Blue and White ignored Israeli Arab vote at own peril
The Blue and White list shunned the Arab electorate, lost their vote and as a result will now have to sit in the opposition.
Soon after news stations released their exit polls and the actual results began trickling in on April 9 indicating that the right-wing bloc had won Israel's legislative elections, Labor Knesset member Shelly Yachimovich offered some impractical advice to Benny Gantz, chairman of the Blue and White party. With the sadness from Labor's stunning defeat visible on her face during an interview with Channel 12, Yachimovich said that if she were in Gantz’s position, she would go knocking on the Arabs’ doors to apologize and ask for their support.
The idea that Arab voters have no firm ideological position and that they could be easily moved by a simple apology testifies more than anything else to the fact that even the left-wing parties have a condescending attitude toward Israeli Arabs, yet still expect their parties to bail them out when they are in trouble.
