Israel’s Arab parties could end Netanyahu’s rule — if his opposition lets them
Vox · Rachel Cohen Booth ·
With the election results inconclusive, the country is at a crossroads with its Arab citizens.
The dust is beginning to settle a week after Israel’s first national election since Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, and the war Israel waged on Gaza in response. Neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor his opponents won the 61 parliamentary seats needed to govern.
Now the fate of the next government hinges on a less-discussed part of the Israeli electorate: Arab citizens, who voted in record numbers and whose parties have emerged with more leverage than ever before. They are not to be confused with the roughly 5.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, who live under Israeli control but are not citizens and cannot vote in national elections.
Although Israel has become a fault line in both American parties, with Democrats split over arms sales and whether to call the war in Gaza a genocide, and Republicans over whether Israel pulled the United States into war with Iran, these were not the central issues in the recent election.