Opposition leaders claim new Gantz campaign against Arab parties is hypocritical, aids PM

Opposition parties have accused Benny Gantz’s centrist Blue and White party of anti-Arab racism, hypocrisy and desperate maneuvering following a series of video ads the party released Tuesday that stated that a government coalition should not include Arab parties or far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who leads the Otzma Yehudit party.

The campaign has garnered intense criticism from both Arab parties and left-wing Zionist opposition parties for targeting Mansour Abbas’s Islamist party Ra’am and equating it with Ben Gvir. Meanwhile, Gantz’s support in opinion polls has collapsed.

In one video ad, a family is seen watching in horror with the wail of rocket sirens in the background as the cancellation of a security cabinet meeting is announced due to the refusal of government ministers from Ra’am to participate in wartime, and in the second, a family again watches in horror as Ben Gvir is appointed defense minister.

“The security of our children comes before everything; we do not rely on Arab parties,” the first ad says.

Accompanying the ad, the party wrote in a post on X: “Fateful decisions regarding the security of the State of Israel cannot be made by a narrow government that relies on Arab votes. The State of Israel needs a broad, Zionist consensus government, without Ben Gvir and without Ra’am.”

Gantz has previously stated that he would not sit in a government that includes Arab parties or that includes the far-right minister.

Opposition Leader Yair Lapid accused Gantz of hypocrisy on Wednesday over the campaign, noting that Gantz had served as defense minister in the previous government, which included Ra’am as a coalition member.

“I launched an operation in Gaza as prime minister while Ra’am was in the coalition,” the Yesh Atid party head said on Wednesday in an interview with Army Radio.

“Gantz was defense minister, so he knows that these claims aren’t real,” he continued, adding that Blue and White’s new ad campaign “only serves [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu.”

Gantz served as defense minister in a short-lived government led by former prime minister Naftali Bennett and Lapid in 2021-2022, which counted the Islamist Ra’am party among its slim 61-seat majority.

However, the Gaza operation mentioned by Lapid was launched during the transition period after the coalition had already fallen apart, before the subsequent election.

The Islamist party is, at least for now, the political wing of the Southern Islamic Movement, a group inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood, a global Islamist organization that has been outlawed in around a dozen countries for alleged links to terrorism.

Abbas has repeatedly denied that his party is connected to the Brotherhood, and said recently that the party will formally separate from the Islamic Movement and will be open to Jewish candidates.

While neither Ben Gvir nor Ra’am released any official statement in response to the ads, a video of Abbas was posted on X by journalist Yuval Sadeh in which he says that he “didn’t take [the campaign] to heart” and that Gantz is “a good man.”

This followed Hebrew media reports that Gantz had warned Abbas before the campaign’s release not to take it to heart.

Left-wing lawmakers argued that the campaign to delegitimize Ra’am aids Ben Gvir and others on the hard right.

“Whoever compares Mansour Abbas to Itamar Ben Gvir is helping Itamar Ben Gvir and is a full partner in the delegitimization campaign of two million citizens,” said Labor MK Gilad Kariv in a post on X on Wednesday, referring to Israel’s Arab population.

Ayman Odeh, leader of the predominantly Arab Hadash-Ta’al party, said in response to Gantz on X that “without us, it’s impossible to build a real alternative to Ben Gvir, [Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich, and Netanyahu’s government.”

“We do not derive our legitimacy from Gantz, Lapid, or any politician who takes part in our exclusion,” he continued, adding that “we are citizens by right, not by favor.”

“We, the Arab citizens of the state, make up 20 percent of the population. And despite the incitement and rampant racism, despite the abandonment and the hatred, we will turn out to vote in large numbers,” Odeh said.

Neither opposition nor coalition

Ra’am currently holds five seats in the Knesset, and polls indicate it will likely retain that number in the next election, currently set for October, making the party a potential kingmaker for a new government.

Several senior opposition figures, including Yair Golan’s, who heads the left-wing Democrats, and Yashar party chair Gadi Eisenkot, Gantz’s former number two, have expressed willingness to form a government including or supported by Arab parties, though right-wing opposition chiefs, including Yisrael Beytenu party head Avigdor Liberman and Bennett, whose government Ra’am was a member of, have vetoed the option.

As the blocs currently stand and assuming no big changes in the next election, the opposition bloc would only be able to form a new government by either including Arab parties in a coalition or relying on them from the outside. A boycott of Arab parties, therefore, would be to the advantage of Netanyahu’s bloc since it would remove a central option for ousting him from power.

However, in recent weeks, Gantz has signaled that he does not necessarily see himself as bound to the opposition bloc, as opposition leaders — including Lapid, Golan and Eisenkot — urged him to quit the race ahead of this year’s election.

The pressure comes amid months of polling showing Blue and White failing to cross the 3.25% electoral threshold, raising questions about the centrist party’s viability.

Amid plummeting polls, remaining relevant with the option of joining Netanyahu’s bloc could, more than anything else, be what’s truly driving Blue and White’s new campaign.

“Gantz is in distress; he hasn’t passed the electoral threshold [in polls] for weeks and is looking for all sorts of gimmicks,” Golan said in an interview with Radio 103FM on Wednesday.

“This is a man who not long ago had 35 seats and has deteriorated politically for one reason: he joined the government twice to save Netanyahu,” he continued, noting that Gantz has repeatedly reneged on his pledge not to join a Netanyahu-led government.

Gantz helped Netanyahu form a government by joining a national emergency power-sharing government with him during the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 — only for the premier to use a loophole to dissolve that government before Gantz’s turn at the premiership arrived — and he again rescued Netanyahu by joining an emergency government in the days following the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, then quit months later over what he said was the prime minister sidelining him from wartime decision-making.

Most recently on Monday, Gantz stated ambiguously that while he “will not give Netanyahu the 61st vote” and “intends to do everything so that Netanyahu doesn’t get to 61,” if the “people decide otherwise,” he will “call on [opposition heads] to join me in isolating the extremists,” implying that he would join a Netanyahu-led government.

Contrary to Gantz’s promises of national unity free of extremists, Golan noted that Gantz has more than once sat in a Netanyahu-led government with Ben Gvir  and other extremist factions, and “we received a horrifyingly extreme nationalist and corrupt government.”