Who Is Allowed to Govern Israel?

JERUSALEM: Benjamin Netanyahu's warning against a government dependent on Ra'am or the Joint List is being presented as an argument about national security, but its deeper significance lies elsewhere. Israel's latest election has produced a parliament in which neither Netanyahu's bloc nor Gadi Eisenkot's opposition alliance can govern alone. Netanyahu's Likud-led bloc holds 53 seats, Eisenkot's four-party camp holds 48, and the two Arab-led parties hold 19. President Isaac Herzog has therefore asked Eisenkot to try to form a government after 67 members of the new Knesset recommended him during consultations. The political arithmetic is clear enough. The constitutional and moral argument that follows from it is much harder.

Netanyahu has urged the Jewish-led parties to avoid creating a government that depends on Ra'am or the Joint List, arguing that these parties should not be allowed to exercise decisive influence over Israel's security and national direction. His language has been deliberately severe because he is fighting not merely over coalition arrangements but over the definition of legitimate power. He is asking Israelis to accept that there is a difference between Arab representatives being permitted to sit in parliament and those same representatives being permitted to decide who governs. His opponents see this as an attempt to delegitimise elected Arab lawmakers at precisely the moment when their votes have become indispensable to any alternative government.

The point deserves to be examined without slogans. Israel faces real security threats. Its citizens have lived through war, terrorism, the trauma of 7 October 2023 and years of confrontation with Iran and armed groups across the region. Political leaders are entitled to judge potential partners by their positions on security, constitutional order and the future of the state. No parliamentary democracy requires parties to enter coalitions with people whose programmes they consider dangerous or unacceptable. Yet there is an important distinction between refusing to govern with a particular party and declaring that a category of elected representatives should not be allowed to determine who governs at all. That distinction now lies at the centre of Israeli politics.

Arab citizens of Israel vote in national elections, elect members of the Knesset, pay taxes, use the institutions of the state and live under the laws enacted by parliament. If their parties are lawful participants in elections and their members are recognised representatives of the electorate, the democratic logic is uncomfortable but straightforward. Their votes in parliament are supposed to have political consequences. A system in which Arab citizens may vote but in which their representatives are treated as unacceptable whenever their support becomes decisive creates a distinction between formal citizenship and effective political power. That is the issue Netanyahu's warning has brought into the open.

Ra'am itself makes the question more complicated than Netanyahu's rhetoric suggests. Mansour Abbas has spent years trying to move Arab politics towards practical participation in Israeli government. Ra'am has emphasised budgets, infrastructure, crime, housing and services for Arab communities, and it has already demonstrated a willingness to cooperate with Jewish-led coalitions. The Joint List is politically different, more confrontational on questions of Palestinian identity and the character of the state, and less willing to accept the conventions of Zionist coalition politics. Treating both parties as though they are one ideological object may serve Netanyahu's political purpose, but it reduces a complicated political landscape to a simpler and more useful enemy.

Eisenkot's own position is not simple. He has been handed the first opportunity to form a government, but he has not been handed a stable majority. His bloc has 48 seats. The Arab-led parties recommended him to President Herzog, but some of Eisenkot's Jewish partners remain reluctant to depend on them for a governing majority. Avigdor Lieberman's Israel Our Home has opposed a minority government dependent on Arab parties, while other factions carry their own red lines. Eisenkot must therefore choose between several difficult routes. He can seek outside support from Arab parties, try to draw ultra-Orthodox parties away from Netanyahu, or explore a broad unity arrangement that would require accommodation with forces he campaigned against. None of these paths is easy, and the fact that Herzog received 67 recommendations for Eisenkot does not mean that 67 members agree on a common government.

This is why the present dispute cannot be reduced to a contest between a democratic camp and an anti-democratic camp. Eisenkot's allies also have doubts about relying on Arab parties, while Netanyahu's supporters can point to genuine ideological disputes over Zionism, national security and the Palestinian question. The difficult democratic principle is narrower. If political exclusion is justified, it should be justified by specific conduct, constitutional positions or legal standards that would apply to any party, not by the assumption that Arab representation as such is unfit to influence government. Once ethnic identity becomes the practical boundary of political legitimacy, democratic citizenship becomes unequal even if the ballot paper remains formally equal.

Israel has lived with this contradiction for much of its history. The state defines itself as Jewish and democratic, two principles that have often coexisted uneasily. The Jewish character of the state has national, historical and religious meaning for the Jewish majority, while democratic citizenship requires that non-Jewish citizens possess political rights that do not vanish when their votes become inconvenient. There is no formula that removes the tension. What can be said is that a democracy is weakened when participation is welcomed at the level of voting but distrusted at the level of power.

Netanyahu understands this argument, but he also understands the political force of fear. His career has been built in part on presenting himself as the leader who sees dangers others underestimate. He has repeatedly connected external threats with internal political choices, portraying decisions about coalitions, courts, territorial policy and security as questions of national survival rather than ordinary political disagreement. That method works particularly well in Israel because the country's security concerns are not invented. Iran is real, Hamas is real, Hezbollah is real, terrorism is real, and the memory of national catastrophe is never far from public life. Netanyahu's political skill has been to place himself at the centre of this landscape and to make his own survival appear closely connected to the survival of the state.

The present argument therefore serves two purposes. It warns Israelis about a coalition Netanyahu considers dangerous, and it places his opponents under a burden of proof that he does not have to carry. Eisenkot is required to explain why a government supported by Arab parties is legitimate, while Netanyahu can describe the very dependence on those parties as evidence that the alternative government is suspect. This shifts the debate away from whether Eisenkot can assemble a parliamentary majority and towards whether the majority itself is morally acceptable.

That has consequences beyond the present coalition negotiations. A parliamentary system depends on more than the mechanical counting of votes. It depends on the belief that participation can lead to influence. If a large minority concludes that its representatives may sit in parliament but must never be permitted to determine the government, the incentive to participate constructively weakens. Exclusion can then become self-reinforcing. Jewish parties point to Arab alienation as evidence that Arab parties are unsuitable partners, while Arab voters see permanent exclusion as evidence that moderation and participation bring little reward. Each side becomes proof of the other's suspicion.

For Israel, this is not only a domestic democratic question but a strategic one. The integration of Arab citizens affects social stability, policing, economic development, relations between communities and Israel's international standing. A state under constant security pressure has an obvious interest in ensuring that all citizens believe there is a meaningful political route for grievances and ambitions. Participation is not an act of charity. It is one of the mechanisms by which a state turns diversity into institutional stability. When citizens believe that political institutions can produce real influence, they have a stronger reason to invest in those institutions. When they believe that their votes are accepted but their political consequences are rejected, resentment has a rational basis.

None of this means Ra'am or the Joint List must be brought into government. Parties remain free to draw coalition lines, and voters remain free to reject those choices at the next election. It does mean, however, that the argument should remain political rather than ethnic. If an Arab party is excluded because of a specific policy, statement, constitutional position or security concern, that case can be made and judged. If the exclusion rests on the premise that an Arab-backed government is inherently illegitimate, the argument changes from coalition strategy into a question about the hierarchy of citizenship.

Eisenkot must now decide whether he can turn a parliamentary recommendation into a functioning government. Netanyahu must decide how far he will push the claim that Arab support invalidates the legitimacy of his opponents. The Arab parties must decide whether influence from outside government is enough, whether formal participation is worth compromise and whether they can persuade Jewish voters that their involvement strengthens rather than weakens the state. President Herzog, meanwhile, has already signalled the central difficulty. The numbers may point in one direction, but mutual vetoes and political distrust make the ability to form a stable government much less certain than the raw arithmetic suggests.

The coalition crisis will eventually end in a government, a second mandate or another election. The argument it has exposed will not disappear with it. Israel must still answer whether Arab citizens are participants in the state only in the limited sense that they may vote and be represented, or whether their representatives can legitimately exercise the same parliamentary power as everyone else when the numbers make them decisive. That is not a question about sympathy for Ra'am, the Joint List, Netanyahu or Eisenkot. It is a question about whether citizenship retains the same meaning when political power becomes uncomfortable. The durability of Israeli democracy will depend less on how loudly its leaders speak about unity than on how consistently they apply that principle when the votes they need belong to people they would rather not need.