Weaponizing Fear: Israel’s Election Season Begins
Dina Kraft — January 20, 2026
Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.
One of the first political ads of this election year in Israel is set in the safe room of an Israeli family with three young children. In the background is the immediately triggering (for any Israeli) wailing of air raid sirens. The camera quickly pans to the face of a girl of about seven in pink pajamas, her knees pulled close, her eyes wide with terror. The camera then travels to the mother clutching a newborn.
As the father scans the computer for information, a TV broadcast can be heard announcing a total anomaly for such a fraught moment: the cancellation of a security cabinet meeting.
Why? Well, the voice of the TV presenter tells us: "In the past hour, the security cabinet meeting, where critical decisions were meant to be made about the continuation of the war, was once again canceled due to the opposition of Ra’am, which said it would not take part in Israeli aggression.”
Ra’am is the acronym for the United Arab List, the Arab party that Israelis will well remember sat in the previous so-called “change government,” when an Arab party was made a member of the government coalition for the first time.
The screen of the ad fades to black to reveal a slogan from the Blue and White party (led by former Defense Minister Benny Gantz, the party describes itself as “centrist”): "The security of our children comes first. We won't rely on Arab parties.”
Gantz, who was seen as a great hope to replace Benjamin Netanyahu when he first entered politics in late 2018, says this particular campaign strategy is aimed at keeping “radicals” out of the coalition. And by radicals he is, to the dismay of his critics, lumping together Arab citizens and the country’s far-right political parties, currently in the coalition -- specifically, the far-right figure of Itamar Ben-Gvir, who serves as the national security minister. Gantz’s campaign slogan reflects this dual message: "A government of national consensus, without Ben-Gvir and without the United Arab List."
Criticism of the ad came quickly from both Arab and Jewish citizen activists.
“Instead of leading a bold democratic alternative, Gantz chose once again to delegitimize Arab elected officials and bend to right-wing rhetoric. This is not just a political mistake, but a moral failure of someone who claims to represent statesmanship,” wrote Yanal Jabarin, in the news site Walla.
Jabarin is a spokesperson for Abraham Initiatives, a non-profit that promotes equality and partnership between Arab and Jewish citizens. He wrote that the ad, “presents Arab partnership as an existential threat… The message is clear: a democratic partnership with 20 percent of the state’s citizens is not legitimate. In any other democracy, this would provoke outrage.”
An Haaretz editorial had even harsher words, saying that the ad, “exploits fear, turns it into hatred of Arabs and follows the political recipe from Rabbi Meir Kahane's ‘kitchen.’ This isn't how an Israeli centrist speaks, nor a member of the ‘soft right,’ the ’sane’ camp, or the nonpartisan one. This is how a Kahanist speaks.”
According to the most recent polls, in which Gantz’s Blue and White party fares badly (in danger of not reaching enough votes to remain in the Knesset), there is no clear bloc that wins enough seats to form a government. Currently, Likud, which according to a Channel 13 poll would be the largest party, is still well short of a majority even with the support of the far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties. The opposition would need the Arab parties to form a government.
To be sure, this is not the first election campaign in which Israel’s Arab minority has been cast as a fifth column worthy of voters’ fears. On election day in 2015, Netanyahu famously took to the airwaves to say, “Arab voters are heading to the polls in droves” in a bid to mobilize supporters to vote. Stung by criticism for including the United Arab List to form the change government he led, and well aware of the rising sentiment of suspicion and distrust of Arab citizens amid the war, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett reportedly would exclude Arab parties if he was attempting to form the next government. At the moment, he is seen as the main rival to Netanyahu.
Bennett and Gantz, who themselves served in the change government, both know that Mansour Abbas, who leads the United Arab List and served with him, is no fifth column. But by voicing the argument that Arab parties, including Abbas’s, have no place in the coalition, they lend credence to that idea – an idea Netanyahu has recently taken a step further by seeking to ban the Muslim Brotherhood and rhetorically tying Abbas to the Brotherhood.
Abbas has refuted any ties, political, ideological, or otherwise, to the Muslim Brotherhood, and has also distanced his party from any religious affiliation. In a recent interview on Israel Radio, he reminded Jewish Israelis that Arab citizens were also victims of October 7th and the Gaza War. He said Arab citizens want to be partners in the rehabilitation of Israel, too.
A top priority for Abbas and his party is combating the devastating crime and homicide wave sweeping Arab towns and cities across Israel, driven by organized crime there. It’s enabled, he and other Arab leaders continually say, by a lack of proper policing (in particular under Ben-Gvir’s watch) and years of government neglect.
“Netanyahu’s strategy,” writes Ameer Makhoul, a writer and political activist from Haifa, “is to pre-emptively delegitimize any coalition that relies on Arab representation.”
Election fever discourse may be focused on the draft (or rather, lack of one) of the ultra-Orthodox, an issue opposition parties are planning to exploit to their advantage. But Netanyahu wants to change the conversation to divide the Jewish opposition from the Arab parties. He knows that an Arab party will have to be included in a coalition led by the current opposition if they are to have a prayer of taking power themselves and doing what they say they want to do: halting rising extremism within Israeli politics and repairing Israeli democracy and security.
The election season has begun.
Dina Kraft is a journalist, podcaster and the co-author of the New York Times bestseller, My Friend Anne Frank, together with Hannah Pick-Goslar. She is a creator of the podcast Groundwork, about activists working in Israel and Palestine, and was formerly the opinion editor of Haaretz English.
Photo by Hanay, CC-BY-SA-4.0, via Wikimedia Common
