Machiavelli Would Form a Coalition With the Arabs
Had he been operating in contemporary Israel, Niccolò Machiavelli would not have hesitated for a second: he would have formed a coalition with the Arab parties.
When he drafted The Prince in 1513, the Florentine thinker stripped politics bare of moralistic pretension, offering an unsparing assessment of reality as it is. A true ruler, he argued, does not surrender to the whims of Fortune (Fortuna) out of sterile self-righteousness or rigid codes of honor; he conquers her through audacity and statecraft (Virtù), mapping the levers of power and maneuvering strictly by the lay of the land.
This is the imperative that leaders of Israel’s opposition bloc must urgently internalize. Not out of sentimental notions of “coexistence,” not as a philanthropic crusade against racism, and not through the lens of liberal purism. A partnership with Arab political parties is dictated by a far more sobering calculus: securing the baseline political and material conditions required for the survival of Israel’s secular, productive class.
While disdain for Benjamin Netanyahu serves as the bloc’s immediate tactical glue, what truly drove the Israeli bourgeoisie into the streets—the very constituency represented by the center-left parties—is an existential dread over the collapse of public administration and the substitution of the modern state with a corrupt, Byzantine court. Economically, this is a relatively cohesive demographic whose capital and future are inextricably tied to the global economy and scientific education. For this class, the hollowed-out state institutions, the gutting of the judiciary, and looming diplomatic isolation represent an immediate, tangible threat to their livelihoods.
This public must urgently shed the phantom memory of its historic majority and reconcile itself to its new reality as merely one faction among many. Demographics permit no delusions. Secular Israelis, currently roughly 32% of the population, are projected to shrink to just 22% within four decades. By contrast, the Ultra-Orthodox share will surge to nearly a third of Israeli society, while Religious Zionism will hover around 15%. Together, these two sectors will comprise roughly half of the country. A constituency receding into minority status cannot afford the luxury of ruling out allies out of base-pandering anxieties or paralysis before Netanyahu’s propaganda apparatus. More to the point: a minority adopting a Machiavellian lens would move heaven and earth to fortify its structural footing against such a future.
Paradoxical as it may sound to a jittery center, the secular Israeli’s most natural ally in the battle for the modern state is the Arab citizen. Making up a fifth of the population, the Arab minority shares an identical existential interest. No other sector has a deeper stake in checking administrative caprice, securing civil equality, and insulating the judiciary. For Arab society, the rule of law and an independent civil service are the only bulwarks against discrimination and dispossession. Those very same mechanisms are the non-negotiable preconditions for sustaining a secular civic space: safeguarding personal liberties from religious coercion, halting the looting of public coffers for sectarian patronage, and preserving an open, rational economy integrated into the world.
This is neither a kumbaya alliance nor a “covenant of brothers,” but a coalition of raw mutual self-interest against the tyranny of an impending theocratic-nationalist majority—a state engineered in an image that leaves no room for Arabs, and none for secularists either. Confronting this reality, the material interests of the Tel Aviv tech entrepreneur and the physician from Tira converge on a single objective: salvaging the modern state. To prevail, the liberal center must cast aside its moralistic timidity and embody Machiavellian Virtù.
Who knows? Something genuinely good might come of it. As Machiavelli observed in The Prince: “Men never do good unless necessity drives them to it.”