Who gets a veto over Israeli action against Hamas and Iran?

As the world awaited the official counting of the votes in Israel’s election for a new Knesset, one thing seemed clear: Neither the coalition led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor that of the “anyone-but-Bibi” alliance of parties arrayed against him appeared to have a path to a majority that would enable them to easily form a government.

Yet the results raise the question of whether a government could be formed by the anti-Netanyahu coalition combining its strength with that of the anti-Zionist Arab parties, which significantly increased their strength in this round of elections.

Will they keep their promise?

To do so would violate the pledges made by three of the main anti-Netanyahu parties led by former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, former prime minister Naftali Bennett and former defense minister Avigdor Liberman, who all promised never to be part of such a coalition during the campaign.

Many on the Israeli left and elsewhere say those parties were bullied into making such a pledge by Netanyahu and their fear of being viewed as aligned with parties that oppose the existence of the Jewish state. Critics of Netanyahu and the Israeli right claim that attempts to exclude the Arab parties from government or even to speak of anyone winning a majority of the Zionist or Jewish vote, as the prime minister did in his election-night address to his supporters, is inherently racist.

That may sound reasonable to Americans, whose political parties have always been vaguely ideological, but not sectarian or representing ethnic or religious groups. And it is entirely true that the votes of Israeli Arabs count just as much as those of their Jewish fellow citizens, and that their representatives have the right to enter the Knesset. Contrary to the smears and blood libels hurled at Israel, it is not an “apartheid state” but a democracy.

And it is also true that a precedent was established by the ragtag, shaky coalition formed in June 2021 led by Bennett, when one of the Arab parties participated: Ra’am, led by Mansour Abbas.

So what factor, other than anti-Arab prejudice, would bar either of the two Zionist coalitions from forming some sort of pact with Abbas and Ra’am, and the larger Joint Arab List, to end the uncertainty and form a government?

The answer is obvious. And it has nothing to do with Jews being prejudiced against Arabs and/or Muslims. 

Simply put, at a time of ongoing war against Iran and its terrorist proxies—Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen—the notion of giving parties ideologically opposed to the existence of the State of Israel an effective veto on security questions and the stability of Israel’s government is unimaginable. Or at least it would be, if those seriously considering such a deal prioritized the defeat of these forces, rather than merely being obsessed with ousting Netanyahu.

A half-truth

As Netanyahu noted with grim satisfaction in an address to his supporters on Tuesday night, the pre-election polls coming from media outlets hostile to him greatly underestimated the strength of his Likud Party and its allies. As the votes were counted, Likud did emerge as by far the largest of the parties. But his alliance of right-wing and religious parties was still short of winning an outright majority, which marked a change from the last election, when it did achieve that goal.

That allowed his foes to claim that Israelis had rejected the prime minister since a majority had voted for parties not aligned with him. That was a half-truth because it involved combining the votes of the anti-Netanyahu Zionist parties and those Arab and Islamic parties.

The idea that supporters of the United Arab List and the Ra’am Party on the one hand, and on the other, those backing Eisenkot, Bennett or Lieberman, are somehow aligned with each other is fictional. However, it does open up the possibility that although the anti-Netanyahu coalition seems to have gotten far fewer seats than the prime minister’s bloc, it could manage to form a government by allying itself with the Arab parties.

What they stand for

It’s important to remember what these two Arab parties stand for.

Abbas’s United Arab List, better known by its Hebrew acronym Ra’am, came into being as the political wing of the Islamic Movement in Israel, an extension of the international Islamist and terrorist Muslim Brotherhood. It has broken off from that movement but still holds to its basic ideology while also claiming to favor a two-state solution with Israel. That’s a contradictory position that allows it to maintain its links to its old allies (whose factions have been banned for inciting and advocating violence) while attempting to represent Israeli Arabs—in particular, the Bedouin, who support it in large numbers.

Abbas got high marks from liberal Israelis and others who cheered his willingness to join with Netanyahu’s opponents in 2021. In return, for propping up the government led by Bennett (who was elected on a pledge to never sit with anti-Zionist parties or those of the Israeli left), he received much-needed funding for Arab communities.

The other Arab Party is the Joint List, a coalition of secular nationalist Arab parties that includes Hadash, the former Communist Party of Israel, and is led by academic Yousef Jabareen. It improved its showing in the last election in 2022 by reuniting with one of its former constituent members, the radical leftist Balad Party, which ran on its own four years ago and fell below the threshold of votes needed for entry to the Knesset.

This restored Joint List did far better than Ra’am this time. Its radicalism and full-throated opposition to Israel’s existence and Zionism is undiluted by any appeals to moderation. It appealed more to Arab voters, who on the whole do not seem to have rewarded Abbas for his past service in a Zionist-led government.

Abbas appeared to double down on posing as moderate in this election. Ra’am gave the second slot on its list to Yoav Segalovitz, a Jewish Israeli former Israeli law-enforcement officer and member of Knesset for the center-left Yesh Atid Party, who was essentially acting as a beard for his new Islamist friends. But this tactic didn’t garner many Jewish voters. By contrast, Arabs were inspired to turn out in large numbers by the prospect of electing radicals who would be their answer to Israeli right-wingers like Otzma Yehudit’s leader Itamar Ben-Gvir, the current national security minister.

The Haredi analogy

Some on the Israeli left say the Arab parties ought to be no more out-of-bounds for participation in a government than the Haredi parties: the Mizrachi Shas and the Ashkenazi United Torah Judaism, which are not, at least in principle, Zionist.

But this argument is somewhat disingenuous. 

It’s true that, strictly speaking, Shas and UTJ aren’t Zionist because the rabbis who act as their spiritual authorities don’t consider the current State of Israel to be the answer to the messianic hopes of Jews for the last 2,000 years. One can certainly criticize them for enabling a culture of avoidance of military service or even of participation in the economy for Haredi men. But they have not only worked with and participated in the government of Israel for decades; they also do not sympathize with or support Israel’s enemies. They illustrate the difference between non-Zionism and anti-Zionism. One is based on acquiescence to the need to cooperate with the Jewish state. The other is part of an effort to destroy it.

The two Arab parties have offered to provide their votes to Eisenkot and the Zionist left from outside the government to enable them to oust Netanyahu. But whether inside or outside the Cabinet, it would make Eisenkot and his colleagues utterly dependent on factions that could pull the plug on them at any moment.

That means they could rely on Jabardeen and Abbas to back their plan to topple Netanyahu and perhaps enact constitutionally dubious legislation to ensure that he would be barred from office in the future. Once that was accomplished, Eisenkot—or whoever it was that wound up forming such a minority government—would know that their tenure would end the moment they displeased these Islamist and Arab nationalist factions.

Giving insurance to Iran and its allies

That could effectively give Iran insurance that Israel would not strike (with or without the United States) its nuclear and ballistic-missile facilities, as well as other targets that aid its fomenting of international terrorism. That would likely also extend to any action to ensure that Hezbollah isn’t able to re-establish its ability to threaten northern Israel, which was largely eliminated by the current government’s victories won during the course of the war that ensued after the catastrophe of Oct. 7, 2023.

And it might also be exactly what Hamas needs to ensure that it can get away with its refusal to abide by the terms of the October 2025 ceasefire agreement with the United States, and both disarm and surrender control of the approximate 30% of the Gaza Strip it still controls.

That is why the precedent of Mansour Abbas’s participation in the government led by Bennett and his colleague Yair Lapid from June 2021 to December 2022 isn’t a reason to try such a scheme again.

Israelis may have patted themselves on the back during those 18 months for demonstrating to the world anew that it was a democracy in which Arabs as well as Jews could govern. While that fact didn’t convince any of its critics to stop libeling it as an “apartheid state,” it also took place in a time when Israel wasn’t at war.

During the period before the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab orgy of mass murder, torture, rape and kidnapping that took place on Oct. 7, the entire Israeli military, intelligence and political establishments, including both Netanyahu and those who opposed him in the current election, were convinced that Hamas wasn’t really a threat. Few understood the gravity of their country’s security predicament as Iran put in place the forces that would launch a multi-front war on the Jewish state.

In the aftermath of that disaster and the costly war Israel was forced to fight against foes who amply demonstrated their genocidal intent, it’s all well and good to second-guess Netanyahu and blame him for it happening on his watch. But it is equally apparent that refraining from inviting into the cabinet parties that are against ensuring the elimination of the ability of Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran to again call into question Israel’s existence is not an irrational or bigoted perspective. It’s simply common sense.

And that is not even taking into account the argument that in the remaining two years of President Donald Trump’s second term, Israel has a window of opportunity to ensure its security. That window is likely to close once he leaves office and is replaced by either a Democrat or a Republican like Vice President JD Vance, who would, at best, be less interested in Israel’s strategic dilemmas and might be hostile to Jerusalem.

Even if we assume that Eisenkot would wish to follow in Netanyahu’s footsteps and form a partnership with Trump on these issues—an assumption that may be unfounded—the idea that an Israel governed by a coalition dependent on the goodwill of the Joint List, let alone Ra’am, could pursue such necessary policies is pure fantasy.

A theory of cooperation

In the past, some Zionist thinkers have written and spoken of the need for a Jewish state where Arabs would also be empowered as partners. In particular, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, one of the founding fathers of Zionism and Israel and the ideological North Star of the Israeli right, wrote of the need for shared governance and Arab participation, even mentioning the idea of Arabs serving as vice premier of the state when a Jew was prime minister.

This is cited by those who oppose Netanyahu as a justification for a government with Ra’am or the Joint List.

Still, his idea presupposed the achievement of the “Iron Wall” Jabotinsky had written of in his 1923 essay on the subject of securing Arab acquiescence to a Jewish state. Only when the Arab and Muslim world was ready to realize that the Jewish state that would become Israel (after his death in 1940) could not be defeated and was a permanent fact accepted by the Arabs could such a scheme work. The tragedy of Oct. 7—and the subsequent surge of antisemitism across the globe driven by anti-Zionist agitation and blood libels—demonstrates that the world is a long way away from a theoretical era of peace when Jabotinsky’s liberal vision could conceivably be accomplished.

From this perspective, the belief that Israel needs a government that secured its votes only from the Zionist parties that share a national consensus against repeating the mistakes of Oslo and the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza seems not merely reasonable but an imperative. To smear it as being racist is deeply wrong.

An Israeli government beholden to parties that oppose Israel and sympathize with its enemies is entirely possible and would be legal if attempted. Many of Israel’s past governing coalitions were formed because politicians broke promises to the Israeli people.

Yet the next government of Israel will have the responsibility to ensure that the victories achieved after Oct. 7 via the heroism of its soldiers, the support of its citizenry and the courage of its leader are not thrown away. A Zionist government for Israel is essential in wartime.

Regardless of whether voters favor Netanyahu’s continuance in office—or think that his ouster and giving Eisenkot a chance to lead Israel is the change their country needs—opposition to a minority government that relies on Arab nationalists, communists and Islamists is a rational course of action, not bigotry. Israelis and Americans who support the Jewish state should not be shamed or intimidated into failing to point this out.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS. Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.