On election day in March 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu filmed a controversial 28-second video warning right-wing voters that Arab citizens were heading to the polls “in droves.” A week later, having won against prevailing expectations, he apologized and said he had no intention of offending the Arab sector as a whole. Eleven years and six elections later, Netanyahu is playing the same game, only on a much larger scale. Since losing his majority in the October 27 elections, Netanyahu and his allies have been leveling a serious accusation: the elections were “stolen” by Arab parties through bribery, foreign financing and fraud. They demand investigations, arrests and, in the most extreme version, even cancel the vote and call for another electoral round. They have yet to present evidence, but the political goal is clear: to cast a veil of illegitimacy over the Joint List and Raam, the two Arab parties that saw record turnout and will likely be a crucial part of any effort to topple Israel’s longest-serving leader. “They are doing this because they lost,” Gadi Eisenkot, Netanyahu’s main rival, said in a video statement Thursday. Netanyahu did not lose the election outright nor did he win it. The same goes for Eisenkot. Both fell short of the 61-seat majority required in the 120-seat parliament needed for a clear victory. Israel now faces weeks – perhaps months – of political uncertainty. Netanyahu knows the math. His coalition fell to 53 seats and has no clear way to secure a majority. The Eisenkot-led bloc has 48 seats alone. But with the support of 19 seats from Arab parties, it has a clear majority of 67 seats. The only government to topple Netanyahu (the Bennett-Lapid government in 2021) included Raam, and he collapsed after about a year. Now, Netanyahu’s main objective after the elections, according to a source close to him, is to delegitimize and prevent any Jewish-Arab political cooperation that could weaken his grip on power. The effort began weeks before Election Day. In mid-October, Netanyahu and Religious Zionist Party Chairman Bezalel Smotrich announced plans to deploy some 2,000 observers to polling stations in Arab communities, framing Arab polling stations as sites of possible fraud. Early on the morning of the election, police arrested three Raam activists over an alleged cash-for-votes scheme, in a widely publicized incident. The original information about the arrests, Israel’s Channel 12 later reported, came from Netanyahu’s chief of staff, who bypassed standard channels to personally communicate with the police commissioner. The courts rejected most of the police’s requests to impose strict restrictions and some of the suspects have been released. But Netanyahu’s campaign machine seized on the story, amplifying the arrests and claiming they were an attempt to “steal the election.” As the votes were counted, the campaign continued and intensified. On Wednesday, Netanyahu’s Likud party said it had submitted hundreds of testimonies alleging bribery, threats, violence and forgery by Raam and the Joint List, while pro-Netanyahu Channel 14 reported suspected millions of shekels from a foreign source. Then a letter was leaked. The chairman of the Central Election Committee, the vice-president of the Supreme Court, Noam Solberg, had written to David Zini, director of the Shin Bet security service, requesting an investigation into “serious suspicions” of foreign financing. Israeli media later reported that Zini himself had requested the letter, after allegedly meeting Netanyahu earlier. Solberg wrote that he could not verify the seriousness of the evidence. But for Likud and other right-wing politicians it mattered little: the letter was treated as confirmation and proof. Netanyahu’s far-right allies Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir called for the arrest of Arab party leaders, with Ben Gvir alleging a Qatari-funded effort to increase Arab voter turnout, which Qatar categorically denied as “ridiculous and dangerous.” On Channel 14, the story was dubbed “The electoral terror.” Likud lawmaker Boaz Bismuth wrote in X that the results of “terrorist parties” should not be recognized until “all the stones” have been removed. On Sunday, Netanyahu himself shared a video of a right-wing activist denouncing massive falsifications and calling for “simply invalidating the elections.” The episodes sparked harsh criticism against Israel’s police commissioner and the head of the Shin Bet, both appointed by Netanyahu. “There is a common denominator between the two issues,” wrote Amos Harel, senior defense analyst at Haaretz. “In both cases, the Prime Minister’s Office is stirring things up behind the scenes with the Shin Bet and the police, and the Likud immediately seizes on the reports for a massive propaganda campaign” designed to delegitimize Arab parties and reduce the opposition’s freedom of action. However, electoral authorities rejected Netanyahu’s narrative. The Central Election Committee officially dismissed allegations of widespread fraud as unfounded and said there is no evidentiary basis to allege systematic vote compromise. On Sunday, the committee chairman appeared alongside the head of the Shin Bet and the attorney general in a special statement in which they said the elections were carried out correctly. Even if suspicions of foreign funding are confirmed, they said it will not overturn the result or undermine the integrity of the process. “Their decision at the polls will be respected,” Solberg said. Likud was undeterred, insisting in a statement that a “dark cloud” hung over the results. The opposition has broadly supported the investigation but has framed Netanyahu’s accusations as an attempt to undermine the result. Eisenkot called it a “despicable and malicious influence operation” aimed at delaying the publication of the results and delegitimizing the 26th Knesset. Yair Golan, leader of the left-wing Democrats party, said this is how “a dictator who refuses to accept defeat at the polls” behaves. The Joint List, which is the target of the delegitimization campaign, responded in its own statement. “No smear campaign will erase the achievements of the Arab public, and no attempt to cast doubt on the legitimacy of our vote will change the will of voters,” the party said in a statement last week. “You wanted us small and weak, and you got us big and strong.”
