Ahead of Israel’s election, anti-Arab rhetoric has been intensifying as the country confronts a decisive question: whether Arab citizens and parties can be legitimate partners in government.
I have been working in the Jewish-Arab sphere for nearly 20 years. Over the past several months, vicious incitement against Arab citizens has surged. Its unprecedented intensity has one clear objective: to ensure that Arab parties will once again be shunned as potential coalition partners in a new government. That would prevent a change of government.
Take healthcare, for example. The incitement against Arab hospital staff has been gaining momentum. A video by a far-right influencer claiming that “if you don’t trust someone to carry a gun, you shouldn’t trust them to hold a syringe” is a typical instance of the online flood. Violent attacks on Arab bus drivers have become routine – alongside inflammatory rhetoric portraying them as a threat. Two commentators on the Israeli TV Channel 14 recently claimed that “many Arab bus drivers deliberately block intersections to create traffic jams … Arab drivers who hate us, transporting busloads of 50 or 100 people at a time, is a ticking time bomb”.
Likewise with incitement against Arab teachers in primary schools and kindergartens. Recently, Jewish parents in some areas received an anonymous SMS demanding: “Are you Jewish? Does your child’s kindergarten have an Arab teacher or aide? Report them to us.” For these hate-mongers, the first day of school is the start of hunting season.
The incitement, naturally, is also top-down. Bezalel Smotrich posted a disgusting video on X threatening Arabs in the Galilee with the same persecution he has inflicted on West Bank Palestinians. Yes, a senior government minister is threatening to shrink the area in which a national minority may live. If this reminds you of something from the history of European Jews in the 1930s, you remember correctly.
This is a campaign of demonisation.
The racist rhetoric is calibrated to portray Arab workers as dangerous ticking time bombs instead of as citizens providing essential services in difficult jobs for low pay. The intent is to reinforce the same perception in all spheres: an Arab citizen is not a neighbour, doctor, driver, teacher, or student – but a threat. This is not a collection of isolated incidents; it is a strategically orchestrated campaign.
Let us not mince words: this campaign features appalling racism and shameful ingratitude towards Arab citizens who persevere, despite intensifying humiliation and violence, in keeping essential systems running as integral actors in society. The country’s healthcare, public transportation, and, in some areas, early childhood education systems would collapse without the participation of Arab professionals.
Racist attacks on Arabs are not a new phenomenon. A decade ago, I wrote that it was not merely “ordinary” racism against a national minority, but also a backlash by the far right against the growing strength of Arab society and its integration into Israel’s economy and society. Since then, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the most virulent anti-Arab racist of them all, has advanced from the political fringe into the government and the cabinet, while Likud now includes Kahanists whose incitement against Arabs rivals Ben-Gvir’s. Channel 14 and far-right social media are fuelling hatred of Arabs among ever-larger segments of Israeli society. Example: Micha Lakin-Avni, Channel 14, 25 September: “In our hospitals, there are Arab doctors and nurses who poison Jews, and it is covered up day in and day out.”
It is crucial to understand the main objective of this attack: to prevent the formation, after the elections, of a coalition that includes an Arab party. To achieve that, a perception must be created that Arab citizens are enemies. Indeed, even before the last few months, research by the aChord Center revealed disturbing findings: large segments of the Jewish public, among them opposition voters, now view Arab citizens as enemies.
Because who would want to bring their enemies into the government?
Decades of efforts to delegitimise Arab political power have done enormous damage to the Jewish public’s perception of Arabs and their political leadership, but failed to prevent the formation of a coalition with an Arab party in June 2021, which succeeded in ousting Netanyahu from power temporarily, for the only time since 2009.
And so the inciters have now shifted to a two-pronged attack. First, they are pressing ahead full force with their lies and blood libel against leading Arab political figures: portraying all of them as illegitimate leaders. Each and every one is labelled a “supporter of terrorism” – meaning they support the murder of Jews.
Now, ahead of the elections, the campaign has broadened to portray all Arab citizens as enemies. And suppose that those colluding to promote this drive succeed in igniting widespread civil violence between Jewish and Arab citizens, with bloodshed in the streets. They, the planners, do not care, and some even aspire to such an outcome.
The Israeli liberal-democratic camp has two choices. It can cooperate actively or passively with this coordinated campaign of incitement, continue to boycott the Arab parties and risk failing to replace the present government; or it can reject this campaign with contempt and choose the most basic option available in a liberal democracy by voting to form a government that represents a majority of the country’s citizens.
If Israel’s Jewish voters and political leadership choose the latter path, it will mark an important starting point to wholesale repair of the country’s social fabric. But repair will not end with the formation of a different coalition. It must also somehow touch the hearts that have been poisoned by years of incitement. Because ultimately, the test of a democratic society is not only who sits in government, but whether, in Israel’s case, it is capable of seeing one-fifth of its citizens not as enemies, but as full partners in citizenship and in life.
Republished from Haaretz
Ron Gerlitz
Ron Gerlitz is the CEO of aChord – Social Psychology for Social Change, at the Hebrew University.