Poisoning the well: Netanyahu reaches for Trump’s playbook

Americans are voting in midterm elections that are still shadowed by the big lie told six years ago. Donald Trump has never stopped claiming that the 2020 election was rigged, making the lie itself a political loyalty test. The lie trope has lasted long after the 2020 election and this is the nature of the poisoned well. The poison does not dissipate over time. Everyone who drinks from it, drinks it too. In the intervening years Trump and his proxies have continued to pour more poison in the well.

Last week, Benjamin Netanyahu reached for the same bottle of poison. Within hours of the polls closing on October 27, He used his personal X account to declare that the election had been “stolen” by Arab parties. Hebrew media had reported before the vote that the party was preparing these complaints in advance, to be used if the result went the wrong way.

An accusation drafted before the evidence exists is not an accusation. It is a strategy. And by using it Netanyahu is giving the strongest testimony that he knows he lost the election.

The acting director-general of the Central Elections Committee said Likud had submitted a list of claims, not evidence. Shin Bet chief David Zini, Netanyahu’s own pick and a man the right celebrated as one of its own, said on election day that the vote was being properly monitored and conducted. On Sunday he stood beside Justice Noam Sohlberg, the committee chairman, and the attorney-general to say that the election was conducted properly and that the result stands.

Sohlberg deserves a sentence of his own. He is a religious, conservative justice, neither an activist or a progressive and certainly not partisan. When he said that the foreign-funding suspicions, even if confirmed, would not overturn the result, Likud’s response was to question his judgment.

We have seen this sequence before. First the media, then the attorney-general, then the courts, then the security chiefs. Now the people Netanyahu chose himself are being added to the list. This is the logic of “deep state” populism: there are no sacred cows. Any institution that says no to their power becomes part of the conspiracy, until there is no referee left whose call the loser is obliged to accept.

Channel 14 has supplied the soundtrack. For weeks before the vote, it questioned the Central Elections Committee and primed its viewers to treat defeat as theft. Its final polls put Netanyahu’s bloc at or near a majority; the real number was 53. When the gap opened, presenters called for the results to be frozen and the election disqualified, and one guest urged viewers to “sit on Sohlberg’s head” until he cancelled it. Americans know this pattern: a loyal network tells its audience victory is certain, then tells them the defeat was stolen. Republican officials who certified Trump’s loss were branded traitors by their own side. Sohlberg is now getting the same treatment.

None of this means the suspicions now under investigation should be dismissed. If foreign money was used to buy votes, it should be pursued to the end and those responsible prosecuted. Suspicions alone of a crime are not proof that an election was stolen, and the official reporting is that the story thin. Most importantly, in their official capacity as those responsible for the veracity and integrity of the elections, the head of the Shin Bet and the Chairman of the Central Election Committee confirm the outcome.

And then there is the massive irony. The prime minister has discovered, rather late in the day, that Qatari money corrupts Israeli politics. He is right, and he should know. A close aide in his own office has admitted taking Qatari money while working for him, in an affair that has been under investigation for months. The same man now asking why Ahmad Tibi was in Doha four days before the election has never given the public a satisfying account of how Qatar’s influence reached the corridor outside his own door.

If Qatari influence is a threat to Israeli sovereignty, and it is, the investigation should begin at the top of the pyramid, not at the polling stations in Arab towns. It beggars belief that Jonathan Urich is still working for Netanyahu in the most sensitive office in the country.

Aside from ripping apart the trust in the country’s democratic process and institutions, the additional damage is the Likud narrative concerning one in five of their fellow citizens. Strip away the detail and the claim comes down to this: when Arab citizens vote in large numbers, the result is suspect. In Makor Rishon following the election there were opinion columns that said as much. The fact of the increased Arab vote is the threat itself.

Arab turnout surged. After three years of war, after October 7, and after a campaign in which they were told repeatedly delegitimized, Arab citizens chose the ballot box. With all the complexities of the relationship between Israel and its Muslim minority this should count as a major success.

Arab politics in Israel is neither a single bloc, nor is it simple. Ra’am became the first Arab party to sit in a governing coalition in 2021. Other Arab parties hold radical positions that most Jewish Israelis, me included, find deeply objectionable. That complexity is a case for argument, hard coalition bargaining and red lines. It is not a case for disenfranchisement by insinuation. You can refuse to sit with a party. You cannot declare its voters’ ballots as illegitimate.

We have already seen where the other road leads. Ben Gvir and Smotrich demanded that the arrest of the heads of the Arab parties. Moshe Feiglin, number two on Smotrich’s list, called for a snap re-run with Border Police battalions at the entrance to every polling station where Arabs vote.

And the narrative is already moving beyond fraud. This week Amichai Chikli, the minister responsible for Israel’s relationship with world Jewry, warned that replacing the Knesset speaker with the votes of Arab MKs, whom he called a “fifth column,” would be a stab in the back of the Jewish state and a step towards a binational state.

Replacing a speaker is a routine parliamentary procedure. But Chikli has said out loud what the stolen-election story only implied. The problem is not how Arab citizens’ votes were counted. It is that they count at all. The Arabs, the courts and the “stolen” election are woven into a single enemy. And this comes from the minister whose job is to persuade the Jewish world that Israel is a thriving democracy.

Which brings us to what the stolen-election story is designed to hide. The government that presided over October 7 sought a renewed mandate from voters and lost. The coalition that won 64 seats in 2022, growing to 67 during the Knesset session, came back with 53, and 67 of the Knesset’s 120 seats went to parties outside it.

The result was fragmented, but its central message was clear: Israelis said no to the October 7 government. The fraud narrative turns a verdict on the government’s record into a story about the Arabs, and accountability disappears behind it.

The lesson from America is that this will not end at the end of this election cycle. Trust in elections, once broken, is not restored by a committee report or a court ruling. Six years on, the 2020 lie is still eating away at American democracy, on the very day Americans vote. Israel, facing enemies on every border and the hardest reckoning in its history, cannot afford that.

Netanyahu is creating a belief within his camp that the elections were stolen, this to cover the fact that the elections were lost. This is a dangerous move with potentially dire and long-term consequences. Along the way he and his proxies are cutting the very democratic branch that is one of Israel greatest assets. Free and fair elections, for every Israel citizen.

The well he is poisoning belongs to all of us.