When Benjamin Netanyahu returned to the prime minister's office in 2009, he met with his old political patron, former Defense Minister Moshe Arens. As a senior Likud member, Arens advised him to make equal rights for Israel's Arab citizens the major item on his agenda and to correct the long years of discrimination that they had faced. Arens later recalled that meeting in an interview with Al-Monitor. "Go to Nazareth," he told Netanyahu. "Talk with the Arabs. They are your citizens." Arens then bemoaned that his entreaty had had no effect on Netanyahu. "But that doesn’t fit with him, it doesn’t speak to him, and that’s a shame.''

Arens believed that fostering and helping the Israeli Arab community would provide an unequivocal response to their growing sense of alienation, which can be traced to long-standing inequality in budgets and infrastructures, along with other issues. Arens assumed that focusing on Israeli Arabs, instead of the Palestinian issue, would be ideal for Netanyahu in every possible way: It would not lead to conflict with the right in his tenuous coalition, and it would be an important legacy encompassing all of Israel. The rest is history. Netanyahu focused on the Iranian nuclear program and other issues instead, while Israel's Arab population got pushed to the bottom of his list.

It is safe to assume that Arens was not overly impressed by reports on Nov. 21 that Netanyahu had participated in the festive dedications of two new police stations in the Arab sector: one in Jisr az-Zarqa and the other in Kafr Kanna. The prime minister attended with Police Commissioner Roni Alsheikh and Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan. After all, almost a decade had passed since Arens had had that talk with Netanyahu.

The disparities between the Jewish and Arab populations have grown since then, and Netanyahu is no different from prime ministers on the left who hid their heads in the sand when it came to the Arab population. What sets him apart is that this tendency to ignore the Arabs is complemented by his use of rhetoric to incite against them whenever it serves his political needs. This only adds to the feelings of prejudice, discrimination and alienation that the Arabs feel. One example of this is Netanyahu's famous remark on election day in 2015 to rally Jewish turnout: "Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls." A few days later, he apologized for this remark.