Today, it is safe to say that the Knesset election campaign has kicked off in the Arab sector. We have seen media leaks and the Joint Arab List and Ra'am parties trade barbs, all at what appears to be a greater intensity than what we have seen between the Right and Left or between the ultra-Orthodox and the secular sectors.
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This is a highly dramatic week for the Arab parties, as one would not normally expect the Joint Arab List to vote against a no-confidence motion from the opposition or for Ra'am, a coalition member, to abstain.
While Ra'am abstention was almost openly coordinated with coalition leaders, it was meant to send the message to the Arab public that regardless of when elections are called, election season has begun.
To date, the coalition has done more to abandon Ra'am leader Mansour Abbas than Abbas has done to abandon the coalition. If Abbas had any intention of quitting the government, he would have done so and leveraged the move for political gain following the violent events in Jerusalem over the last month. Yet this is not on the table as Abbas believes he has yet to obtain a significant achievement for Arab society and is unlikely to do so in the future.
The attempt to bring an Arab party into the coalition has not been a success at this stage, in particular, due to the narrow structure of the coalition government. Such a narrow government does not allow for political maneuvering and threatens on a weekly basis to bring about a new round of elections as well as make it less likely for Arabs to integrate into Israeli politics. This process should have taken place two decades ago. Since the founding of the state, Zionist parties avoided the possibility of integrating Arab parties in the coalition, and Arab parties for their part saw the Israeli government as the institution responsible for implementing discrimination against Arabs. Among both Arabs and Zionists, the consensus was one that leaned away from pragmatism.
Nevertheless, the Islamic Movement's entry into a coalition headed by the former head of the Yesha Council, the umbrella organization of Jewish authorities in Judea and Samaria, and someone who believes in a unified Israel and does not recognize the Palestinians' rights to a country between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is a bold although apparently not entirely implementable step at this stage.
The Arab dilemma as to whether to topple the government is far more difficult than that of the Zionist consensus over whether or not to have an Arab party join the coalition. Among other things, the Joint Arab List fears that if the current government dissolves, it will result in a coalition government headed by Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu in cooperation with Otzma Yehudit party head Itamar Ben-Gvir. On the other hand, if the Joint Arab List provides a lifeline to the current coalition, Ra'am would necessarily use this against them in an election campaign.
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