🇮🇱🔍 Why Israeli politicians are desperate to shut Palestinians out of power

Israel's opposition once argued that cooperation with Palestinian Arab parties was key to ending Benjamin Netanyahu's long dominance of Israeli politics.

Now, the same politicians are trying to freeze Palestinian Arabs out of the government, despite the fact that they represent one-fifth of the population.

The pledge has been repeated in recent weeks by figures across the anti-Netanyahu camp, such as Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, who used to defend their partnership with Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas as the necessary price of ending Netanyahu’s dominance.

The same stance is shared by Gadi Eisenkot, who has been positioning himself as a potential PM. Opinion polls suggest that at the October election Eisenkot's bloc will be running neck-and-neck with Netanyahu's coalition.

👉 This marks a sharp retreat from the pragmatic experiment of 2021 and shows how the events of October 2023 rewired the political climate around cooperation with Palestinian citizens of Israel.

The latter make up roughly two million people and are descendants of those who remained after the 1948 war.

Their parties have sat on the political margins for decades, and the taboo was broken only in 2021, when Ra’am’s four seats allowed Bennett and Lapid to assemble a majority.

However, that arrangement lasted barely a year. Now, the taboo appears to have returned.

🔴 71.5% of Jewish Israelis oppose including Arab parties in the next government (Israel Democracy Institute)

🔴 57% of Israelis oppose a Palestinian state under any circumstances (Institute for National Security Studies survey)

Political arithmetic may ultimately prove more stubborn than campaign rhetoric since Israel's fragmented parliament has repeatedly produced deadlocks.

Recent polling suggests neither bloc can count on securing a majority alone.

There is also another lingering question: whether the political cost of ignoring Palestinian citizens of Israel will eventually become too high for the Zionist state.

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