Campaigning will draw to a close this weekend, and no more poll results will be published (by law). Still, party activists will continue their efforts on the ground until the voting is over. Israel has probably never seen an election as intense as this one, with people fighting over every single vote. The most recent polls show that the roughly equal division of the electorate into two rival blocs will repeat itself in the March 2 election. In other words, the election will not be decided by which of the candidates has a bigger bloc behind him. As far as the Likud and the Blue and White party go, they are locked in a race over which will be the biggest party in the Knesset. Meanwhile, it is obvious to everyone that voter turnout in the Arab population will ultimately determine the value of each seat and the division of seats in the house.

The Arab Joint List claims that it can win as many as 16 seats this time around. They also believe that this will help keep Benjamin Netanyahu out of the prime minister’s office. Netanyahu seems to realize this, too, so he has avoided the mistake he made in the last two elections, when he failed to form a government. In this election he did not incite Jewish Israelis against Arab voters. His proposed “Camera Law” (to install cameras in polling stations) on the eve of the September 2019 election was supposedly intended to prevent voter fraud in Arab towns and villages. What actually happened as a result was that it spurred Arab citizens to take advantage of their right to vote. While they may not have voted en masse, voting rates were noticeably higher among the Arab public than they were in previous elections.

In the current election, Netanyahu limited his incitement campaign to target only Knesset members from the Joint List — because he can’t go without any incitement or intimidation at all against the Arabs. At the same time, he took great care not to incite against Arab voters. He even tried to convince them that he would be good also for the Arabs, because he plans to repeal the “Kaminitz Law,” which was approved by the Knesset in 2017.

On Feb. 25, the Knesset’s Finance Committee decided to freeze implementation of the controversial Kaminitz Law until further notice. The law, which is named for Deputy Attorney General Erez Kaminitz, calls for stiffer penalties for building violations. The Israeli Arab population suffers from acute housing shortage, mainly because the government had neglected for years their communities and pushed forward no development programs or urban planning. This desperate situation has generated many building violations in Israeli Arab towns and villages. Thus, the law seems to target the Arab population. Former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked admitted as much in an interview in 2019, when she said, “The goal was to enforce laws against illegal construction in the non-Jewish sector.”