How Arab Parties Could Hold the Balance of Power in Israel's Closely Fought Election

At rush hour in Nazareth, the largest Arab-majority city in Israel, students stand by the roadside handing leaflets to passing drivers, asking them to vote in next week's general election. Polls suggest Arab parties could end up holding a decisive balance of power, and the students know it.

Arab Israelis make up about a fifth of the population, and many describe themselves as Palestinian citizens of Israel. Disaffection has often kept their turnout low. This time there is a strong push to remove the most right-wing governing coalition in the country's history, an alliance of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties. Arkan Badran, 23, one of the students, says he sees it as a duty to bring the government down, because its members treat Arab citizens as second-class. He urges young people to vote for Arab lists.

The arithmetic is tight. Most polls show neither Netanyahu's bloc nor the main Change Bloc, led by the centre-right former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, with a clear path to a majority. This week's surveys put each at around 50 of the 120 seats in parliament, with 13 or 14 seats going to Arab-majority groupings. If that holds, anti-Netanyahu parties would have to either break pledges not to work with the prime minister or strike a deal with Arab-majority lists. Eisenkot has so far ruled out a government with Arab parties, citing a lack of shared values. Mohammed Magadli, a news anchor at the Nazareth station Radio Nas and an analyst for Channel 12, calls that racism, and says Netanyahu's political interests lie in stripping Arab parties of legitimacy. Magadli's father, Raleb, was Israel's first Muslim minister, serving from 2007 to 2009 for Labour.

The backdrop is the Hamas-led attack of 7 October 2023 and the war in Gaza, which brought greater mistrust and hostility toward the Arab minority. Suha Salman Mousa of the Mossawa Centre, which advocates for equal rights, says Arab citizens were treated as enemies afterward: free speech shrank, there were major arrests, and people were fired for social media posts or for opposing the war. She accuses ministers of systematic discrimination and incitement. Civil society groups say budgets for Arab communities have been disproportionately cut; the government says the reductions fund wartime defence and security. There have also been politicised campaigns against Arab doctors in Israeli hospitals and racially motivated attacks on Arab bus drivers by Jewish Israelis.

The campaign itself has leaned into the divide. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has vowed to "Judaise" parts of the Galilee and the Negev, where most Arabs live, likening it to settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank. Netanyahu has warned that his rivals plan a "dangerous government" with Arabs. His campaign put up billboards, including one at the main entrance to Nazareth, offering a choice between "Right or Palestine," with opposition figures, right-wingers among them, cast as the latter. It has also used AI-generated videos showing opponents embracing Arab leaders.

Two Arab-majority forces are in play. The Joint Arab List is a coalition of Hadash, Balad and Taal, secular parties that campaign for equal rights, an end to occupation and a two-state solution. It aims to influence from the opposition, offering an electoral safety net to any alternative government in return for support on key policies. The United Arab List is an Islamist party led by Mansour Abbas, who served as a minister in Naftali Bennett's short-lived 2021 government; Bennett is now a right-wing member of Eisenkot's bloc. Abbas has put a Jewish former police official and centrist MP, Yoav Segalovitz, in the number two slot, and says representation alone is not enough: he wants influence and a place in the next government.

For many Arab voters, the most pressing issue is gang crime. A September Israel Democracy Institute poll found it decisive for 53.5% of Arab citizens choosing a party. Murders in the community hit a record 252 last year, about five times the number of Jewish Israelis killed, according to the Abraham Initiatives. In Jaffa, Ziad Samouni points to where his son Hussein was shot dead last November by two gunmen on a motorcycle. No one has been arrested. Samouni accuses the government of letting killers go uncaught. Police say the investigation remains active and that they treat every case with utmost seriousness.

This month the Supreme Court overturned a Central Elections Committee decision, made by a body dominated by the governing coalition, to disqualify both Arab lists and two of their members for allegedly denying Israel's existence as a Jewish state. The parties deny it. With days left, some Nazareth drivers fly party flags from their cars, and Arab citizens see the vote as both a choice of who governs and a measure of their own future in the country.