A day after the Sept. 17 election, once most of the votes were counted and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu realized he did not have the 61-seat Knesset majority to form a government, he arrived at Likud headquarters in Tel Aviv and declared that “Israel needs a strong, stable, Zionist government” rather than one dependent on “anti-Zionist” parties. Netanyahu was saying that there was no room for the Joint List in Israel’s government — a message to his rival, Blue and White leader Benny Gantz, lest he dare consider forming the country’s next government with Arab party backing.
Netanyahu ignored the fact that one of the partners in the right-wing religious bloc — the ultra-Orthodox Agudat Yisrael faction of Yahadut HaTorah — is far from Zionist. In fact, Agudat Yisrael was formed in the early 20th century to counter the emerging Zionist movement.
While Knesset member Aida Touma-Suleiman of the Joint List declared on Sept. 21 that she and her colleagues would not join a ruling coalition, the Likud warns at every opportunity that a coalition led by Gantz would be “dependent on the Arab parties” and thus a “dangerous government.” In other words, the ruling party of the “only democracy in the Middle East,” as Israel prides itself on being, seeks to prevent almost 21% of its citizens from being represented in a future government.
How, then, do such racist pronouncements by the prime minister and his Likud line up with a recent statement by Arab Knesset member Abbas Mansour exposing past contacts between the Likud and Arab parties? The chairman of the Islamist Ra’am Party confirmed in a Sept. 24 interview with Channel 13 that associates of Netanyahu had spoken at the beginning of May with Arab parties in a bid to mobilize their support for disbanding the Knesset. "Meetings were held with a few Knesset members and one minister who asked us to abstain in the vote on disbanding the Knesset” in order to give Netanyahu the majority he needed to dissolve the Knesset and call new elections, he said. The contents of these talks are documented in a series of WhatsApp messages, he added.
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