Dan Steinbock Informed Comment
The attempt to discredit an election that Netanyahu could not win exposes a much darker project: the exclusion of its Palestinian citizens from democratic power, the consolidation of territorial supremacy, and the transformation of Israel into a non-Palestinian Jewish. Netanyahu’s response to the October 27 election has been extraordinary, even by his increasingly incendiary standards. Having failed to secure a governing majority, he and Likud have moved from contesting political opponents to questioning the legitimacy of the electorate itself.
Israeli Palestinian voters turned out in unprecedented numbers, helping the two “Arab-led parties”, as the Israeli government refers to them, win 19 seats. Netanyahu responded with allegations of widespread fraud, bribery and foreign interference, without producing a shred of evidence of systematic electoral manipulation.
The distinction matters. Israel’s Central Elections Committee said there was no basis for claims that the integrity of the vote had been systematically compromised. The Shin Bet likewise stressed that its narrowly focused investigation into possible foreign interference did not implicate Israeli-Arab voters collectively. President Isaac Herzog warned against tarnishing an entire community. Yet Netanyahu’s political machinery continued to portray the result as a “stolen election” and an “assault on Israel.”
It was a new low to a shrewd veteran politician who has sustained his career on incendiary campaigns. But this is not simply a sore loser refusing to leave the political stage. It is an attempt to redefine legitimate democratic participation according to ethnic and ideological criteria – and to pre-tarnish those Israeli parties willing to cooperate with the “Arab parties” and perhaps to set the stage for a new attack against Iran, to foster domestic support.
An Israeli Palestinian citizen’s vote is constitutionally valid when it supports Netanyahu’s political survival; apparently, it becomes suspect when it threatens it.
Qatar: Another convenient scapegoat
Netanyahu’s latest accusation introduces a familiar foreign villain: Qatar. Likud alleged that Doha, possibly alongside Turkey, financed organizations mobilizing Palestinian voters, thereby helping manufacture the electoral defeat of the Israeli right.
Like most calculated nonsense, the accusation is politically convenient. Qatar hosts Hamas’s political leadership, has mediated negotiations over Gaza, and has become an established target of Israeli nationalist rhetoric. Yet the evidence presented so far does not establish that Qatar financed electoral fraud or manipulated the Israeli vote.
Qatar categorically denied interference, describing the allegations as a disinformation campaign. More damaging to Netanyahu’s narrative, the Central Elections Committee’s acting director-general, Dean Livne, rejected claims of widespread electoral fraud as baseless. The committee stated that there was no basis for alleging systematic damage to the election’s integrity.
The Shin Bet confirmed that, while its foreign-interference investigation was limited, originated in its own intelligence rather than information supplied by political parties, it did not implicate an entire community of Palestinian voters.
Investigating possible foreign interference is legitimate; converting an unfinished intelligence inquiry into proof that its “Arab citizens” stole an election is political manipulation. Netanyahu has transformed a narrowly defined security investigation into an expansive political indictment.
Qatar may be a convenient suspect, but it cannot substitute for evidence. And foreign interference, even if established in individual cases, cannot invalidate the lawful votes of hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens, which is what Palestinians are.
The coalition arithmetic behind the incitement
The numbers explain the desperation. Likud emerged as the largest party, with 27 seats, but Netanyahu’s nationalist-religious bloc secured only 53 in the 120-seat Knesset, eight short of a majority. Gadi Eisenkot’s opposition bloc won 48, while Israeli Palestinians’ Joint List and Ra’am together secured 19. The arithmetic is devastating for Netanyahu. The Palestinian parties could help an alternative government reach 67 seats.
Netanyahu therefore has two problems. He must find eight additional seats or prevent his opponents from assembling the 61 required to replace him. The second problem is potentially easier to address through political intimidation than parliamentary negotiation.
His campaign against Palestinian participation serves precisely this purpose. By depicting “Arab parties” as illegitimate, Islamist, foreign-influenced or sympathetic to Israel’s enemies, he raises the political price of cooperation with them. He is effectively demanding that the opposition disqualify a substantial portion of the electorate before it can exercise its parliamentary mandate.
There is an additional irony: Likud had already sought to disqualify both Arab-led electoral lists. The Central Elections Committee initially accepted the petitions in September, but the Supreme Court overturned those decisions on October 2, allowing both lists to contest the election. The voters subsequently delivered their answer.
Netanyahu is now attempting to contest that answer by other means.
Three possible governments, three different political outcomes
Scenario 1: A Netanyahu-led reconstruction. Netanyahu attempts to attract defectors from the opposition, exploiting disagreements between his main rival Gadi Eisenkot, the new-right Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Liberman promoting Russian Jews’ interests. He needs eight additional seats. This is difficult but cannot be discounted: political survival has always been one of his strongest negotiating skills.
Scenario 2: An Eisenkot-led minority government. Eisenkot’s Yashar bloc, Bennett’s B’Yachad, the Democrats representing the left and labor and Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu would need external Arab support to reach 67 seats. The principal obstacle is not parliamentary arithmetic but political cowardice and ideological resistance. Several opposition leaders have already ruled out cooperation with Palestinian parties, even as their support could end Netanyahu’s tenure.
Scenario 3: A national-unity government or renewed elections. A Likud-centered unity arrangement with centrist and right-wing opposition figures could command approximately 66 seats, but would require Netanyahu to abandon or marginalize his far-right partners. Alternatively, prolonged deadlock could lead to another election. Neither outcome is assured.
The essential question is whether Israel’s opposition can translate its electoral rejection of Netanyahu into a governing alternative without reproducing the very exclusionary politics it claims to oppose.
The mainstream media’s election story misses the larger story
Much of the mainstream coverage concentrates on dark election techniques: alleged bribery, suspicious cash, foreign interference, voter mobilization and the counting of absentee ballots. These matters deserve investigation.
But they risk obscuring the far more consequential political development: the systematic marginalization of Palestinians, both inside and outside Israel’s internationally recognized borders.
The effort to exclude Palestinian parties from the election was not an isolated incident. Likud petitioned to disqualify them; the Central Elections Committee initially complied; and only Supreme Court intervention restored their right to participate. Netanyahu’s subsequent attacks on Arab turnout are part of the same political continuum.
Meanwhile, the destruction of Gaza has been accompanied by an accelerating campaign of displacement in the West Bank. In February 2026, the UN Human Rights Office warned of ethnic-cleansing concerns in both territories. More recently, Human Rights Watch documented the displacement of 107 West Bank communities since January 2023, attributing the pattern to settler violence enabled by the Israeli state.
The election controversy is therefore unfolding against a much larger struggle over who has the right to inhabit, govern and politically represent this land. The attempt to delegitimize Israel’s Palestinian voters and the displacement of Palestinians from their homes in Gaza and the West Bank are different instruments, but they belong to an increasingly coherent political environment.
De-legitimizers, conditionalists and partners
There is a useful rule of thumb for mapping Israel’s political parties against the question of Arab representation. Three categories emerge: outright de-legitimizers, conditional gatekeepers and advocates of political partnership.
The de-legitimizers include Netanyahu’s Likud, and the two far-right Messianic parties, Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism. Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu belongs politically in this category when it comes to coalition exclusion: Liberman has explicitly ruled out a government with the Joint List, declaring that he would sit neither with Netanyahu nor with Ayman Odeh’s “Arab-led alliance.” These parties differ in ideology and intensity, but their political positions help institutionalize the principle that Palestinian representation may be tolerated in parliament without being accepted as an equal partner in government.
The conditional gatekeepers feature Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar and the Bennett-Lapid Yachad alliance. They oppose Netanyahu and are prepared to negotiate among themselves, but most resist relying on “Arab parties” to establish a government. Revealingly, they may welcome Palestinian votes when those votes weaken Netanyahu, yet hesitate to recognize the parliamentary legitimacy of the parties and constituencies providing them. This is not equivalent to Likud’s direct campaign of delegitimization, but it preserves much of the same exclusionary political arithmetic.
The partners are principally Yair Golan’s Democrats and the Jewish-Palestinian Hadash-Ta’al alliance, alongside the Palestinian-led Ra’am and Joint List. Golan has distinguished himself as the only Jewish-led opposition leader openly advocating a government that includes Arab parties. Following the election, he met Mansour Abbas of Ra’am, as well as Eisenkot and Lapid, and called for cooperation to establish an alternative government. Eisenkot, meanwhile, met Bennett and Golan, while Golan’s meetings with the Arab leadership represented a more consequential political opening. As of October 29, there was no comparable public commitment from Bennett, Lapid or Liberman to include “Arab parties” in a governing coalition.
The distinction matters. Political coordination among Jewish opposition leaders is not the same as political partnership with Palestinian citizens. Nor should conditional parliamentary support be mistaken for acceptance of equal political representation. The 2021 Bennett-Lapid government, which included Ra’am, demonstrated that such cooperation is institutionally possible. The current opposition’s reluctance to repeat that precedent reveals how far the political center has shifted toward far-right.
Ultimately, the Democrats and Hadash-Ta’al represent the clearest Jewish-Palestinian political alternatives to ethnonationalist exclusion. Even here, however, cooperation with Palestinian parties should not automatically be equated with a shared commitment to Palestinian statehood. A durable two-state settlement demands more than parliamentary arithmetic. It requires recognition of Palestinian national rights, territorial self-determination and political equality.
As Israeli observer Gideon Levy argued before the election, “If you want change, vote Arab parties.” He is right. The deeper challenge is whether Jewish Israeli parties are prepared to accept the democratic consequences of that choice. It would seem that the alternative, the Netanyahu government’s current course, is far worse.
The bitter debate on national identity
Netanyahu’s far-right partners, particularly Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, have made little secret of their territorial ambitions. Their political project goes well beyond conventional Israeli nationalism or security policy.
It seeks to consolidate Jewish sovereignty over the entire territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, while denying Palestinians an equivalent right to national self-determination.
The 2018 Nation-State Basic Law already established that national self-determination within Israel is exclusive to the Jewish people and designated Jewish settlement a national value. The present coalition’s settlement and displacement policies have given this ideological principle an increasingly territorial expression.
The controversy did not begin with Netanyahu’s latest government. For more than a decade, Israel has been engaged in an increasingly bitter debate over its constitutional identity: is it a Jewish nation-state that guarantees equal citizenship, or a state in which Jewish national supremacy takes precedence over universal democratic principles? Do Israelis live in a democratic state that’s Jewish, or a not-so-democratic Jewish state?
The 2018 Nation-State Basic Law brought this contradiction into constitutional law. Passed by 62 votes to 55, it established that national self-determination in Israel is unique to the Jewish people, designated Jewish settlement a national value and downgraded Arabic from its previous official-language standing to a language of special status. Most controversially, it omitted any explicit commitment to equality among citizens. Critics argued – and rightly so – that it set the stage for an apartheid state.
The Supreme Court upheld the law in 2021, arguing that its provisions did not extinguish the constitutional principle of equality or Israel’s democratic character. But the political controversy never disappeared. The judicial overhaul initiated in 2023 intensified the struggle over the courts, constitutional safeguards and the limits of majority power – sparking huge mass demonstrations against the Netanyahu government.
As I argued in The Fall of Israel, the danger is not simply religious extremism or Netanyahu’s personal ambitions. It is the gradual institutionalization of an ethnonationalist conception of democracy in which political equality is increasingly subordinated to Jewish collective supremacy.
Messianic project: Judaizing the territory, marginalizing its people
I described that conception as the danger of Herrenvolk democracy: a political system in which democratic institutions and electoral competition remain operational, but their substantive benefits accrue disproportionately to the dominant national community: the Jews only.
The October election illustrates the contradiction. Palestinian citizens retain the formal right to vote, yet their political representatives are increasingly treated as illegitimate partners in government. Beyond Israel’s borders, Palestinians face an even more extreme denial of political self-determination. The constitutional question and the territorial question are therefore inseparable: who is entitled to vote, who is entitled to govern, and who is entitled to belong?
The implications extend beyond the West Bank and Gaza. Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, its territorial ambitions in the occupied Palestinian territories and its expanding security footprint in Lebanon and Syria raise the prospect of a regional strategy built around territorial control, strategic buffer zones and demographic engineering.
A young Palestinian man from the Arab Israeli town of Umm al-Fahm enjoys shisha at Caesarea. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons
This is not to suggest that every Israeli security deployment is evidence of a predetermined annexation plan. But the cumulative direction is unmistakable: territorial expansion and the fragmentation of Palestinian political and geographical continuity.
The ultimate contradiction is glaring. A state claiming democratic legitimacy while consolidating exclusive national sovereignty for one people over a territory inhabited by two peoples is not a liberal democracy. The destination is a unitary, Jewish-dominated political order from river to sea, with Palestinians denied equal collective rights.
The politics of scapegoating and the threat ahead
There is a particularly disturbing symmetry between Netanyahu’s domestic and territorial strategies. At home, Arabs, Palestinians, the peace movement and the Israeli left are portrayed as threats to national survival.
Abroad, Palestinians are increasingly treated as obstacles to territorial consolidation. In both cases, political opposition becomes an existential enemy rather than a legitimate participant in public life.
This politics of permanent emergency has several functions. It mobilizes Netanyahu’s electorate, divides his opponents, intimidates potential Jewish-Palestinian cooperation and diverts attention from the government’s failures, including the October 7 security catastrophe and the consequences of its subsequent wars. It also gives the far-right ideological cover to pursue policies that would otherwise face much greater domestic and international resistance.
The threat is not another Netanyahu government. It is the possibility that a new coalition, however constituted, will inherit a political system increasingly conditioned to accept the exclusion of Palestinian citizens, the dispossession of Palestinians and the normalization of permanent territorial domination.
There is a reason to be very wary of the language of national survival. Historically, projects of exclusion have rarely presented themselves as projects of exclusion. From Nazi Germany and Italian fascism to apartheid South Africa, they invoke security, demographic balance, historical entitlement and national redemption. The list includes Netanyahu’s pursuit of a territorial and demographic order in which Israeli Palestinians have no meaningful place.
Israel’s election has exposed a profound democratic crisis. The question is no longer simply who will govern the country. It is whether democracy can survive when a substantial part of its electorate is treated as illegitimate, and when an entire people is treated as an obstacle to the state’s territorial ambitions.
Netanyahu may yet lose office. The toxic project he has helped unleash is considerably harder to defeat.
Juan Cole’s Informed Comment delivers independent, expert analysis of war, the Middle East, climate change, and U.S. foreign policy. Help sustain this work
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