Whose Votes Count in Israel?
Israel’s Election and the Politics of Belonging
Israel’s October 27 election has produced a remarkable political situation. As I write, with most of the votes counted, Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing and religious bloc is projected to win approximately 53 seats in the 120-member Knesset. The four principal Jewish-led opposition parties hold 48. The two Arab-led parties, Ra’am and the Joint List, have won approximately 19 seats, a historic level of representation.
A majority in the Knesset requires 61 seats. Neither Netanyahu nor his principal opponents have enough. Yet the parties seeking to replace him, together with the Arab-led parties, hold a potential majority of 67.
There is a problem. Most of the Jewish-led opposition parties have pledged to exclude the Arab-led parties from their governing coalition. Yair Golan’s Democrats have supported cooperation. Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, Gadi Eisenkot, and Avigdor Lieberman have expressed varying degrees of opposition.
That raises a question that extends beyond the arithmetic of coalition negotiations. What place do Arab citizens of Israel, many of whom identify nationally as Palestinian, have in the government of the country in which they live?
The accusation of supporting Hamas
I have heard the argument that the Arab-led parties cannot be trusted because they are somehow sympathetic to Hamas. Given the atrocities of October 7 and the continuing trauma of the war, such an accusation carries enormous weight. It also deserves careful examination.
Consider Ra’am, led by Mansour Abbas.
Ra’am is a socially conservative party rooted in the southern branch of Israel’s Islamic Movement. It has historical connections to the broader Muslim Brotherhood tradition, as does Hamas. Those connections are relevant to understanding its ideological origins. They tell us relatively little about what Abbas has actually done as a political leader.
Following October 7, Abbas publicly condemned the Hamas massacres, including the murder of innocent civilians. In a November 2023 interview with CNN, he called for Palestinian armed factions to lay down their weapons and pursue statehood through peaceful political means. His party subsequently qualified the timing of that disarmament proposal, and Abbas has resisted demands that he explicitly endorse the destruction of Hamas. Those qualifications matter. So does his unequivocal condemnation of the attacks on civilians.
Abbas also led Ra’am into the Bennett-Lapid government in 2021. For the first time, an independent Arab-majority party formally participated in an Israeli governing coalition. Naftali Bennett, a politician from the Israeli nationalist right, served as prime minister.
This year, Abbas recruited Yoav Segalovitz, a Jewish former senior police commander and deputy public security minister, to run second on Ra’am’s electoral list. Their partnership focuses on combating organized crime, improving public safety, and strengthening Jewish-Arab cooperation.
These are the actions of a party actively seeking a role within Israel’s parliamentary system. The record hardly supports a sweeping description of Ra’am as a Hamas-supporting organization.
The Joint List presents a more complicated picture.
It brings together Hadash, a Jewish-Arab socialist movement; Ta’al, a largely secular Palestinian political party; and Balad, a Palestinian nationalist party that advocates transforming Israel into a state of all its citizens. Its published platform calls for ending the occupation, Palestinian self-determination, civil equality, improved public services, and a serious response to organized crime in Arab communities.
There have been genuine controversies. Sami Abu Shehadeh, the leader of Balad, published an article immediately following October 7 that Israel’s attorney general argued constituted support for armed struggle. Abu Shehadeh denied supporting violence and expressed regret over the article. He withdrew his candidacy after the Supreme Court indicated that a majority of its justices would uphold his disqualification.
His words deserve scrutiny. We should apply the same scrutiny to statements advocating violence against Palestinian civilians, regardless of which political party makes them.
There is a considerable distance between examining the conduct of individual politicians and assigning collective guilt to an entire electorate.
What Israel’s Supreme Court decided
The question of whether the Arab parties could legitimately participate in the election was already tested in court.
In September, Israel’s Central Elections Committee voted to disqualify both Ra’am and the Joint List, along with individual candidates. The objections included allegations of rejecting Israel’s Jewish and democratic character and supporting armed struggle.
On October 2, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the disqualification of both party lists. The justices also permitted Hadash’s Ofer Cassif to run, although they expressed serious objections to some of his statements. The court applied the stringent evidentiary standards required before denying citizens the right to elect their representatives.
The Library of Congress’s account of the decision is worth reading.
The court’s ruling establishes their legal right to participate in the democratic process. It does not establish that their political positions are beyond criticism, nor does it require other parties to enter a coalition with them.
Still, the ruling is significant. Israel’s highest court rejected the attempt to exclude the parties from the election, and the voters subsequently gave them substantial parliamentary representation.
The question of how that representation will be treated now belongs to Israel’s political leadership.
Why the opposition refuses
The opposition leaders’ objections have several sources, and I think we need to acknowledge the legitimate disagreements involved.
Bennett is a religious Zionist and a nationalist. He opposes Palestinian statehood and supports policies that are fundamentally incompatible with much of the Joint List’s platform. Eisenkot has established conditions for coalition partners concerning recognition of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, universal national service, and the future of Hamas. Lieberman has pledged to govern exclusively with Zionist parties, excluding both the Arab-led parties and the ultra-Orthodox parties.
These are substantive political differences. Coalition partners need some shared understanding of the policies they intend to implement.
The differences also expose a more difficult problem.
Lieberman has declared that he will not support even a minority government dependent on Arab-party votes. Eisenkot has specifically ruled out Ra’am, despite Abbas’s record of participation in government and his stated willingness to cooperate. Bennett, who previously governed with Ra’am, has now rejected a similar arrangement.
And the categorical refusal to include Arab-led parties persists even when their members offer to support a government without joining the cabinet.
There is a political history behind these positions. Bennett paid a considerable political price for his 2021 partnership with Abbas. Arab participation has repeatedly been used as a campaign weapon against Jewish politicians, particularly those who might form a government with their support.
It is worth remembering that Netanyahu himself explored cooperation with Abbas after the 2021 election. His eventual coalition partners prevented the arrangement.
The question is whether opposition to a specific party’s policies has become a broader prohibition on Arab citizens of Israel exercising political influence through their elected representatives.
That distinction matters.
Jewish self-determination and equal citizenship
I continue to identify as a liberal Zionist. Jewish history gives us powerful reasons to value collective self-determination, political sovereignty, and the ability to defend ourselves and provide refuge when other governments fail to do so.
Zionism gave Jews something we had lacked for centuries: the capacity to make consequential political decisions about our own future.
I also believe that exercising that power creates obligations toward everyone subject to it.
Arab citizens of Israel constitute roughly one-fifth of the country’s population. Their communities include Muslims, Christians, Druze, and others whose national identities and relationships to the state vary. Many identify as Palestinian, while others identify primarily as Arab, Israeli, Druze, or through some combination of these identities.
They pay taxes, participate in Israel’s economy, work in its hospitals and universities, serve in public institutions, and live with the consequences of decisions made by the Knesset. Their children grow up under Israeli law. They possess the same formal right to vote as Jewish citizens.
When the representatives of Arab-led parties are treated as permanently unacceptable coalition partners, regardless of their actual positions or conduct, formal equality begins to lose some of its practical meaning.
I am reminded of the debates over Jewish emancipation in Europe. Jews were often offered citizenship on terms defined by the majority, with demands that they subordinate aspects of their collective identity to demonstrate their political reliability. The circumstances are profoundly different, and the historical analogy has limits. Still, the underlying question of who gets to define the conditions of belonging deserves attention.
An Arab citizen who identifies as Palestinian should be able to affirm Palestinian peoplehood, advocate Palestinian self-determination, and seek equal participation in Israeli political life. Jewish citizens can disagree with those positions, just as Arab citizens can challenge the political programs of Jewish parties.
The legitimacy of a citizen’s vote cannot depend on agreement with the national identity of the majority.
Here is where the accusation of racism becomes relevant. Some coalition objections rest on genuine ideological conflicts. Others establish conditions that seem to apply to Arab-led parties as a category, regardless of what an individual party has done to demonstrate its willingness to participate in democratic government.
We need to examine both the stated reasons and their consequences. Political leaders may have different motives, but a system in which an entire national minority’s representatives are routinely excluded from governing negotiations raises serious questions about equal citizenship.
An election and a new accusation
As the votes have been counted, Netanyahu and Likud have alleged that Arab-led parties stole the election. The head of the Central Elections Committee has asked the Shin Bet to investigate serious suspicions of foreign funding and improper electoral influence, with reporting pointing to possible involvement by Qatar. Individual allegations of vote buying are also under police investigation.
These matters warrant investigation. Any proven violation of election law should be addressed through the legal process.
As of this writing, the allegations have not established systematic fraud or invalidated the results. Police have said there is no supporting evidence for the broader claim that Arab parties stole the election. The investigation into possible foreign interference remains ongoing.
The distinction is particularly important when the allegation concerns a minority population that has just participated in unusually large numbers.
High Arab voter turnout is a legitimate democratic outcome. Those votes require the same protection, scrutiny, and respect as votes cast anywhere else in Israel.
The political future
Israel has been here before, in different circumstances.
In the 1990s, Yitzhak Rabin’s government relied at crucial moments on the parliamentary support of Arab-led parties. In 2021, Bennett and Lapid formed a coalition with Ra’am. These arrangements involved difficult compromises, and the latter government eventually collapsed. Their history nevertheless establishes that cooperation between Jewish-led and Arab-led parties is possible within Israel’s parliamentary institutions.
The current election has made that question unavoidable again.
As a rabbi, I take Jewish collective responsibility seriously. I understand the fears that shape Israeli politics, especially after October 7. I also take seriously the Jewish obligation to exercise power justly, including when doing so requires us to listen to people whose history, national identity, and political aspirations differ from our own.
The Torah’s concern for the dignity of those who live among us provides an ethical vocabulary, although Arab citizens of Israel should not have to be understood through the category of the biblical ger. They are citizens of their own country, entitled to participate in determining its political future.
Jewish self-determination and the political participation of Arab citizens of Israel are both realities that Israel’s democracy must accommodate. A disagreement over national identity does not extinguish citizenship.
Whatever government eventually emerges from this election, the larger issue will remain. A substantial population has exercised its democratic rights and elected representatives who seek a voice in the country’s future.
Whether Israel’s political institutions can make room for that voice is a question about the character of the democracy itself.
And it is a question that Jews who care about Israel’s future have every reason to take seriously.
Election figures are provisional as of October 29, 2026. Official results are expected November 4. Sources include reporting from The Times of Israel, Reuters, AP, Ynet, the Israeli Central Elections Committee, the parties’ published platforms, and the Israeli Supreme Court ruling.
Transparency note: I used ChatGPT to assist in the process of drafting and editing this article. The arguments, perspectives, and final editorial decisions are my own.
