Oded Balaban — University of Haifa — balaban@research.haifa.ac.il
On the night of 29 October 2026 there was a demonstration outside the home of Gadi Eisenkot, in support of Jewish-Arab partnership. Dany Algarat spoke. He addressed Eisenkot by name, with no intermediaries, the way one speaks to a neighbour.
The arithmetic explains why they went there. In the election of 27 October no bloc reached the sixty-one seats that make a majority in the Knesset. Ynet’s count gave fifty-three to Netanyahu’s bloc, forty-eight to Eisenkot’s and nineteen to the Arab parties. The figures were still moving as this was written, but the situation they describe is stable. Eisenkot cannot form a government without the Arab parties, and the only alternative left to him is an understanding with the Likud, that is, with Netanyahu. Governing with them admits of two forms. One is to bring them into the coalition; the other, to form a minority government that they sustain from outside, as Rabin did in 1992 with what was called the blocking majority. Algarat does not choose between the two. He asks for what makes both possible, which is to stop treating Arab citizens as a danger. That is what the appeal is about.
Dany Algarat is not an activist like any other. His brother Itzik was abducted on 7 October 2023 and, months later, identified among three hostages murdered in captivity. He himself spent twenty-four years in the bomb disposal unit of the Israeli police and retired with the rank of sgan nitzav, equivalent to a senior superintendent. Before that he had served in combat engineering; afterwards he was director of environmental quality in the municipality of Ashdod. Today he teaches Islam and Middle Eastern studies to secondary school students. His family was one of the six that set up Begin Gate, the permanent protest site of the hostages’ families. He led hunger strikes and returned his police medal of honour when the government dismissed Yoav Gallant.
His argument has a simplicity that is uncomfortable. On 7 October, he says, it became clear who was dangerous to the state. That government had no Arabs in it and no leftists. It was a government of the full right, with Kahanists, that is, with the declared heirs of Meir Kahane, and with racists. Those who brought the country to that point were in power, not outside it. The premise that Arab citizens are a danger to security is refuted by the plain fact of who was governing.
The second thing he says is equally concrete. The Arabs of Eretz Israel contribute to society, to health, to the economy, in every field; on 7 October they were not the ones who came out of their homes, and they condemn what happened. Of Eisenkot he asks two things: not to be afraid, and not to go chasing Netanyahu’s mirages. He reminds him, in passing, that if it suited Netanyahu he would leave tomorrow with Ahmad Tibi.
What makes these words hard to dismiss is where they come from. This is not someone arguing in the abstract about coexistence from the outside. It is a man for whom 7 October cost a brother, and who asks for the opposite of collective punishment. That is the most uncomfortable position for anyone who wants to use another person’s grief as a political argument.
The original video, as published by Algarat himself: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1439898390913807. The Spanish subtitles are mine, and the subtitled version is on my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/reel/2624693014638152.
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