Israel's two Arab parties are positioned to influence who forms the country's next government, a prospect that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sharply challenged. On Wednesday, Netanyahu wrote on X that the election had been "stolen by Arab parties that support terrorism and the elimination of the Jewish state," alleging a range of serious criminal offenses during voting in Arab areas of the country.
Preliminary results projected the two parties to win a combined 19 seats in the Knesset. Neither Netanyahu's Likud-led right-wing bloc nor the centrist bloc led by opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot reached the 61 seats needed for a parliamentary majority, leaving the Arab parties with leverage over the outcome.
Netanyahu said the Likud party was transferring hundreds of testimonies and pieces of evidence to the police, the Shin Bet security service and the Central Elections Committee. He cited allegations including thousands of envelopes containing cash and Ra'am ballot slips, threats and violence against polling station staff, multiple votes cast behind the voting curtain, voting under multiple identities, discrepancies between the number of ballot envelopes and voters, and the use of prohibited voter-mobilization software. "We demand from the police and the Shin Bet a thorough investigation into the election theft by the Arab parties and the full prosecution of the criminals," he wrote, adding that he also demanded an immediate response from the Central Elections Committee.
The two parties are the Joint List, an alliance of Hadash, a predominantly Arab-Jewish left-wing party rooted in Israel's communist movement, and the Arab nationalist parties Ta'al and Balad, and the United Arab List, known as Ra'am, led by Mansour Abbas and affiliated with the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel. With over 90% of ballots counted, the Joint List was projected to win 12 seats and Ra'am seven. Arab citizens make up roughly 21% of Israel's population, and turnout reached a near-record 75% to 80%.
Dahlia Scheindlin, a former policy fellow at the Mitvim Institute and a senior analyst at Haaretz, told Fox News Digital that the Arab parties have become "a political force to be reckoned with." She said Netanyahu framed his campaign around the claim that the opposition would form a government dependent on Arab support, which he argues would lead to a Palestinian state becoming a terror state. "This is the most consistent message, and he never stopped saying it, including on election day," she said.
Scheindlin noted that leading Zionist opposition parties have pledged not to cooperate with the Arab parties, either inside or outside a coalition. "If they receive any help, they will have to break that promise," she said. She added that it is highly unlikely, though not inconceivable, that Netanyahu could reach out to one of the Arab parties to explore cooperation.
Dr. Arik Rudnitzky, a researcher in the Israel Democracy Institute's Arab Society in Israel Program, said Arab parties have historically stayed in opposition and rarely joined governing coalitions. In the 1990s, under governments led by Yitzhak Rabin and later Shimon Peres, Arab parties provided a parliamentary safety net from outside the coalition, helping the government complete its term after it became a minority government amid opposition to the Oslo Accords and the departure of the Haredi Shas party. "It's a novelty of recent years, plus the fact that their political strength in terms of the number of seats was not as significant as it is today," Rudnitzky said.
Rudnitzky attributed the parties' growing strength not only to demographic change but also to shifting voting patterns. He said that in the 1980s and 1990s roughly half of Arab voters backed Jewish parties, while today he estimates that between 85% and 90% support Arab parties. Any support these parties give a prospective coalition would likely come in exchange for political concessions, including a government decision and plan to combat crime in Arab communities and a new socioeconomic development plan for the Arab sector.