On election day in March 2015, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recorded a controversial 28-second video warning right-wing voters that Arabs would head to the polls “in droves.” A week later, after winning against most expectations, he apologized, saying he had not meant to offend the entire Arab sector.
After 11 years and six elections, Netanyahu is simply playing the same game on a much larger scale.
Since losing his majority in the Oct. 27 vote, Prime Minister Netanyahu and his allies have continued to make grave accusations that the election was “stolen” by Arab parties through bribes, foreign funding and fraud. They are calling for investigations, arrests, and in the most extreme cases even canceling the vote and holding new elections.
They have not yet presented any evidence, but their political goals are clear. It is casting a veil of illegitimacy on two Arab parties, the Joint List and Ra’am, which recorded record turnout and are likely to be key parts of the effort to oust Israel’s longest-serving leader.
“They are doing this because they lost,” Gadi Eisenkot, Netanyahu’s main challenger, said in a video statement Thursday.
Prime Minister Netanyahu neither completely lost nor won the election. The same goes for Eisenkot. Both fell short of the required 61-seat majority in the 120-seat parliament needed for a clear victory. Israel currently faces weeks, perhaps months, of political uncertainty.
Prime Minister Netanyahu knows math. His coalition government is reduced to 53 seats, with no clear path to securing a majority. Eisenkot’s bloc alone has 48 seats. However, the support of 19 seats from Arab parties ensures it has a majority of 67 seats.
The only government to oust Netanyahu (the 2021 Bennett Lapid government), which also included Mr. Raam, collapsed about a year later. Now, people close to Netanyahu say his main goal after the election is to delegitimize and prevent Jewish-Arab political cooperation that could weaken his grip on power.
The effort began weeks before Election Day.
In mid-October, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Religious Zionist Party Chairman Bezalel Smotrich announced plans to deploy approximately 2,000 observers to polling stations in Arab communities, marking them as potential sites of fraud.
Early on the morning of the election, police arrested three Ra’am activists on suspicion of a vote-cashing scheme, in a widely publicized incident. The first information about the arrest, later reported by Israel’s Channel 12 news, came from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s chief of staff, who bypassed standard channels and contacted the police chief directly. Courts rejected most police requests for stricter restrictions, and some suspects were released. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign seized on the story and escalated the number of arrests, claiming it was an effort to “steal the election.”
The campaign continued and intensified as votes were counted. On Wednesday, Netanyahu’s Likud party announced it had submitted hundreds of testimonies alleging bribery, threats, violence and forgery from Raam and the Joint List, and pro-Netanyahu Channel 14 reported allegations of millions of shekels from foreign sources.
Then, a letter was leaked.
Supreme Court Deputy Chief Justice Noam Solberg, chairman of the Central Elections Commission, had written to David Zini, head of the Shin Bet security service, requesting an investigation into “serious allegations” of foreign funding. Israeli media later reported that Zini himself, who reportedly met with Prime Minister Netanyahu earlier, had requested the letter. Solberg wrote that he could not verify the significance of the evidence. But for Likud and other right-wing politicians, that mattered little. The letter was treated as confirmation and evidence.
Netanyahu’s far-right ally Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir have called for the arrest of Arab Party leaders, with Ben Gvir claiming that Qatar is funding efforts to boost Arab turnout, a claim Qatar firmly denies as “ridiculous and dangerous.”
Channel 14 dubbed the story “Voting Terror.” Likud lawmaker Boaz Bismuth wrote in X magazine that the results of the “terrorist party” should not be recognized until “every stone” is overturned. On Sunday, Prime Minister Netanyahu himself shared a video of a right-wing activist alleging a massive fabrication and “simply invalidating the election.”
The episode prompted sharp criticism of Israel’s police chief and Shin Bet chief appointed by Prime Minister Netanyahu.
“There are similarities between these two incidents,” said Amos Harel, senior defense analyst at Haaretz. “In both cases, the prime minister’s office is stirring things up behind the scenes with the Shin Bet and police, and Likud immediately uses the reports in massive propaganda campaigns,” aimed at outlawing Arab political parties and reducing opposition groups’ freedom of action.
But election authorities rejected Netanyahu’s version. The Central Election Commission formally dismissed claims of widespread fraud as baseless and said there was no evidence to allege any systematic compromise of the vote.
On Sunday, the chairman issued a special statement along with the Shin Bet leader and the attorney general, saying the elections had been properly conducted. He said even if the foreign funding allegations were confirmed, it would not overturn the results or undermine the integrity of the process. “Your decision at the polling station will be respected,” Solberg said.
Likud remained unmoved, insisting in a statement that “dark clouds” hung over the outcome.
Opposition parties broadly support the investigation but call Prime Minister Netanyahu’s claims an attempt to undermine the outcome. Eisenkot called it a “despicable and malicious influence operation” aimed at delaying the publication of the results and undermining the legitimacy of the 26th Parliament. Yair Golan, leader of the left-wing Democratic Party, said it was the behavior of a “dictator who refuses to accept defeat at the polls.”
The Joint List, a target of the delegitimization campaign, hit back with its own statement.
“No smear campaign will erase the achievements of the Arab people, and no attempt to cast doubt on the legitimacy of our vote will change the will of voters,” the party said in a statement last week. “You wanted us to be small and weak, but you made us big and strong.”
