According to the survey, the most qualified candidate for prime minister in the Arab sector is Benjamin Netanyahu, with 24.9 percent support, followed by Ahmad Tibi of the Joint Arab List with 14.3 percent.
By: Ariel Ben Solomon
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s effort to gain Israeli Arab votes by emphasizing his practical policy towards them by aiding with issues that concern them appears to be gaining traction. He has been seen in the media sitting with Bedouin sipping tea, visiting the Bedouin city of Rahat in the Negev and playing soccer on the beach with Arab children all to court a new swath of voters.
Mansour Abbas, the head of the United Arab List Party (UAL, also known by its Hebrew acronym, Ra’am)—the political branch of the southern branch of the Islamic Movement—broke off from the Arab Joint List of parties after angering them for seeking to improve ties with Netanyahu and the government.
Arik Rudnitzky of the Israel Democracy Institute and Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center told JNS that “it appears that many in the Arab public do not believe that the Knesset can further their interests.”
“But they do believe that the government is the real power-broker,” he said.
Against the backdrop of the social and economic crisis following the coronavirus pandemic in the past year and increasing bloodshed due to rising criminal incidents in the Arab sector, “quite a significant portion of the Arab voters will support Netanyahu, hoping that he will take care of their burning needs.”
An in-depth analysis of a survey carried out by the Konrad Adenauer Program for Jewish-Arab Cooperation at the Moshe Dayan Center reveals that those who intend to vote for Likud pay less attention to the party’s ideology and political platform than those who intend to vote for the Joint List.
“In other words, the ‘Likud Arab voter’ is not necessarily identified with Zionist ideology, but rather, is interested in getting results here and now,” explained Rudnitzky.
Surprisingly, according to the survey, the most qualified candidate for prime minister in the Arab sector is Netanyahu (24.9 percent), followed by Ahmad Tibi (Ta’al) of the Joint List (14.3 percent), and then Joint List and Hadash head Ayman Odeh. It also found that half of the Arab voters (46 percent) support an Arab party’s participation in any government after the elections.
And it discovered that the Joint List—made up of the Communist Hadash, nationalist Balad and Tibi’s Ta’al Party—would receive around eight Knesset seats while Abbas’ UAL would barely squeak into the Knesset with the minimum four seats.
