When Israel’s Central Elections Committee published its final count early Friday, the two Arab-led lists held 19 of the Knesset’s 120 seats, nearly double what they had before.
Eleven went to the Joint List, an alliance of the communist-rooted Hadash and the Palestinian nationalist parties Balad and Ta’al. Eight went to Ra’am, the only one of the two lists with Islamist roots.
Within two days, part of the pro-Israel commentariat had decided what the number meant: The ballot box had become the latest instrument of an Islamist offensive against the Jewish state.
That reading raises a fair question, and Israel has already answered it with some precision.
The Islamic Movement in Israel, which grew out of the same ideological current as the Muslim Brotherhood, split in 1996 over a single issue: whether to run candidates for the Knesset.
The Southern Branch chose to take part in elections and formed Ra’am. The Northern Branch, led by Sheikh Raed Salah, boycotted the political system altogether.
In November 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government outlawed the Northern Branch, calling it a sister movement of Hamas, and has kept shutting down its successor fronts since. The Southern Branch remained legal.
Israel did not decide in 2015 that Ra’am’s roots were harmless. It decided something more useful: that a movement rejecting the state’s institutions and working with Hamas belongs in one category, and a party competing inside those institutions belongs in another, to be judged on what it does. The panic over this week’s result erases that line.
I don’t make this argument out of naiveté about the Brotherhood. Recently, I wrote that it runs an endless conquest project. Such movements negotiate perfectly well, signing temporary arrangements without giving up their larger aim.
By that logic, Ra’am’s pragmatism proves nothing on its own, and neither does the fact that its number two candidate this year was Yoav Segalovich, a Jewish former senior police officer and deputy minister, who ran as an independent on its slate.
What such choices do provide is conduct to judge, and that is the criteria Israel already uses: watch what a party does, gather evidence, act when the evidence is there.
The system did exactly that this month. Former Balad lawmaker Sami Abu Shehadeh, who had written an article praising the Oct. 7 attacks, withdrew his candidacy once the Supreme Court signaled it would uphold his disqualification.
Treating 19 elected members of the Knesset as a fifth column only confirms the Brotherhood’s favorite story about Israel as a democracy closed to Arabs.
Erasing Israel’s line has a cost, and this election proved it. On Sept. 23, the Central Elections Committee, made up of representatives of the Knesset parties and chaired by a Supreme Court justice, voted to bar both Arab lists from running.
The next day, it declined to bar Itamar Ben-Gvir’s far-right Otzma Yehudit Party.
On Oct. 2, the Supreme Court unanimously reinstated the Arab lists, finding that the evidence did not meet the legal standard. For more than a week, Arab citizens had been told, in effect, that their representatives might not be on the ballot. In the elections, Israel’s Channel 12 put Arab turnout at around 80%, against 53.2% in 2022.
For perspective, Arab citizens make up 18% of eligible voters living in Israel, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics, which is worth about 21 seats. Nineteen, with some Arab votes going to Jewish parties, is roughly what a community voting at the national rate produces. The revival of the Joint List played its part, since Arab voters have long punished division by staying home.
But anyone who has watched Israeli elections knows that attempts to keep Arab voters out tend to bring them in. People turn out when someone tries to take their ballot away. For example, in 2019, after a fight over Likud’s push to place cameras in Arab polling stations, and with the Arab parties reunited, projected turnout jumped from 49% in April to a nearly 60% turnout that September.
None of this means there is nothing to investigate. Justice Noam Sohlberg, who chairs the elections committee, has asked the Shin Bet to investigate foreign interference, including Qatari money allegedly used to mobilize Arab voters. Qatar denies it.
Police are separately investigating suspected vote-buying. These inquiries should go wherever the evidence leads, and the 2015 distinction is precisely what makes them effective.
Foreign influence operations work through layers of intermediaries, which is why investigators need to follow the money toward whoever paid and whoever relayed it, not toward the citizens who voted. The committee’s acting director, Dean Livne, has said the investigation will not affect the election results and does not target any particular sector of the population.
There are also serious security arguments against forming a government with the Arab parties, and every Zionist party except the Democrats has refused to do so. That is a legitimate decision about who governs.
It is different from treating 19 elected members of the Knesset as a fifth column, a reading that confirms the Brotherhood’s favorite story—about Israel as a democracy closed to Arabs—more effectively than any foreign sponsor could.
The question this election raises is not whether Israel faces an Islamist threat. It does.
The question is whether it keeps the tool it built to fight that threat, a line drawn on conduct and evidence, or trades it for suspicion of anyone who votes for an Arab party. In 2015, a Netanyahu government chose the first. Nothing in the latest election result argues for abandoning it.
