Prior to the 2015 election, the Joint List – made up of four diverse Arab parties – refused to sign a surplus vote agreement with Meretz, since one of the list’s constituent parties, Balad, was opposed to cooperation with a Jewish party.
Following last week’s election, another of those four parties – Ra’am, which broke away from the Joint List – will likely determine who will be this country’s prime minister by either joining the coalition of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or supporting it from the outside; or, conversely, by joining the coalition of the anti-Netanyahu parties, or supporting it from outside the government. And the Joint List, too, will be courted by the anti-Netanyahu forces to either join their coalition or support it.
That journey, from refusing to sign a surplus vote agreement with a far-left Jewish party in 2015, to the possibility that an Arab party may prop up a right-wing government of Netanyahu, which will likely include the far-right Religious Zionist Party, shows how far the Arab parties have traveled over the last six years.
The coalition math is simple. Netanyahu, if he convinces Yamina’s Naftali Bennett to join a government he will lead, will have 59 seats. In the event that he will be unable to lure Gideon Sa’ar and the New Hope Party back into his fold or win over two defectors from other parties, Ra’am’s four seats will be needed to push it over the top. If the prime minister wants to hold on to power without going to a fifth election, this seems like his best ticket.
The pro-change (anti-Netanyahu) coalition without the haredim or Yamina, has 51 seats, and would need both Ra’am and the Joint List to either join the coalition or prop it up from the outside to rule. Even if Yamina would join, it would need one of the two Arab parties to put together a coalition.
So from not being willing to cooperate with Meretz in 2015, the Arab parties will be able to determine who this country’s prime minister will be in 2021.
What is even more interesting is that this kingmaker role comes even as the Arab parties lost 33% of their strength when Ra’am split from the Joint List this time around, going from 15 seats as a unified party last time, to 10 seats in two parties this past election (six for the Joint List, and four for Ra’am). Likewise, this new political power came as Arab voter turnout dropped from some 65% in March 2020, to about 46% in March 2021.
This new state of affairs, where the Arab political parties are being taken into account, is as good for the country as it is for the Arab sector, and it is due to newfound pragmatism both among the Arab parties and the government. Forty years from now this moment might be seen as a groundbreaking moment in Israeli political history.
Why? Because it is the moment when the Arab parties were seen as legitimate. Just as only the Likud’s Menachem Begin could have signed the peace deal with Egypt in 1979, because had he been in the opposition he would have fought the uprooting of the settlements in Sinai tooth and nail; and just as only Ariel Sharon could have carried out the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, because had he been in the opposition he would have fought it tooth and nail; so, too, only Netanyahu could give the Arab parties a stamp of approval, because – as was the case a year ago – when his political opponents entertained the idea of leaning on the Joint List for support, he slammed with all his might the idea of relying on anti-Zionist parties to form a coalition.
But now, as the Likud and Netanyahu are openly talking about getting support from an Arab party – and a religious Islamist party (Ra’am) at that – that legitimizes the Arab parties as coalition partners in the future.
Granted, there is likely to be resistance to the ultra Palestinian nationalist Balad (which now only has one seat in the Joint List) becoming a legitimate partner, but that is likely to take the same form as opposition now to the ultra-right-wing Otzma Yehudit faction of Itamar Ben-Gvir becoming a member of any government.
Nevertheless, a Rubicon is being crossed which is good for the country and for its 20% Arab minority.
It is good for the country because it is important that such a sizable minority feels a part of it, feels that its voice matters, and that it is able to impact how the country’s resources are spent. It is not good for the country to have one-fifth of its people walk around with a sense of being second-class citizens. Having political power will enhance a sense of being part of the country, with a stake in it.
Likewise, this is a very welcome phenomenon for the Arab sector. Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas’s willingness to break with convention and work with any Israeli government that is willing to help his constituents is a dramatic shift.
This would seem natural, a given, but for so long it was not. For so long what was more important for Arab politicians than securing resources for their constituents was to shout out nationalist Palestinian slogans. This served neither the Palestinians, who have gained nothing by having Israeli-Arab politicians blindly support every step taken by the Palestinian Authority, nor the Israeli-Arabs whom the Arab politicians were sent to the Knesset to serve.
Israeli-Arabs need personal security, housing, good education and jobs, and Abbas gambled that this is what many want when he split from the Joint List and ran on a ticket of improving the lot of the Israeli-Arabs, even if that meant working with a right-wing government.
Even as he voted against the Abraham Accords in September, Abbas surely realized that if the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain could cooperate with Netanyahu and a right-wing government because it serves their interests, then surely Israeli-Arab political parties could do the same to improve life for their constituents.
This gamble is now paying off in spades. In 2015 Abbas’s Ra’am faction was part of the Joint List that refused to sign a deal with Meretz. Now he is being courted by both Netanyahu and the anti-Netanyahu bloc, and that courtship is certain to result in the largest bridal gift the Israeli-Arab community has ever been offered.•