Ahead of elections in Israel next week, Palestinian leaders in the country are urging the minority Arab community to vote in big numbers as they seek to unseat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and topple the most right-wing government in the country’s history.
High turnout among Israel’s 21% Arab minority, whose members are of Palestinian heritage but hold Israeli citizenship, could influence the country’s complex coalition calculations in favour of an anti-Netanyahu alliance led by former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, Reuters reported. In 2021, he became the first Arab Muslim politician to serve as a minister in an Israeli coalition government, joining an administration led by Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister who is now a right-wing member of Eisenkot’s bloc. Because of disagreements between Bennett and Abbas over the occupied West Bank, however, that government collapsed after 18 months, partly.
Opinion polls suggest Eisenkot’s patchwork bloc of centrist, right- and left-wing parties will get the most votes, but fall short of a majority, and will need Arab support, either as coalition partners or from outside, to prop up a minority government. Abbas’s political career demonstrates that such partnerships are possible.
“We can ensure the formation of a new government of change,” Mansour Abbas, an Islamist dentist-turned-politician who heads the United Arab List party, told Reuters in his office in Nazareth, Israel’s most populous Arab city.
In Nazareth, party organizers hope to harness Arab voters’ anger towards Netanyahu, Smotrich and far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, alongside growing frustration over rising crime in their communities.
Ahead of the election, Bezalel Smotrich, Netanyahu’s far-right finance minister, proposed a plan to “Judaize” areas around Nazareth in northern Israel and in the south, where Arab communities are concentrated. He likened the initiative to Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank, according to Reuters. Last week, according to Reuters, canvassers from Abbas’s party distributed campaign leaflets near Nazareth’s prominent Church of the Annunciation.
