Like a goal-line pileup in football, with half the players signaling a touchdown and the other half celebrating a defensive stop, everyone is claiming victory in Israel’s election. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu points to Likud’s status as Israel’s largest party. His opponents point to the loss of his governing majority. Did Netanyahu win? Did the opposition win? Those of us watching from the stands are waiting for the referee’s signal, unsure of what exactly is going on in the field.

The arithmetic is straightforward. In Israel’s 120-seat Knesset, a governing coalition needs 61 seats. Netanyahu’s bloc won 53. The principal Jewish-led opposition parties won 48. Israel’s Arab parties won an unprecedented 19 seats, nearly doubling their previous representation. Neither major bloc can govern alone. The election is over, but the overtime game of coalition politicking has just begun.

There are several paths forward. Netanyahu and his opponents could form a national unity government. Alternatively, either bloc could seek cooperation with Arab parties. The difficulty is that political leaders have drawn red lines against both possibilities.

Herein lies one of the most uncomfortable paradoxes of Israeli democracy: Arab citizens have exercised their democratic rights in extraordinary numbers, yet the very parties whose votes could break the political deadlock are those whom much of Israel’s political establishment refuses to consider as governing partners.

Arab parties have rarely been full partners in Israeli governing coalitions. During Israel’s early decades, Arab lists affiliated with the ruling party participated but enjoyed little autonomy. In the 1990s, Yitzhak Rabin relied on Arab parties from outside his coalition. In 2021, Mansour Abbas and his Islamist Ra’am party became the first independent Arab party to join an Israeli government. Ironically, Netanyahu himself had explored cooperation with Abbas earlier that year.

Since Oct. 7, political boundaries have hardened. The attack, the hostages, the war, the continuing grief and fear have shattered trust. Many Israeli Jews now regard cooperation with non-Zionist parties with profound suspicion. These anxieties cannot be dismissed; there remains a trauma through which much of Israeli society sees its present and future.

The predicament has been called a “dilemma from hell.” Either politicians find a way to cross red lines or Israel risks another election, another round of recriminations, another deepening of its internal divisions.

At the heart of this political dilemma lies a question as old as the Jewish people itself: Can the Jewish family make room for those who do not share its Jewish identity? Can we affirm our own destiny without excluding another?

The biblical precedent

This is not the first time the Jewish people have confronted the question of whether there is room in the Jewish family for those who do not share its identity. The question goes back to the very first Jewish family. In the biblical account, Abraham and Sarah are blessed with Isaac, their long-awaited son. But Isaac is not Abraham’s firstborn. Years earlier, Sarah had given her Egyptian maidservant Hagar to Abraham, and Hagar had borne Ishmael. When Isaac arrives, Sarah perceives Ishmael as a threat. Biblical commentators debate her motivations: Was Ishmael behaving dangerously? Was Sarah concerned about inheritance? Whatever her concerns may have been, Sarah’s demand is unequivocal: “Cast out that woman and her son.” Despite Abraham’s distress, Hagar and Ishmael are sent into the wilderness.

The first Jewish family could not find a way to live together.

Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions have long associated Ishmael with the ancestry of Arab peoples. It raises the question. What if Isaac’s covenantal destiny had not required Ishmael’s expulsion? What if Abraham’s tent had been large enough for Isaac to remain Isaac, Ishmael to remain Ishmael, and both to know they belonged?

We cannot rewrite Genesis. But given the crossroads Israel faces today, we can ask whether its tragedy must remain ours.

Three considerations make this moment worthy of serious political imagination.

First, consider Israel’s internal political health. Imagine what cooperation across entrenched political divisions might communicate to Israeli society. Coalition politics have always required compromise: Religious parties negotiate military-service exemptions and yeshiva funding. Why should negotiations with Arab parties be categorically unthinkable?

Not all Arab parties are alike, and their differences matter. Mansour Abbas condemned the atrocities of Oct. 7 and has acknowledged Israel’s Jewish character. Surely the “Start-Up Nation” can devise an agreement that safeguards Israel’s security and Jewish character while giving Arab representatives substantive governance over the issues affecting their communities.

Second, consider Israel’s international standing. Israel faces mounting criticism and accusations of discrimination and apartheid. Arab participation in government would not resolve the Palestinian question or erase existing inequalities. But imagine the Jewish state’s democratic promise expressed not only through Arab citizens voting, or the oft-cited presence of Arab pharmacists, but through Arab representatives sharing responsibility at the highest levels of government. What happens in Israel does not stay in Israel. Those of us who defend Israel in the public square understand the significance such an arrangement could carry.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, consider Israel’s Arab citizens. Their communities face violent crime, inadequate policing, infrastructure deficiencies, housing shortages and educational disparities. Effective representation matters. As the saying goes, nobody brings a rental car to the car wash. People invest in institutions in which they have a stake. Giving Arab representatives governing responsibility would strengthen the sense that Israel belongs to all its citizens.

An Israeli friend offered a simple observation this week: “If everyone keeps their pre-election promises, we’re going to have another election.”  His comment reminded me of hatarat nedarim, the Jewish legal institution for annulling certain vows.  Judaism takes promises seriously.  Yet Jewish law also recognizes, as reflected in the tradition of hatarat nedarim and the familiar words of Kol Nidre, that commitments made without full knowledge of future circumstances may, under prescribed conditions and for the greater good, be reconsidered. What good could be greater than the future welfare of the Jewish state?

Jews love invoking Abba Eban’s famous observation that the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. I can’t help but wonder if this is a moment that future generations will turn that observation back on us.

Perhaps what appears to be a dilemma could become an opportunity to break political deadlock and reconsider entrenched patterns of exclusion – a moment calling for political imagination across the spectrum.

It is the great “what if” of our people, from the first Jewish family to the present day. What if Abraham had found a way to keep Ishmael in the fold? Israel’s leaders now have a chance to recognize possibilities that have longed seemed out of reach; its citizens have a chance to give those leaders the political room to act, and together the opportunity to summon the courage and collective imagination to build a Jewish and democratic state capacious enough for all who seek a place within the tent of Abraham.

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For decades, the American Jewish community has battled the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel. Now, in the aftermath of the election there, it has the opportunity to deal it the biggest blow yet. All it has to do is send one clear message to the Israeli opposition leaders: Join with the Arab parties.

Many Israelis, such as The Democrats party leader Yair Golan, are making the same argument. Arab Israelis voted in historic numbers in this week’s national election, winning a total of 19 seats with all votes counted. Together Zionist and Arab parties would, with 67 seats, become the country’s ruling coalition and bring an end to the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot pledged not to bring Arab parties into his coalition, and doing so would be no easy task. But if pressure builds at home and abroad — and if he gets cover and encouragement from Jewish leaders around the world — he might find a way. It’s a big ask of Eisenkot and more conservative opposition members, but it’s the right ask.

Breaking that one promise would enable Eisenkot to keep many more. He could pass his top legislative priorities, including an independent inquiry into Oct. 7, a crackdown on Jewish terrorism in the West Bank and a restoration of democratic norms.

Those are the immediate — and sufficient — Israeli reasons. There is a more basic one: a democracy shouldn’t treat the votes of 20% of its citizens as treyf. And from abroad, there’s an added benefit, one that could have a long-term impact on Israel’s well-being: Undermining the BDS movement.

For a generation, the movement to boycott, divest and sanction the Jewish state has called on governments, businesses and institutions to pull their investments from Israel, cancel Israeli academics and performers, and ban the import of Israeli goods.

It hasn’t succeeded — yet. Israeli international exports surged to $169 billion in 2025, the highest ever, and more than 35 states have passed anti-BDS laws. But BDS has been notching some major wins: In June, United Auto Workers delegates voted — barely —  to divest from Israel bonds, the first major union to do so. Internationally, at least 50 universities, institutions and academic groups ended cooperative programs with Israeli universities, and there have been more than 1,000 cases of academic boycotts, cancellation of student exchange programs and research grants.

Some of that is in direct response to the Gaza War, but the BDS movement has built the infrastructure that turned outrage over the war into concrete actions.

The BDS movement has also normalized, or tried to normalize, the idea that entities that do business with Israel are complicit in apartheid, that Israel is a sham  democracy and that Zionism is racism. BDS supplies the vocabulary of anti-Israel diatribes on social media.

Now Israel’s election provides a historic opportunity to prove BDS wrong,  to take the steam out of a movement that shows no sign of slowing. Bringing together Jews and Arabs in a ruling coalition would be the single greatest blow to BDS.

For decades, American Jewish leaders and organizations have lobbied government officials, organized counter-petitions and worked to stem the BDS tide.

That job can now either get much easier, or immeasurably more difficult. A Jewish-Arab ruling coalition that acts on the issues of crime and under-investment plaguing Israel’s Arab communities would belie BDS advocates’ claim that a Jewish state and democracy are mutually exclusive.

That same Jewish-Arab partnership would have to work toward resolving Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza disaster — but those enormous tasks will be much easier with a strong majority and in a country not facing constant international pressure.

And if those 19 Arab seats amount to nothing? If the Jewish parties do all within their power to disempower Arab citizens who turned out in historic numbers?

Try arguing against the BDSers then. Try defending Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East” when 20% of its citizens were just shut out of national representation.

Of course, there are other good reasons to bring the Arab parties into the government. One of them is written into Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which promises Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel, “full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.”

For decades many Arab Israelis didn’t believe that sentence because they didn’t experience it. They stayed home, many because they refused to participate in a system that they believed would never truly serve them. This time, enraged by the Gaza War, fearful of violence in their own community and disgusted by the overt racism of Netanyahu’s Kahanist cabinet ministers, they chose to vote.

“I also wanted to show that Palestinians can participate when we choose to, and that our exclusion cannot be blamed on our refusal to enter the political arena,” wrote the journalist  Nagham Zbeedat in Haaretz.

Seeing Arab Israelis dance in celebration when the election results were announced is a testament to the power of democracy and the hope it brings.

I know that what gives hope to American Jews like me instills fear in many Israelis. Palestinians from Gaza came over a border and slaughtered their loved ones.

But Palestinian citizens of Israel did not join the terror — something Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar counted on them doing. Arab Israelis were killed alongside their Israeli Jewish neighbors. And in many cases, they rescued Jews under attack.

American Jewish institutions need to step up and fight as hard for including Israeli Arabs in a new government as they do against boycotting Israel. Because fighting for democracy and fighting against BDS — it’s the same fight.

The post American Jews have fought BDS for 20 years. Israel’s election just handed them the winning move. appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) —

Allegations that Qatar secretly funded efforts to boost Arab voter turnout in Israel’s election have sparked a political firestorm, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declaring the vote “stolen” as his opponents accuse him of trying to undermine the results.

“The Ra’amgate affair is an earthquake,” Netanyahu’s Likud party said in a statement posted on the prime minister’s X account, referring to Ra’am, one of two Arab lists running in the election. “They stole the elections in Israel.” 

Elections officials were at pains to say that the allegations did not indicate widespread fraud, and even if they were substantiated, would not invalidate the election.

“The elections to the Knesset were conducted lawfully,” acting Central Elections Committee director-general Dean Livne wrote Thursday, adding that “to the best of our knowledge there is no basis for claims of systematic harm to the integrity of the elections.”

The Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security apparatus, also cautioned against jumping to conclusions. “The Shin Bet has not yet completed its investigation, and any statements concerning the substance or nature of the suspicions under investigation do not reflect the agency’s position,” the statement said. “Such statements should have been avoided.”

Opposition leaders welcomed any investigation and accused Netanyahu of fearmongering – and noted that figures in his office have been under investigation for months for alleged ties to Qatar. 

“I welcome the fact that Netanyahu is finally condemning Qatari involvement in the State of Israel,” said Gadi Eisenkot, whose Yashar Party is the largest in the opposition bloc. “It is serious when it happens in the Prime Minister’s Office and it is serious if it happens in the election system.”

Eisenkot accused Netanyahu of trying to change the rules after losing the game.

“What is already clear is that Likud and Netanyahu have embarked on an orchestrated and organized campaign to delegitimize the election results,” he said.

If the allegations are substantiated and found to have affected the results, a court could invalidate the election in whole or in part and order a new vote – though overturning an entire election is unprecedented in Israeli history.

The controversy erupted after Arab parties won a record 19 seats in Tuesday’s election, potentially giving them a decisive role in efforts to unseat Netanyahu. 

With counting complete, Netanyahu’s bloc has 53 seats and the opposition bloc led by Eisenkot has 48, leaving neither with the 61 seats needed for a majority. One potential path for Eisenkot is to form a government with Arab parties or a minority government with their support from outside the coalition.

In a letter Wednesday to Shin Bet chief David Zini, Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, chairman of the Central Elections Committee, called for an investigation into suspected foreign interference.

“Serious suspicions have been brought to my attention regarding improper influence on the elections through foreign funding by outside actors operating against Israeli interests,” Sohlberg wrote.

“I cannot attest to the nature of these suspicions,” he added, but said that because they involved foreign entities, “there is an obligation to investigate them thoroughly.”

Sohlberg instructed Zini to “uncover evidence to substantiate or refute the suspicions,” requesting findings within a week, ahead of the deadline for filing election appeals.

The letter did not identify Qatar or any Arab political party.

Likud alleged that foreign actors had sought to bring about an “Islamization of Israel” and overthrow the right-wing government. It urged other Zionist parties not to cooperate with Ra’am or the Joint List to replace the Knesset speaker or form a government reliant on Arab lawmakers.

Ra’am chairman Mansour Abbas denied any connection between his party and the suspected financing.

“Ra’am has no connection whatsoever to the affair in question or to any other such affairs,” Abbas said in a statement, pledging full cooperation with law enforcement.

He mocked Netanyahu by invoking the allegations that Netanyahu’s office has been infiltrated by Qatari agents and also by linking him to his son Yair, a provocateur who has been caught up in separate controversies.

“To Abu Yair [father of Yair], who employs Qatari agents in his office, we have one message in response to the campaign of incitement and delegitimization he is waging against Arab citizens: There will be nothing, because there is nothing,” he said.

Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana called the allegations the most serious in Israeli democratic history, while National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir urged the arrest of Arab party leaders suspected of involvement.

In a statement Thursday, the Shin Bet said the intelligence originated from its own operations and “did not come from any political party or political entity on either side of the political spectrum.”

The agency stressed that the investigation was narrowly focused and “does not cast suspicion on, or accuse, an entire sector of society that went out to vote democratically and legally.”

Qatar rejected the allegations, calling them “ridiculous and dangerous.”

“We categorically deny allegations that Qatar has interfered in Israeli elections or funded any activities intended to influence their outcome,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Majed Al Ansari said in a statement.

Al Ansari accused Israeli politicians of attempting to use Qatar as a scapegoat for their electoral setbacks, pointing to what he described as contradictory accusations that Doha had bought Netanyahu’s loyalty, financed Israel’s left and now manipulated Arab voters.

Experts on Israel’s Arabs said the massive turnout was organic.

Rami Zeedan, a professor of Israel studies and author of a book on Arab political participation in Israel, said he observed extensive grassroots mobilization during three months of fieldwork in Israel this summer. Many Arab voters viewed Netanyahu’s government as particularly hostile to their community and were determined to replace it, believing that almost any alternative would treat them more equitably as Israeli citizens, he said.

“The exceptional turnout was therefore not inexplicable,” Zeedan told JTA. “It reflected a genuine and highly visible effort to remove Netanyahu and his government.”

Zeedan said Likud and the Israeli right have long sought to delegitimize Arab political participation. He warned that the allegations could be used to cast doubt on the entire Arab vote or justify calls for a new election.

“The danger is that an investigation into specific financial or criminal allegations will be transformed into a sweeping claim that the Arab vote itself was fraudulent,” he said.

Joint List leader Yousef Jabareen accused Netanyahu of attempting to delegitimize Arab voters and prevent the new Knesset from being sworn in on schedule.

“Netanyahu was defeated at the ballot box. No incitement campaign will change the voters’ decision,” Jabareen wrote on X.

Knesset member Ahmad Tibi, also from the Joint List, fired back after the prime minister questioned why he had visited Qatar four days before the election.

“I told Al Jazeera in Doha that we very much want to bring you down,” Tibi wrote on X, quoting Netanyahu’s post. 

“Meanwhile, according to Israeli police, the only ones who received Qatari money are those in your own office. Lots of money,” he added, referring to the investigation into allegations that Netanyahu’s aides received payments to promote the Gulf state’s interests.

Anwar Mhajne, a political scientist originally from Umm al-Fahm, said she was not surprised by the Arab voter turnout, saying she witnessed “sophisticated social media mobilization by journalists, influencers, activists,” who made a compelling case for voting.

Mhajne argued that Netanyahu was using the allegations to discourage opposition parties from partnering with Ra’am and the Joint List.

“The allegations risk achieving Netanyahu’s objective before the investigation concludes: making cooperation with Arab representatives appear illegitimate and closing off a possible route to replacing his government,” she said in an email to JTA.

President Isaac Herzog called for the allegations to be thoroughly investigated but warned against casting suspicion on Arab voters collectively.

“Even at a moment like this, we must not tarnish an entire community that sought to exercise its right to vote and take an active part in democracy,” Herzog said Thursday.

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