinian struggle. It is a fear of the moment when the Declaration’s promise is taken seriously.

We know where such fear can lead. Yitzhak Rabin’s government relied on the outside support of Arab parties, whose votes were also crucial to the approval of the Oslo II agreement in 1995. The rhetoric of the “absence of a Jewish majority” formed part of the political climate in which the prime minister was assassinated. It is no coincidence that, within days of the election, Netanyahu was already claiming that a clear majority of Jewish voters had chosen him, and calling for a “broad national government” without the Arab parties. The demand for a “Jewish majority” is not merely a political position concerning the formation of a coalition. It can become a mechanism through which citizens are denied the right to be regarded as legitimate partners in the decisions of their own state.

None of this means that partnership would be simple, or that opposition to it comes only from the Jewish side. There are political forces within Arab society that also oppose such a partnership. The Arab parties are not a single bloc. Nor does their status as representatives of a disadvantaged minority automatically make them models of liberal democracy. Ra’am, the Islamist party that joined the Bennett-Lapid government in 2021, differs considerably from other Arab parties in both its political outlook and its approach to participation in government. Political partnership, like any partnership, requires negotiation, compromise and boundaries. But there is a fundamental difference between a partnership that is difficult to establish because of political disagreements and one that is ruled out in advance because of the national identity of the prospective partners.

Even so, Israel will not be saved simply by the growing strength of the Arab parties, or by leftwing Jewish voters casting their ballots for them. The real test of Israeli democracy will be the integration of Arab citizens not only into the healthcare system, where they already play a central role, but also into the centres of political decision-making — in the Knesset and the government. Partnership with the Arab parties is the bridge. The destination is a country in which an Arab citizen can be the health minister, not merely a doctor on a hospital ward.

The election results do more than open the possibility of forming a government. They may also offer an opportunity to begin recovering from our need for an internal enemy in order to know who we are. For decades, Jewish Israeli identity has been defined, in part, in opposition to the Arab citizen. He was there so that we could know who we were not. Sharing political power with Arab citizens is more than a coalition arrangement. It is an opportunity to begin healing something of the split at the heart of Israeli citizenship. It is difficult to imagine a step that would strengthen Israel more than bringing the Arab parties into the camp for change. Only then would that camp truly deserve the name it has chosen for itself.

But an opportunity for recovery is not recovery itself. We can recognise the opportunity and then file it away in a drawer, or recoil from it because of the psychological and political price it demands. Even if such a partnership emerges, it will not transform relations between Jews and Arabs overnight. And if it does not emerge, the question that produced the political deadlock will not disappear. Freud taught us that what cannot be remembered and worked through returns as repetition in action. Five elections between 2019 and 2022 became deadlocked, to a considerable extent, over the question of whether it was permissible to rely on the votes of Arab citizens. It seems that our political unconscious will keep sending us back to the ballot box for as long as we remain unable to confront our dread of sharing power with them.

In 2015, we failed to act politically, and all that was left was to call the maid. This time, the potential majority exists, and no one from outside will do the work for us. The stain is real — the exclusion we have lived with for years — and it is on our own tablecloth, on our own political map. The question is whether the elected representatives of the camp for change, and those of us who elected them, will have the courage to look at it and change the reality it reveals — or whether we will prefer to sit beside it in depression, waiting for someone else to do what we do not dare to do ourselves.

Eran Rolnik is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst based in Frankfurt and Tel Aviv.