Arab-led parties win 19 Knesset seats as both blocs fall short of a majority

Police and election officials find no basis for Likud’s fraud claims

Record turnout among Palestinian Arab voters has reshaped the contest to govern Israel, after an election last month in which Arab-led parties won 19 of the Knesset’s 120 seats and neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition nor his main challenger, Gadi Eisenkot’s center-right opposition, reached the threshold of 61 seats needed to form a government. The result hands the Arab-led parties a critical role in the negotiations that will determine Israel’s next government. It marks a turn from recent years, when many Palestinian citizens of Israel shunned the polls, believing there was little to gain from participating in the politics of a state which, they say, regularly marginalizes their communities and oppresses their fellow Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Jamal Zahalka, chairman of the High Follow-Up Committee, the main umbrella body representing Palestinian citizens of Israel, said the vote had denied Netanyahu’s coalition a path to continue. “We blocked the government of Netanyahu from continuing,” Zahalka said. “It’s a historical achievement. I think our community found its strength.”

Arab-led parties received a 64 percent increase in votes compared with the last elections, according to Israel’s Central Elections Committee. Palestinian citizens of Israel, descendants of those who remained when the state was established in 1948 — when a majority of the prewar population was forcibly expelled or fled during the war — now make up about 20 percent of the population. The parties’ gains have stirred anger, and even fear, among many on Israel’s political right, who see them as a threat to the country’s Jewish character.

Two days after the election, hundreds of people gathered at a park in the Palestinian-majority town of Kufr Qasim for the annual commemoration of residents gunned down in 1956 by Israeli border police on the opening day of the Suez Crisis, when Israel, Britain and France attacked Egypt after it nationalized the Suez Canal. “And today we stand here, 70 years later,” a speaker told the large crowd from a podium. “And the story still isn’t over.”

The crowd, mostly dressed in black and some wearing the keffiyeh — the black-and-white stitched scarf symbolizing Palestinian resistance — mourned not only relatives lost decades ago but Palestinian suffering today: the sharp rise in discrimination against their communities in Israel since the deadly Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023; the war in Gaza that has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians and left the enclave’s population surviving amid the ruins; and the actions of Netanyahu’s government in the occupied West Bank, where rights groups and the United Nations say it has armed and supported settlers as they force Palestinians from their homes and agricultural lands with unprecedented violence.

Worsening conditions inside Israel was one reason, residents of Kufr Qasim said, that so many Palestinian citizens went to the ballot boxes. “There is no freedom anymore,” said Intisar Sarsur, 65, sitting with relatives beside an olive tree in the park. “We are seeking for our basic rights as human beings.” “Everybody that I know participated in the elections. Not one person stayed home,” Sarsur said. She and her family shared platters of mutabbaq, a sweet Palestinian layered pastry, and freshly pressed olive oil from this year’s harvest — usually a joyous moment in the Palestinian calendar that she said now felt bittersweet. This year’s olive harvest for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank was marred by frequent attacks by Israeli settlers trying to disrupt the economically and culturally significant time of year.

Netanyahu and his allies made the large Arab turnout a rallying cry. On election day, Netanyahu posted a video calling it an “emergency.” Itamar Ben Gvir, the far-right national security minister, filmed his own appeal at the entrance to Kufr Qasim. “If you want this country to remain Jewish and Zionist … then get out and vote!” he said in the video.

As results came in, Netanyahu’s Likud party claimed Arab parties had “stolen” the election through bribery, threats and forgery, and later warned of a foreign takeover of the Knesset and the “Islamization of Israel.” The party has made no evidence public. Police said they found no basis for the claims, and election officials said there was no widespread fraud. The head of the elections committee separately asked the Shin Bet security service to investigate suspected foreign funding of efforts to boost Arab turnout, but he and the attorney general said the vote was conducted properly and the results were not compromised.

The messaging by Netanyahu’s bloc is widely seen as an attempt to prevent Eisenkot’s center-right grouping from partnering with the Arab parties — a step that would give Eisenkot the majority he needs to form a government. But the sharp rise in anti-Arab sentiment since the October 7, 2023, attacks, in which some 1,200 people were killed, has made an alliance with any Arab party potentially politically treacherous, and right-wing members of Eisenkot’s bloc could split off in fury.

Eisenkot is not a natural ally for the Arab parties. A former military chief of staff whose son was killed fighting in Gaza, he served as an observer in Netanyahu’s war cabinet early in the war and still cuts a hawkish figure. As a general, he is credited with formulating the “Dahiyeh doctrine,” which he laid out in 2008: using “disproportionate force” against villages from which militants fire on Israel, which he called “not civilian villages” but “military bases.” The doctrine is named after Beirut’s southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold that Israel largely decimated in heavy bombardment in 2006.

The Arab-led parties are divided on how to use the power they gained. Ra’am, a socially conservative Islamist party, campaigned on joining a governing coalition and put a Jewish former police official second on its list. The Joint List alliance, which won 11 of the 19 Arab-led seats, will not formally partner with Eisenkot for now; its leaders have said they could back his government from the outside but will not join it, citing the ongoing war in Gaza and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

President Isaac Herzog has been consulting with parties over whom they would support and is expected next week to announce which candidate will receive a mandate to try to form a coalition. That candidate will have 28 days and can ask for a further two-week extension. A second candidate, if the first fails, would get only 28 days without an extension. If no one manages to form a coalition, Israel will hold repeat elections next year.

In Kufr Qasim, as readings and re-enactments of the 1956 killings unfolded on stage, Mansour Shaaban, 33, said he would vote again in an instant. This was the first election in which he had voted, and he said voting had become necessary to try to stop what he called the racism and oppression of Palestinians by Israel’s extreme right. “There are Israelis we eat with and live alongside,” Shaaban said. But Netanyahu, Ben Gvir and other leaders of the last years “are making it impossible to co-exist,” he said. “Even if we don’t succeed to create change this time,” he said, right-wing Israeli politicians now know that Palestinian citizens of the country have found their voice.