Bedouins on camels, queues around the block: How the Arab vote shook Israel - The Independent

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There are pizza boxes surrounding us – remnants of a long night. Rotem Kalero, head of operations of the Central Election Committee at the Knesset, and her colleagues have been busy. An almost unprecedented turnout – of 77.7 per cent – led to huge queues to vote. Flooding in the south of the country meant some polling boxes, having been counted on site, had to be picked up by helicopter to bring to the government building in Jerusalem where the chits are all kept in case of dispute.

There were 10,000 complaints of electoral malpractice that had to be checked out on the day by inspectors – from allegations of bribery of Arabs (discounted) to a polling card being found in an envelope before a vote had been cast (also discounted).

“This is a huge operation and we try and be as open as we can,” says Rotem. “It has been particularly challenging because this was the biggest number of people who have voted since they started counting numbers and we didn’t know what to expect.”

Next to us is a huge screen showing how many votes have been counted, how many polling centres have given their results and what that all looks like. A map, which is interactive on its website, shows which parties each district voted for. The votes are still being counted; it can take a long time because of the “double envelope” electoral chits from people who are away from home – whether in the army, in hospital, evacuated, or in prison. Each name on the first envelope has to be checked manually before the vote inside the second envelope can be counted, and there are 600,000 of them. This number, too, is unprecedented.

Polls before the election had Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s Likud party either losing or being neck and neck with his main rival Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party. They were wrong. Even most of the exit polls were wrong. Likud remains the most popular party. But to remain so, Netanyahu has eaten into the vote of some of his coalition parties. The way things stand, neither he (as I write, on 26 seats) nor his main opposition, Eisenkot (21), have enough seats – 61 – to form a government, but President Isaac Herzog will likely have to give Netanyahu the first opportunity to try.

This is the joy and the pain of proportional representation. Now the horse trading will begin.

Netanyahu will try to take seats from Eisenkot’s coalition – maybe even including the leader himself in a “unity alliance” which could see the two leaders take turns as prime minister. At the same time, he may need to remove current coalition partner, far-right extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir, whom some of the other parties won’t work with.

There is ostensibly an easier option in front of him. The election saw an unprecedented turnout from Israel’s Arab population, which makes up 21.7 per cent of the electorate, and between them the Arab parties hold around 17 seats. Normally relatively apathetic about elections, this one saw a turnout of up to 80 per cent among Arab Israelis, larger even than the Jewish vote. Bedouins showed up at polling booths on camels, so many people lined up in Arab towns that new voting centres had to be set up. Some centres saw close to 100 per cent turnout.

The previous Netanyahu coalition helped create this surge. Ben-Gvir’s revolting anti-Arab rhetoric, his actions as security minister ignoring problems of crime and gun attacks within Arab towns, demolishing Bedouin villages while also turning a blind eye to extremist violence in the West Bank, is said to have electrified Arabs to turn out to vote against the coalition.

The deadlocked election result was dubbed a “historic achievement for the Arab public”, Ahmad Tibi, who leads one of the factions that form the Joint List Arab party, said, adding, “Netanyahu could have formed a government by himself with the right. We blocked that possibility.”

One Arab party led by Mansour Abbas – Ra’am, which was once affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood – was briefly in government before Netanyahu was elected and showed what could be achieved: increased funding for Arab majority towns, cities and schools. The more Arabs were encouraged to think about voting, the more they started to become interested in the politics of the country they live in.

October 7 and its aftermath both brought Israelis of all backgrounds together: Arab Israelis and Bedouins were also targeted by Hamas, but that never stopped the racist rhetoric based on the conflict from taking hold. Likud ran a particularly nasty campaign ahead of the election, dramatically warning that a vote against Netanyahu would be a vote for Palestine. Even on polling day, Likud sent out election alerts on telephones warning of the heavy queues in Arab areas and saying that a failure to vote could amount to “a matter of life and death”.

Meanwhile, far-left Israelis and communists voted for the Arab parties to help give them extra strength. But while a huge Arab turnout has shown there is an appetite from this community to have a bigger say in the way their country is run, will they get the opportunity? According to Abbas, speaking on the night of the election, both blocs had approached him. “Everyone is speaking with us, not just from the change block,” he told Israel’s Channel 12 before refusing to say any more.

But it does not seem Netanyahu will take the option of the Arab parties. In an X post on Wednesday night, Netanyahu accused the Arab parties of “stealing” the election, using “prohibited software to mobilise voters”.

After the votes are counted, the parties will each speak to President Herzog about their preferences, and he will see which coalition is most likely to be able to form a government to try first. While it is likely Netanyahu will get first dibs, in the world of Israeli politics, which from 2018 to 2022 saw five elections, no one is betting on him succeeding. It was always unlikely he would go into a coalition with the Arab parties; now his decision on that front seems clear.

Rotem is prepared. “Speaking personally, it would not surprise me if we are back here in a few months,” she says, shrugging. “This is how our system works. And we’ll be here.”

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