Balad chief, barred from running, blames Israeli ‘racism’ for political deadlock

Balad faction chief Sami Abou Shahadeh says the only reason yesterday’s election isn’t seen as a loss for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is that Israeli society is too racist to view Arab-led parties as part of the opposition.

The bloc of Netanyahu’s supporters is projected to have won 53 seats in the Knesset, while his opponents are projected to have won 67. But that opposition number is split between Jewish-led parties, which won 48 seats, and Arab-led parties that won a historic high of 19 seats, up from 10 in the outgoing Knesset. Most of the Jewish-led parties have ruled out a coalition with the Arab parties, presaging political deadlock.

“If we lived in a normal, democratic, non-racist country, Netanyahu would have lost the election,” Abou Shahadeh says in an interview with the Qatari channel Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.

Abou Shahadeh’s Balad faction is part of the Joint List, which is projected to have won around 12 seats, in addition to seven seats going to the Arab-led Ra’am party. Abou Shahadeh himself left the Joint List slate after the High Court was poised to disqualify him over an article he wrote indicating support for the Hamas-led October 7 attack. He later walked the article back.

“In reality, Netanyahu’s camp did lose the election — dropping from 68 seats to 54 — and the contest should have ended there,” Abou Shahadeh tells Al-Araby, using an earlier projected tally.

“But because of the racism within Israeli society, we are still debating whether or not this was a decisive outcome,” he continues. “The fundamental issue in Israeli society has always been, and remains, its racism directed against anything Arab or Palestinian.”

Abou Shahadeh specifically criticized the leading opposition candidate, Gadi Eisenkot, who has said that neither of the Arab-led parties meets the conditions he has set for joining a coalition.

“Eisenkot has a majority to form a government, yet what prevents him from doing so is his own racism,” Abou Shahadeh charges. Referencing Eisenkot’s background, he adds, “Eisenkot, a leader of Arab — specifically Moroccan — descent, says he refuses to sit with Arabs. This is a racist society.”

Two of Eisenkot’s other coalition partners — B’Yachad chief Naftali Bennett and Yisrael Beytenu chief Avigdor Liberman — have more explicitly ruled out partnership with Arab-led parties, claiming that such a move would be illegitimate after Hamas’s October 7 attack, in which Arab Israelis were killed and taken captive along with Jewish Israelis.

Yair Golan, chair of the left-wing Democrats, is the lone opposition party chief calling for political partnership with the two Arab-majority parties.