Yousef Jabareen, chairman of the Joint List, an alliance of three Arab political parties, played into Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hands, observers told JNS, when he told Radio 103FM on Oct. 13 that “whoever will want to replace the current extremist government will see that he will, in fact, need to turn to us.”
A central message of the Netanyahu campaign is that the opposition can’t win without the support of the Arab parties. Numerous Likud campaign ads have warned: “Eisenkot and Liberman will establish a left-wing government with Yair Golan and the Arab parties.”
Gadi Eisenkot of the Yashar party and Avigdor Liberman of the Yisrael Beiteinu party are key opposition leaders. Eisenkot served as IDF chief of staff. Liberman, a one-time partner of Netanyahu, served as defense minister. Both are credible from a security standpoint.
To undermine that credibility, the Likud has been hammering the message that Eisenkot and Liberman, while they may be acceptable to most Israelis, won’t be calling the shots. They’ll be beholden to their extremist coalition members, namely Yair Golan of the far-left The Democrats Party and one or more of the Arab parties.
In one AI-generated Likud campaign ad, an Eisenkot Cabinet meeting is imagined in which an increasingly frustrated Eisenkot contends with Mansoor Abbas, head of Ra’am (a fourth Arab party running independently of the Joint List), who smokes a hookah pipe while shooting down ideas for dealing with security issues. (The only suggestion Abbas supports is evacuating Jewish towns as a “faith-building” exercise toward a Palestinian state.)
“An Eisenkot government is a government that is controlled in fact by Abbas and the Muslim Brotherhood,” the ad concludes.
In an early Likud campaign ad, also AI-generated, Eisenkot is seen running into the arms of a young man with “Israeli unity” printed in Hebrew on his T-shirt. Instead of embracing the young man, Eisenkot runs past him to embrace Abbas. (The ad was scrubbed after criticism that the young man too closely resembled Eisenkot’s son, who was killed fighting in Gaza. He was replaced with a young woman.)
Yoni Ben-Menachem, Middle East intelligence analyst for the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA), told JNS, “It will be very easy to prove to the Israeli public that it is not a Likud invention that the opposition cannot form a government without the Arab parties. As proof, they can point to what Jabarin is saying.
“He just gave the Likud leverage if they use it properly,” Ben-Menachem said.
Perhaps surprisingly, given that Likud campaigners have already capitalized on Oct. 18 comments by Benny Gantz of the Blue and White Party that “whoever votes for Eisenkot votes for the Arab parties,” they have not yet exploited Jabareen’s remarks.
Avraham Diskin, professor emeritus of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, agreed that Jabareen certainly didn’t hurt Netanyahu’s campaign. “Netanyahu has said again and again that an opposition victory means a left-wing bloc leaning on Arab support,” he told JNS.
Jabareen listed four demands that any anti-Netanyahu coalition seeking the Joint List’s support would have to meet. Three dealt with domestic issues, but the fourth was support for the creation of a Palestinian state in the pre-1967 lines. This means in practice evacuating more than half a million Jews from Judea and Samaria, ceding half of Jerusalem and leaving Israel nine miles wide at its narrowest point.
“Anyone who wants to replace Netanyahu’s government of wars and bloodshed must also propose a political horizon in the direction of recognizing the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination,” he told 103FM.
Here again, Jabareen confirmed one of Likud’s election slogans: “Right-wing or Palestine.”
“The Arab parties want to bring closer the implementation of an independent Palestinian state. Of course, they object to a Jewish state. They want a state ‘of all its citizens,’ not a Jewish state. And then the second phase, of course, is support for ‘the river to the sea’ idea. This is the strategy,” Ben-Menachem said.
It remains to be seen whether Jabareen’s comments will spur more right-wing voters to head to the polls. Netanyahu’s overriding concern is voter turnout, Diskin said. Right-wing voter turnout tends to be lower than in left-wing neighborhoods. “So a higher turnout generally means a boost for the right,” he said.
“Turnout is really crucial. That’s why Netanyahu says it’s currently a tie, that the election is going to be decided by very few votes. He should say that even if it isn’t the situation and there’ s a big margin in his favor,” Diskin said.
Turnout is also top of mind for Jabareen, who told 103FM: “The truth is that during this period, our main concern is to work with the Arab public in order to increase the voter turnout. This is our main task today. We are optimistic that there will be a relatively high voter turnout compared to the previous elections, which will definitely bring us a good result, a double-digit result, even if you don’t see it in the polls.”
Jabareen is counting on a big turnout to translate into Knesset strength that will make his party indispensable to an anti-Netanyahu coalition, he said. “Our efforts at the moment are to have a joint, large, strong list that can influence decision-making after the elections.”
