View from Israel: Palestinians voted with one voice. The opposition cannot ignore them

Reporting around the world framed the results of recent elections in Israel as “ambiguous”. Other descriptions were taken straight from the thesaurus: impasse, deadlock, stalemate.

Election results anywhere can be complicated. But this week’s elections in Israel were not. They were, in fact, crystal clear: opposition parties have won 67 seats in Israel’s 120-seat parliament. By any standard, that is a clear majority.

These results are straightforward. The complexity is not in the realm of counting votes. Rather, it is in the context of the structural racism dominating Israeli coalition politics since the state was established in 1948.

More than a quarter – 19 seats out of the aforementioned 67 – of the political power expressed in the opposition’s robust 56 per cent majority comes from the two Palestinian parties: the Joint List and the United Arab List. Their voters make up some 800,000 citizens out of the opposition’s three million.

Yet the racist logic deeply ingrained in Israeli politics opts to almost always declare Palestinian political representation as off-limits, enemies of the state – or worse. Yes, Palestinians in the state of Israel are citizens in the formal sense of the word, but no, their representatives are not seen as viable candidates for coalition.

Liberal-Jewish Israelis and their political leaders repeatedly stated before the elections that the country could not endure another four years of Binyamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government: further entrenchment of racist and messianic extremism, endless wars and bloodshed, growing international isolation, trampling of institutional watchdogs, mounting corruption and degraded state services.

Now this public and their leaders have the opportunity to save the country from that bleak, ruinous future. All they need to do is to democratically act on their clear majority. But will they?

This fork in the road will be very telling. Palestinian citizens have spoken with clarity, choosing to participate in the political process at unprecedented levels, bringing their elected political representation to an all-time high. Will their voices be heard?

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The anti-Netanyahu parties in Israel like to describe themselves as “the change bloc”. Well, in order to begin governing and get a chance to change reality here, they will need to first change themselves. They need to begin the process of walking away from racist dogmas, towards what should have been self-evident – the legitimacy of Palestinian political representation in Israel. Otherwise, they will continue on the long tradition of treating Palestinian citizens as no more than an unwanted appendage – as something Israel is “stuck with” in 2026 simply because, back in 1948, “Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job” of ethnic cleansing them.

Horrifyingly, that issue – the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians – is not a historical fact from decades ago, but a continuing agenda supported by many Israelis, with violent manifestations in both Gaza and the West Bank. Between physical and symbolic erasure, it spells out the almost wall-to-wall racist consensus of Israeli politics. In that reality, self-perceived “liberal” Jews in Israel stand shoulder to shoulder with the likes of ultranationalist Itamar Ben-Gvir of the Jewish Power party.

Going down that path would not only squander a decisive victory in a critical parliamentary election; it would also represent moral bankruptcy.

There is another path: one in which the voices of the hundreds of thousands of great-grandchildren of the Palestinians from the 1948 Nakba generation are heard, saying in a clear voice: we are here. If you count us as equal citizens, then together we have the political power to bring about change. This ought to be self-evident. I live here, and I know the extent to which it is, sadly, anything but.

Yet it is still possible.

Citizens who cast a vote in an election are not “stealing” anything, as Netanyahu claims; they are exercising a fundamental right. Netanyahu, the man the leaders of the “change bloc” deem essential to remove from power, is the one who, for years, portrayed voting by Palestinian citizens as anything from a security threat to a crime requiring police investigation. It is easy to condemn Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and their ilk for this – they deserve condemnation. Yet those who may effectively choose to discard these votes are not the Kahanists; rather, they are the liberal, well-intentioned Jewish Israelis who desire a “normal” state.

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Liberal Israelis must now decide who to form a coalition with. They surely do not envision themselves in one with Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir. But if they choose to cast aside the votes of Palestinian citizens, the defining message emerging from these elections will be clear. That message is a form of Jewish racism so profound that it remains incapable of viewing Palestinian citizens as equal partners.

In 1989, Gerhard De Kock, then Governor of the South African Reserve Bank, asked in a landmark speech, “The South African economy – quo vadis?”. As apartheid South Africa faced mounting international sanctions, De Kock’s answer was that his country’s “economic future is inextricably entwined with its political future”, and that political future must include “continued political and constitutional reform”.

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Emerging sanctions on apartheid Israel are still a far cry from what South Africa faced – yet they are growing. Just before the elections Netanyahu stated that there “could be sanctions, and sanctions on banks, so you need to set up a bypass economy”. Bank of Israel Governor Amir Yaron responded that cryptocurrencies “cannot be used as a route for bypassing sanctions” and that “the right thing for Israel’s economy is preserving the economic relationships with our principal trade partners”. Unlike his South African counterpart 37 years ago, Yaron said nothing of political reform.

Yet what was true for South Africa is true for Israel, even if its central bank is yet to acknowledge it. Most Palestinians under Israeli control – in Gaza and the West Bank – are stateless subjects. Only a minority of them, inside Israel proper, are citizens. Those Palestinian citizens have now acted on their most basic of rights: they voted. What better step towards political reform then to let their votes – finally – count.

Hagai El-Ad is an Israeli human rights activist and commentator.