The Delegitimisation of the Arab Vote in Israel

Political uncertainty in Israel has intensified following inconclusive election results. Since the election, the political right has sought to delegitimise the unprecedented electoral success of Arab citizens, whose representatives secured 19 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. The right has united behind Netanyahu’s “election-theft” campaign, portraying Arab participation in government as treasonous support for terrorism and Islamisation. Immediately after the elections, the Shin Bet launched an investigation into alleged electoral fraud in the Arab sector, with its director reportedly seeking to question all Arab party leaders before being blocked by an unprecedented Attorney-General veto. Yet even within the so-called “camp of change”, Arab parties are denied legitimacy as coalition partners: one centre-right party explicitly excludes them, effectively precluding a stable coalition, while frontrunner Gadi Eisenkot’s party likewise refuses to campaign on the basis of political partnership with them. Mainstream television channels (11, 12, and 13) reinforce this exclusion through discourse portraying Arab parties as inherently untrustworthy and requiring conformity to dominant national values as a condition of legitimacy. An examination of a leading Channel 13 current affairs program (on Israel’s ostensibly most liberal mainstream channel) identified at least 45 instances of anti-Arab hate speech, incitement, delegitimisation, and racist rhetoric over just ten days (October 27-November 7), approximately two-thirds of which were voiced by the program’s own hosts.

This delegitimisation effort extends beyond the right and reflects a broader consensus within the Jewish political centre, one that illuminates the deeper sociopolitical foundations of Israel’s democratic backsliding.

The Liberal Blindness to Backsliding in Israel

Many Israelis (and external observers) understand the prolonged democratic crisis in Israel as a confrontation between two political camps. Its defining image since 2023 is the Likud Minister of Justice Yariv Levin’s attempted “judicial reform” in 2023 and the immediate civil response of the liberal camp (sometimes described as the left) in the protests on Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv. On this account, democratic backsliding resembles a battle between a camp intent on dismantling democracy and another struggling to defend it. But viewed as an internal Jewish social process, democratic backsliding in Israel is characterised by the fact that the right and the political centre have, for much of the time, been on the same side.

Contrary to the prevailing Israeli public narrative, the phenomenon that scholars call democratic backsliding began in Israel well before 2023. At least since 2015, the country experienced an initially illiberal and subsequently anti-democratic deterioration. Its defining feature is its movement from the margins towards the centre. In Israel, the margins consist of minorities and political groups excluded from power, which were the first to bear the brunt of these measures. The centre is Israel’s political mainstream, including the liberal centre that demonstrated on Kaplan Street. For most of this period, it steadfastly denied that its country was undergoing democratic backsliding. Backsliding did not concern it so long as it did not affect it directly. Moreover, significant sections of this camp share some of the premises guiding the right and sometimes even regard the right as doing their work for them. The claim that “the settlements are the first line of defense”, for example, is not merely a hawkish position. It reflects a broader historical and political outlook that lets parts of the centre identify with right-wing policies and assumptions even when they clash.

By around 2018, the patterns of Israel’s democratic deterioration could already be situated alongside those of Hungary and Poland, and certainly India, the United States and Brazil. Netanyahu’s ethno-nationalist campaigns, including the delegitimisation of his political opponents, formed part of a process whose defining characteristics were already discernible. Yet Israel’s centre-left elites failed to recognise it. Some remained in denial. Others – particularly political leaders outside Netanyahu’s camp and the opinion-shaping circles surrounding them – deliberately avoided this framing. They were uncomfortable describing Israel as a country experiencing democratic backsliding. Such a description sat uneasily with Israel’s national, “Start-Up-Nation”, brand, the liberal centre’s self-image, and its associated institutional and political interests. Netanyahu was still seen as someone with whom one could “do business”, a political rival who might be defeated at the next election, rather than the leader of a sustained transformation of the regime’s character.

Only in 2023, when a right-wing government united all its factions behind a sweeping illiberal and anti-democratic project, did a broad recognition of the nature of the process emerge within the liberal-centrist bloc. In other words, Israel’s hegemonic centre recognises democratic backsliding primarily when it reaches the centre itself. The rest of the time, it denies developments unfolding before its eyes and sometimes even tacitly acquiesces in them. This distinction – on the liberal blindness to the deterioration of democracy and the delayed recognition – is particularly important for understanding the response we are now witnessing to the votes cast by Arab citizens of Israel.

An (Anti-)constitutional Moment?

The 2026 electoral mobilisation of Arab citizens, who constitute approximately 20 per cent of Israel’s citizenry, is a politically transformative event. In some respects, it may mark the peak of a “constitutional moment”: an event that alters not merely the balance of power among parties but the assumptions underpinning the political order and citizenship itself. Broad political participation by Arab citizens reshapes the strategic configuration of Israel’s political blocs. It challenges the presumption of an inherent right-wing dominance and may enable a stable long-term ventre-left majority. The significance of this vote extends beyond coalition arithmetic. Following a prolonged suppression of the Arab public sphere since 7 October, the very decision of Arab citizens to re-enter electoral politics in large numbers, even if partly as an act of protest, is of exceptional democratic significance. After their public sphere was constricted and their ability to express political dissent curtailed, they have chosen to return to political participation and, in some cases, to place renewed trust in the state’s political institutions.

It is precisely this possibility that generates fear among parts of the Jewish public – and not only on the far right. This is the crucial point: beneath the surface, sections of Israel’s political centre appear no less apprehensive than the right about meaningful Arab political participation. What they fear is not merely an electoral outcome, but the broader implications of fully recognising Arab citizens as legitimate partners in determining who governs.

Thus, contrary to the familiar narrative of a struggle between two political camps, those responding to the election results with suspicion and anxiety are not confined to prominent right-wing correspondents and spin-doctors such as Amit Segal or Moriah Asraf. The same pattern is discernible at the heart of Israel’s mainstream media, the ones that purport to be the Israeli Walter Cronkites, not the Sean Hannitys. Amalia Duek, Esti Perez, Eran Binyamini, Avri Gilad, Ben Caspit, and others share in media panels in which Arab representatives are repeatedly required to establish their legitimacy as political partners. Naming these figures is deliberate: the media play a central role in policing the boundaries of political and democratic legitimacy in Israel. In interviews and statements, including from media figures not identified with the right, nationalist positions have been voiced towards Arab political representatives.

The pattern is therefore the same as the one we have witnessed since 2015: democratic deterioration begins with an assault on the (Arab) margins and encounters denial, accommodation and sometimes active collaboration from the hegemonic center. Television studios, which serve as proxies for the opinion-makers of the political centre, do not merely fail to reject outright the democratically indefensible framing that casts doubt on the legitimacy of a vote awarding Arab representatives 19 Knesset seats. In some instances, they actively nurture it. As usual, they invoke the sacred principle of “balance”, even as the right advances a stolen-election narrative. They host speakers who portray Arab citizens as fraudsters at best and saboteurs at worst. One mainstream broadcast even invoked the image of the “Nukhba” – the Hamas’s war-crime units – in reference to them. Racist incitement of a kind that warrants an immediate regulatory response has become commonplace in public discourse since the election results became known.

This is no longer simply a denial of democratic backsliding. In some cases, it amounts to internalising the right’s own framing. Sometimes this stems from fear, sometimes from an unwillingness to acknowledge political partnership with Arab citizens, and sometimes from genuine agreement with the premise that Arab citizenship cannot provide an equal basis for participation in government. It is worth recalling that the 2018 “Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People” was not, in any meaningful sense, solely a unilateral initiative of the right. This Basic Law can also be easily understood as a constitutional instrument that served the political and identity-related needs of sections of Israel’s Jewish centre-left (as opinion polls also suggested). It enabled the primacy of Jewish national identity to be preserved within the state’s constitutional framework without fully confronting its implications for the principle of equal citizenship. Here too, the convenient distinction between an anti-democratic right and a liberal centre-left conceals the deeper areas of agreement between them.

Just an “Electoral Democracy”?

We now face an especially grave danger. Unlike many of the anti-democratic measures adopted thus far, if the hegemonic bloc at the political centre – not only the unequivocal right, but also media executives, opinion-makers and centrist political leaders – participates in denying the political citizenship of approximately 20 per cent of the country’s population, it will become extraordinarily difficult to speak meaningfully of democratic recovery in Israel. The reason is straightforward. Democracy is not simply a system in which elections are held. It requires recognition that all citizens are entitled to participate on equal terms and that their votes may determine the composition of government. When the vote of an entire group of citizens is treated as legitimate only for as long as it does not alter the political balance of power, the rights to vote and to stand for election are deprived of their substantive meaning.

If the current campaign results in voter suppression – for example, through intimidation, delegitimisation or measures that reduce Arab citizens’ participation in a repeat election – Israel may cross another threshold in its regime deterioration. Under established criteria in comparative political science, Israel’s classification as an “electoral democracy” represents a narrower and less demanding conception of democracy than that of a “liberal democracy”, and indeed, in 2023, the V-Dem Institute downgraded Israel from the latter to the former (assessing Israel separately from the West Bank and Gaza Strip). But electoral democracy requires, at a minimum, meaningful political competition and the effective participation of all citizens. Scholars of Israeli democracy have long debated whether Israel is an “ethnic democracy” – that is, for Jews alone – or whether it has succeeded in sustaining a liberal democracy within its borders. Refusing to recognise the Arab vote would settle that debate in the starkest possible terms.

For these reasons, I believe we are witnessing the most acute stage of Israel’s democratic backsliding to date. Compounding this is an even more disturbing phenomenon, which I cannot explore here: the involvement of senior public officials, including the head of the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet), in fueling stolen-election conspiracy theories. The coming weeks may determine whether Israel’s Jewish majority – and especially what remains of the hegemonic centre-left – can make the democratic leap of faith now required of it: recognising Arab citizens as equal partners in shaping the state’s political future. This is a politically perilous leap, particularly in a country whose history includes the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the price paid by those who sought to broaden the boundaries of political partnership. Yet the alternative is far more dangerous: accepting, through action or silence, the right’s thesis that Israeli democracy has ethnic boundaries.

The question now facing the liberal centre is not whether it is prepared to defend democracy when its own rights are threatened. Kaplan Street has already supplied the answer. The question is whether it is prepared to defend democracy when doing so requires full recognition of the political power of Arab citizens. This is no peripheral question in the struggle over Israeli democracy. It is, to a considerable extent, its defining test.