Analyst warns of rising hostility towards Palestinian citizens after Israel election

Palestinian citizens’ participation in Israel’s election has prompted a wave of hostile political and media commentary, according to analyst Ameer Fakhoury, as both Benjamin Netanyahu and challenger Gadi Eisenkott face obstacles to forming a government. A week after the vote, the country’s political future remained unresolved.

Palestinian citizens account for approximately one-fifth of Israel’s population. Turnout among the community of 2.1 million reached 80 percent, and Palestinians secured 19 seats in the 120-member Knesset. Netanyahu accused the community of stealing the election, while politicians and commentators portrayed Arab voters as internal enemies and associated them with Hamas and the attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.

Fakhoury, a specialist in Jewish-Arab relations at the Vanleer Institute, told Middle East Eye that the hostility constituted an organised political campaign rather than isolated incidents. He warned that its intensity was dangerous and compared coverage on mainstream Israeli television to Radio Rwanda’s incitement against the Tutsi minority. A recent study cited in the report found that racist discourse targeting Palestinian citizens on Israeli social media rose by 428 percent on election day and the two days that followed.

Television commentary included descriptions of Palestinian voting as “ballot-box terrorism”. Shimon Riklin, a senior journalist at Channel 14, said the Israeli public was not “racist enough”. A Likud candidate also challenged Arab journalist Lucy Aharish’s belonging in Israeli society, telling her: “You will never be part of us, nor part of the people of Israel.”

For Fakhoury, who is a Palestinian citizen of Israel and leads Vanleer’s Nisan Center for a Shared Society, the attacks reflect a struggle within the Jewish majority. Netanyahu’s Jewish Zionist opponents need Palestinian support to remove him from power, placing the legitimacy of Arab political participation at the centre of their dispute. Fakhoury argued that racism was being used as an instrument in that conflict, whose underlying stakes concern the nature of the state.

He said the treatment of Aharish illustrated how adopting the state’s Zionist narrative did not shield Palestinians from hostility. Moshe Feiglin, a far-right politician elected on Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism slate, called Palestinian electoral participation a “political 7 October”. Fakhoury said such language resonated with Israelis who viewed substantial citizenship as something reserved for Jews.

Before the election, Fakhoury had linked growing Palestinian turnout to fears arising from events in Gaza, increasing settler attacks in the occupied West Bank and ministers’ promises to deport Palestinians. Violent crime in Palestinian communities within Israel and worsening discrimination after 7 October also contributed to voters’ sense that their survival was at stake, he said.

Fakhoury argued that the election result had brought a deeper tension to the surface: the relationship between Israel’s democratic institutions and its declared Jewish character. He described Palestinian participation as a challenge extending beyond negotiations over government membership, forcing a debate about whether the state could exclude a fifth of its citizens while maintaining its democratic promise.