Many political commentators in the Israeli media sympathetic to the opposition have, since the elections and the surprising success of the two Arab parties, the Joint List and Ra'am, argued that just as one cannot doubt the commendable treatment of Arab physicians, pharmacists, and tradesmen toward their Jewish clients, one can hardly doubt the right of the Arab parties, to which the Arab public overwhelmingly voted, to be part of the government and government decision-making at the highest level.
This argument, at face value so inviting, hardly holds water for the Jewish majority in a state, which is legally described as "Jewish and democratic."
The Jewish majority has every right to test the relationship between individual Arab behavior and their conduct and aspirations as a collective group towards the state, its Jewish majority, and its many declared enemies in the near and far.
It has every right to question whether the lists Israel's Arab citizens voted for Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, to which the overwhelming majority of Israel's Jewish citizens adhere.
That there is an Arab collective, which is more than the sum of the individuals belonging to it, is beyond doubt. Presuming that there was no widespread fraud in the election process, at least 85% of Arab voters voted for the two Arab lists whose candidates were overwhelmingly Arab and Muslim.
This outcome reflects a political homogeneity greater than any ideological or social subgroup in Jewish society, including the haredim (ultra-Orthodox), whose exclusively haredi parties secured only 9% of the vote, even though haredim comprise 14% of the Israeli population.
It is also clear from their voting behavior that Israel's Arab citizens are very different from their Jewish counterparts, of whom only a tiny fraction voted for these two lists.
This Arab collective clearly had other choices. If Arab voters were mainly concerned with day-to-day issues, as many political commentators and opposition politicians claim, they would have been better served by voting for the Democrats or Yashar, as over a quarter of the Arab electorate did 30 years ago.
Strategically, had two-thirds of Arab voters cast their votes for these two, albeit Zionist, parties, they would have clinched victory for the opposition.
The 13 seats their votes would have tallied (of a total of 19), coupled with the 48 seats the opposition procured, would have secured the 61 seats needed to form a government, perhaps even a stable one. This means that the Arab voters were also, if not predominantly, preoccupied by ideological and identity-driven concerns.
It is important to gauge then the positions these two lists, for whom the overwhelming majority of Arab citizens voted, take towards the nature of the state, their relationship to the Jewish majority, and towards Israel's enemies.
The findings based on the content matter on their official sites paint a troubling picture from the point of view of most Jewish Israelis. Neither site acknowledges that Israel is the state of the Jewish people.
Instead, one finds an exhortation of a Palestinian state living side by side with Israel, with east Jerusalem as its capital.
In the more radical Joint List, this statement is followed by the need "to find a just solution to the refugee issue and their right of return in accordance with international resolutions, foremost among them Resolution 194."
The Joint List fails, of course, to mention that United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 (passed in December 1948) also calls for the establishment of a Jewish state alongside an Arab state 11 times.
Pointless comparison
While for most Jewish voters Gaza evokes the October 7 massacre, in the Joint List, reference to Gaza reflects a totally different perspective:
"We work to consolidate the cessation of the war and the genocide and prevent their resumption, to lift the siege on Gaza and end military control over it, to guarantee aid, reconstruction, and the return of the displaced, and to resume the operations of international organizations, foremost among them the Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, UNRWA."
UNRWA is an organization in which some of whose members participated in the October 7 massacre.
Some may argue that the haredim do not accept a Jewish and democratic state either, and that just as haredim readily take part in the government, so should the Arab parties.
The comparison is patently false. The haredi parties clearly identify with the Jewishness of the state – in fact, they decry that there should be more of it than less.
The haredim, as individuals or as a collective, have rarely been involved in terrorism or hostile mass behavior against fellow citizens, as occurred among Israel's Arab citizens in the first two weeks of the second intifada in October 2001, in which at least one Jewish town, Nof Hagalil (Upper Nazareth), was besieged.
And in the May 2021 bout of violence between Israel and Hamas, during which Jewish Israelis in mixed towns (Acre, Lod, and Ramle) were seriously maimed, one was killed, and nine synagogues were burnt down.
Certainly, except for Neturei Karta, haredim, or the parties they voted for, do not identify with Israel's enemies. In Arab media sites, closely linked to the Arab parties, such as Arab48, Israel is almost always to blame just as much as Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran are almost always exonerated.
When the overwhelming majority of Israel's Arab citizens vote for parties which, at so many levels, do not accept the basic formula of the Jewish and democratic state, Israel's Jewish citizens and parties that represent them have every right to distinguish between the Arab citizens' civil rights as individuals and the claim to have the parties they have elected.
The latter seek to share in government and influence decision-making on matters related to the state's fundamental identity and the crucial security issues it faces.
The writer is a senior researcher at JISS and a professor emeritus at Bar-Ilan University.