A Historic Opportunity for Israel
On the evening of the 27 October 2026 election, the verdict seemed familiar: once again, Israelis had been unable to decide. That is true if one counts only Jewish voters. If one counts all citizens, more than a fifth of whom are Arab, the opposition clearly prevails. The historian Michael Brenner draws the consequences: for the first time, a government could be formed with the decisive support of Arab parties. From the mistrust that has grown since 7 October to accusations that the election was ‘stolen’ and campaign pledges, the obstacles are many. But the precedents of 1992 and 2021, and even the writings of Jabotinsky, founder of the Zionist right, show that such a coalition is by no means unthinkable.
Israel’s citizens have once again decided that they cannot decide, as they already did in three inconclusive elections between April 2019 and March 2020, none of which produced a majority capable of governing. But is this observation really accurate? Only if one is speaking of the country’s Jewish population, which makes up a good three quarters of the electorate. If one includes the more than twenty per cent of Arab Israelis, most of whom today identify as Palestinian citizens of Israel, it does not hold. If we regard Israel as a state of all its citizens, the result is unambiguous: Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc has lost the election, and the opposition, including the Arab-majority parties, has won a clear majority.
“For the first time, a government could be formed in Israel with either the active support or at least the passive toleration of a considerable Arab component.”
The parliamentary arithmetic as it stands does indeed offer a historic opportunity. For the first time, a government could be formed in Israel with either the active support or at least the passive toleration of a considerable Arab component. It would make a clear statement: against the charge that Israel is an apartheid state, and for a new relationship between Jewish and Arab citizens. Such a government would reflect what is already a reality today in many sectors of Israeli society. Take the health sector, for instance. A quarter of all doctors, dentists and nurses, and half of all pharmacists in the country, are Palestinian citizens of Israel. Among the victims of Hamas terror on 7 October 2023 were Arab Israelis too, including paramedics at the Nova music festival. Given the discrimination that many Arab Israelis feel in their everyday lives, it cannot be taken for granted that their elected representatives are now extending a hand to the Jewish majority with a view to governing the State of Israel together.
Let us not deceive ourselves. Time and again, especially after 7 October 2023, leading figures in the opposition camp, too, have stressed that they would form coalitions only with ‘Zionist parties’. While some Jewish Israelis see a broad coalition as proof of the country’s vibrant democracy, the majority of them fear that, in a state under acute threat, the participation of Arab parties would pose a potential security risk.
The Two Precedents
And yet the idea of Arab parties taking part in government is neither entirely far-fetched nor without precedent. Similar situations have arisen twice before. The 1992 government of the social democrat Yitzhak Rabin had a majority only thanks to the toleration of two Arab parties1, although they were not partners in the governing coalition. The result was the government that has so far come closest to a peace agreement with the Palestinians: it was this government that signed the Oslo Accords. At the same time, however, the division of Israeli society deepened during this period. Violent right-wing protests against the concessions to the Palestinians culminated in November 1995 in Rabin’s assassination by a far-right extremist.
The second precedent is the government formed in 2021 by politicians from every camp, united only by their rejection of Netanyahu’s policies. Under the two rotating prime ministers, Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, the Islamist Ra’am party2 was an active coalition partner, and its leader, Mansour Abbas, became the first representative of an Arab party to be appointed a minister (albeit without portfolio). But the government had only a wafer-thin majority and collapsed after a year and a half.
A New Political Weight
What is different today? Israel has changed fundamentally since 7 October 2023. Mistrust between Jewish and Arab Israelis has grown; the once-ostracised far right, after four years in government, is accepted by large sections of the population as an established force; and the two-state solution, like any other solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, seems to have receded into the distant future. Moreover, the previous models rested on the support of a small number of Arab members of the Knesset. In 1992 the two Arab parties supporting the government had only five members between them; in 2021 Ra’am had just four. Today the opposition needs the members of the Arab-majority parties, who would therefore carry decisive weight in such a government.
“He speaks of the ‘theft’ of the election, as though it were the preserve of Jewish Israelis alone.”
The signs, then, are by no means favourable for such a government. Netanyahu has repeatedly warned against high turnout among Arab citizens. Instead of seeing it as a sign of their democratic participation, he speaks of the ‘theft’ of the election, as though it were the preserve of Jewish Israelis alone. Trump’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, then adopted this view, probably unconsciously, when he wrote in a statement: ‘Arabs vote same as Israelis’, for all the world as if Arabs were not Israelis. This sounds as if writing about American Jewish voters: ‘Jews vote same as Americans.’
The right is pointing to the campaign pledges made by opposition politicians not to enter into a coalition with anyone who has not made an unequivocal commitment to Israel as a Jewish state. Its representatives are already predicting that Eisenkot, Bennett and Lieberman3, should they break this promise, will swiftly vanish into political oblivion, just like Benny Gantz, the opposition politician who once set out with great ambitions and who had withdrawn his party from the race even before the election because it had become completely irrelevant.
But this analogy has a crucial flaw. Gantz did not, after all, disappear because of any cooperation with the Arab parties, but because he had entered into an alliance with Netanyahu that proved fatal for him. Despite all the reservations, it is the aversion to Netanyahu, the fear of yet another election and the lack of other options that are now leading some Israeli politicians of the centre and the left to think openly, and even aloud, about a coalition backed by the Arab parties.
“In every Cabinet where the Prime Minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab, and vice versa.”
A Partial Reading of Jabotinsky’s Legacy
The right-wing camp around Likud, which now loudly cries betrayal and a sell-out of Jewish interests, and which wants a cordon sanitaire against Arab parties, should be reminded of the words of its founder. Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the Odessa-born right-wing nationalist Zionist, was by no means averse to such an idea. In his book The Jewish War Front, published shortly after his death in 1940, he wrote these remarkable words: ‘In every Cabinet where the Prime Minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab, and vice versa.’4 Israel would probably sooner turn into an island in the Mediterranean than see Mansour Abbas or another Arab politician become deputy prime minister, let alone prime minister. But the vision of a state of all its citizens (admittedly within maximal borders that would also include present-day Jordan) was once considered kosher even on the Zionist right.
Today every Likud politician may well have a portrait of Jabotinsky hanging in their office, but they no longer know his writings. Jabotinsky knew what he was talking about. For a long time he fought for equal rights for the Jewish minority in Eastern Europe and for its political participation. In Poland and other interwar states, this minority was, in his view, to enjoy not only individual but also collective rights. From this he concluded that a Jewish majority in a future shared state would have to grant such rights to an Arab minority too.
Admittedly, much has happened since Jabotinsky wrote those words: the Holocaust, numerous bloody wars between Israel and its Arab neighbours, the Palestinians long refusal to recognise the State of Israel and, above all, the escalation of the conflict in recent years. Nevertheless, a look at history shows that even on the Israeli right there are precedents for actively including the Arab population in the political process. All the more reason, then, for the parties of the centre and the left to rediscover models that point to new ways out of the bloody dilemma of recent years. Is such a path likely? No, not at all. But nor is it impossible. For as Theodor Herzl wrote in his novel Altneuland (Old New Land): ‘If you will it, it is no legend.’5
- Hadash (the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality) and the Arab Democratic Party, with three and two members respectively. ↩︎
- Ra’am, the Hebrew acronym of the United Arab List, is the political arm of the southern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel. ↩︎
- Gadi Eisenkot, former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces; Naftali Bennett, prime minister from 2021 to 2022; Avigdor Lieberman, leader of Yisrael Beiteinu. ↩︎
- Vladimir Jabotinsky, The Jewish War Front, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1940. ↩︎
- Theodor Herzl, Altneuland, Leipzig, Hermann Seemann Nachfolger, 1902. ↩︎
Michael Brenner
Michael Brenner teaches Jewish History and Culture at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and holds the Seymour and Lillian Abensohn Chair in Israel Studies at the American University in Washington, D.C. He has written numerous works, such as The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (Yale University Press, 1996); German-Jewish History in Modern Times (Columbia University Press, as co-author, winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Jewish History 1997); After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany (Princeton University Press, 1997); A Short History of the Jews (Princeton University Press, 2010); Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History (Princeton University Press, 2010); In Search of Israel (Princeton University Press, 2018).