‘The biggest motivation is fear’: High turnout among Israel’s Palestinians could unseat Netanyahu

The Knesset is up for grabs next week and the Arab community is desperate to topple the far-right ruling coalition

As the sun set over the town of Kfar Qasim, Palestinian citizens of Israel gathered over hot knafeh pastries and shots of strong cardamom-laced coffee to hear an urgent pitch for their votes.

Palestinians make up about 20% of Israel’s population and their votes are likely to be critical to efforts to unseat Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition in elections next week.

“We are determined to do everything in order to bring this government down. And high turnout among the Arab community is one important tool in achieving this goal,” said Ahmad Tibi, a member of the Knesset for more than two decades as head of the Ta’al party.

Most polling shows Netanyahu’s coalition will lose its majority in the 120-seat Knesset but the Jewish Israeli opposition bloc will also fall short of the 61 seats needed to form a government.

Palestinian citizens of Israel are forecast to secure between 12 and 15 seats, divided between the Islamist Ra’am and the Joint List alliance of three smaller parties, one of which is Ta’al.

The mathematics of power are clear, even though most of the Jewish Israeli opposition has ruled out a coalition with Arab politicians, and Netanyahu and his allies have been doing everything they can to make such an alliance politically toxic.

Racist, fear-mongering campaigning includes posters reading “It’s [either] the right or Palestine”, while others on the right have coined the phrase “Bibi [Netanyahu’s nickname] or Tibi”, even though there is little chance Tibi will hold even a junior ministerial post.

In the history of the state of Israel, there have been just two Palestinian ministers: Raleb Majadele held the portfolio for sport for two years and Issawi Frej was in charge of regional coordination for just over one year.

There is recent precedent for breaking promises not to work with Palestinians, however. The Ra’am leader, Mansour Abbas, in 2021 took his party into a historic coalition government with Naftali Bennett, now part of the opposition bloc, and Netanyahu himself had previously started coalition negotiations with Abbas.

One prospective voter, Mohammed, works at a hi-tech company, managing both Jewish and Arab employees, which he sees as a template for a different future for Israel.

Although disappointed that most Jewish Israeli opposition parties have ruled out a coalition with Palestinian parties, he understands the political logic, and he expects their position to shift once results are in.

“At the end of the day, everything is mathematics, right? One plus one is two. They cannot do anything without [those seats]. So they must do [some kind of deal] and they will do it.”

He is voting and urging all his friends, Jewish and Palestinian, to do the same. “You can say, ‘OK, they don’t like me and I want to relocate’. But if you want to stay here, you must vote. You must do that. Because if this government stays in power, it will be a disaster,” he said.

For Palestinian politicians, any alliance with a Jewish-Israeli opposition is also challenging. None of the parties are calling for a two-state solution, most vigorously oppose a Palestinian state and most support the settlement movement in the occupied West Bank.

“It’s between bad and worse. Any new government will not be my cup of tea, but I am choosing between Netanyahu, [Bezalel] Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir and the opposition,” Tibi said.

The scale of death and destruction in Gaza, militant violence and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and spiralling racism and discrimination inside Israel have created deep-rooted fears about what another four years of far-right ministers could bring.

“The biggest motivation is fear. It is more effective and important than our political parties or our campaigns or anything else,” said the Balad party leader, Sami Abu Shehadeh. “People are very politicised, and aware of the danger of what will happen if these criminals come back to rule again.”

Turnout has been suppressed in the past because some voters lost faith in a system that is stacked against Palestinians and their representatives.

Israel’s supreme court effectively forced Abu Shehadeh to drop out of the race last month over an article about the 7 October Hamas-led attacks, in a decision widely criticised for enshrining different standards of free speech for Jewish and Palestinian citizens of the state.

A motion to disqualify the national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, for racist language, including calls for ethnic cleansing, was not upheld.

Other Palestinians do not take part in elections on principle. Nagham Zbeedat, a journalist with Haaretz newspaper, laid out her opposition in an article earlier this year.

“I do not vote because I refuse to legitimize a system that treats my rights as favors, my safety as optional and my humanity as negotiable,” she wrote. “I refuse to be grateful for crumbs while Palestinians are erased – slowly here, violently elsewhere.”

There is a new urgency to voting this year, however, because a far-right coalition returned to power would have a renewed mandate to accelerate its policies of ethnic cleansing and annexation, said Amjed Iraqi, a senior analyst for Israel/Palestine at International Crisis Group.

In Kafr Qassim, the date of the election is a reminder of Palestinian vulnerability. Two days after voting, the town will remember one of the most notorious massacres in Israel’s history, when in 1956 border police killed 49 men, women and children, shot because they broke a curfew they didn’t know had been imposed on them.

“From a Palestinian perspective this election is arguably primarily about mitigation. Everyone understands fully what the opposition represents and yet, for all that, Palestinians in Israel can see the difference between a rightwing government and a far-right government,” Iraqi said.

“There’s the sense you need to make your presence known and heard and shown, in the face of the far right, just by going to the ballot. There’s no clarity about what comes afterwards but that’s how powerless I think a lot of people feel.”