Yesh Atid is building an Arab voter base, but for now the party just hopes they vote
Despite setting up 32 Arab-focused branches, the party doesn’t expect to win more than a few thousand votes from the community in this election, focusing instead on driving turnout
Carrie Keller-Lynn is a former political and legal correspondent for The Times of Israel
With posters and electronic billboards emblazoned with Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s image and Arabic-language slogans in support of his Yesh Atid party lining the main commercial drive, it might be easy to assume that Tamra, in the Lower Galilee, is a Yesh Atid stronghold. Yet in Israel’s last election, held only 19 months ago, Yesh Atid captured a scant 66 — 0.5 percent — of the 12,339 votes cast in this northern Arab city.
Posters for traditional Arab vote-getters Ra’am, Hadash-Ta’al, and Balad take up less central real estate, but those parties, which pulled a collective 96% of Tamra’s 2021 vote, are expected to once again sweep the city of nearly 35,000.
That distribution is okay with Yesh Atid, according to Mohammed Elhega, a Tamra native and the driving force behind the party’s reinvigorated push into Arab society.
As publicly noted by Lapid himself during a visit to the Arab-majority city of Nazareth last week, Yesh Atid’s chief tactical concern is to drum up Arab voter turnout for the November 1 election. While the party is actively courting Arab voters for its own slate, it has been careful not to step on the toes of allies and potential allies.
In the Tuesday election, Arab voter turnout is one of the few factors that could break the predicted deadlock between blocs. Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-religious alliance polled at 60 seats in the three major network polls released Friday, one fewer than the majority needed to form a government in the 120-seat Knesset.
Lapid’s bloc held at 56, including the Islamist Ra’am party. In a third wedge of the electoral pie were the four seats forecast for Hadash-Ta’al, which is opposed to Netanyahu but is also unlikely to join a Lapid-led government. Balad continued to poll well under the 3.25% of the vote threshold to enter Knesset.
If Arab turnout is relatively high, above 50% according to some polls, Ra’am and Hadash-Ta’al will both make it across the threshold, potentially blocking Netanyahu’s path back to power after a year-plus in the opposition. If turnout is low, one of the parties may fall beneath the threshold, likely clearing Netanyahu’s way back into the premiership.
Netanyahu and Likud have also spent considerable resources stumping in Arab communities. In a sort of mirror image of Lapid’s push, pundits believe that the opposition leader does not expect to win many Arab votes, but rather hopes to lull the electorate into not seeing him as a threat and thus dampen turnout.
‘A new political species’
That prospect of Netanyahu’s return to power is worrisome to Yesh Atid activist Samah Najamy, who joined the party last year and now leads its I’billin branch.
Netanyahu has boasted of funneling considerable funds into Arab communities to help deal with crime and other issues. But his political allies include the Religious Zionism-Otzma Yehudit alliance, led by hardline Jewish nationalists Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir. Ben Gvir in particular harbors virulently anti-Arab views, such as advocating deporting “disloyal” Arabs.
Najamy voted for Mansour Abbas’s Islamist Ra’am faction in 2021, but she said she moved to Yesh Atid because she believes it is aligned with coexistence and has the ability to mainstream that vision.
The education advocate said she wants “a new political species” that is serious about creating a “shared life” for Israel’s Jews, Christians and Muslims, like herself.
“I want more leaders like Mansour Abbas, but I preferred to be inside of a ruling party, a party that has power and isn’t racist,” she said. Also, she added, “they speak about budgets,” referring to Ra’am’s promise to improve Arab society in exchange for political mainstreaming, “but they don’t talk about a shared life.”
Abbas has often spoken about the need for coexistence in his Hebrew-language statements.
Others are also drawn to Yesh Atid because of the power it yields, even if it’s not a perfect ideological fit. Arab parties have traditionally shunned joining ruling coalitions, instead railing loudly but largely ineffectually against the Zionist parties in power from the opposition. In 2021, Ra’am broke from that philosophy, arguing it could do more for constituents if it had a seat at the table. But after a year in the government, critics complained that the promised influence never materialized.
Nassib Bahouth, who is Christian, has in the past voted for the majority-Arab Joint List, from which Ra’am split off last year. Now he leads Yesh Atid’s branch in the northern Arab city of Shfar’am, citing the party’s ability to influence.
“When they went down from 15 [seats won by the Joint List in 2020] to 4, I said that’s it. I have to find a new political home,” Bahouth said.
Ironically, the factor that created an opening for Yesh Atid to attract supporters like Bahouth might be the same one that threatens Arab turnout and the party’s chances of holding onto power.
In 2020, the four Arab parties had a banner year, running together as the Joint List. In 2021, they slipped from 15 seats together to a total of 10, six for the Joint List and four for Ra’am. Today, the Hadash-Ta’al remnant of the Joint List polls at four.
Arab voter turnout in the 2021 vote hit a nadir, plummeting to 44%, down from 63% in 2020, when the Joint list was still together. Overall Israeli voter turnout was 67% in 2021, with an estimated 72% among Jewish voters.
Last month, Balad split from what was left of the Joint List, which is now known simply as Hadash-Ta’al. For the upcoming vote, pundits and pollsters have predicted Arab turnout as low as 37% and as high as half in recent weeks.
And many of those who vote may no longer cast ballots for Arab parties.
“If the Joint List were still together, you wouldn’t see anyone here who is Arab,” Bahouth said, pointing to an auditorium next to a popular Tamra eatery where about 40 locals had gathered to hear Elhega and a delegation of Yesh Atid politicians speak.
Building a long-term network
Echoing a position made famous by Mansour Abbas, Elhega, who goes by his childhood nickname Shoko, has said that the past year is groundwork for a larger, longer-term vision.
“Don’t forget that everything we’ve done for Yesh Atid has been done only in the past year,” Bahouth said, in support.
According to Elhega, the party doubled down on its outreach to Arab voters following last year’s election, placing Elhega in charge of its newly created Arab community division in August of 2021. In September, Yesh Atid slotted him into the 29th spot on its candidate roster.
In the past year or so, Elhega said, he and his team have built a network of 32 Yesh Atid branches in Arab and mixed Jewish-Arab cities, with a special focus on Israel’s northern and Negev regions.
Whether the party’s efforts will translate to seats in the Knesset this November, however, is unclear.
Elhega says “I really don’t know” when asked about the party’s Arab voter potential. Bahouth doesn’t think it’s powerful enough to net a full seat, but possibly a half mandate at “between 18 and 22 thousand votes.”
That would still be a tremendous jump from the 8,000 votes Yesh Atid believes came to the party from Arab and Druze voters in 2021, according to Elhega, with Druze making up 4,200 of those votes.
While Elhega said that Yesh Atid recruited him to build out its Arab affairs section from an understanding that “Arab society is inseparable” from Israeli society, he declined to speculate on why the party, founded in 2012 by former journalist Lapid, waited 10 years to create such a role.
However, he said that its attention toward the matter now is born out of “responsibility and commitment,” sentiments that Elhega the candidate echoed to potential voters gathered to meet the party’s politicians.
At the Tamra campaign event held mid-October, and countless others Yesh Atid has hosted throughout the four-month election season, Elhega said that Arab voters are most concerned with reducing crime and violence in Arab society, followed by freeing up building permits and city planning in Arab areas.
Both have been cornerstone issues for Arab voters, and while the outgoing government made limited progress on them, even Yesh Atid acknowledges much waits to be done.
“No, the situation is not good. But is it better than it was a year and a half ago?” Deputy Public Security Minister Yoav Segalovitz asked the crowd of potential voters at the Tamra campaign event.
Yesh Atid’s point man on combating violence, Segalovitz also echoed Abbas by adding that such change “is a process.”
Whether that process will create a meaningful base of Arab Yesh Atid voters in the party’s future remains to be proven. But whether it has successfully roused Arab voters to the polls on Tuesday may just decide this election.
“At the end it’s in your hands,” Yesh Atid MK Inbar Bezek told the potential voters assembled in Tamra. “Make sure your families, your friends, your towns go out and vote.”
