Oded Balaban

Oded Balaban · Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Haifa · balaban@research.haifa.ac.il

Israeli politics has entered a crisis as dangerous as it was predictable. After the legislative elections, in which the governing bloc lost its parliamentary majority and Arab society exercised its right to vote en masse, reaching a record representation of 19 seats, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government set in motion a deliberate maneuver to disavow the verdict of the ballot box. This is not one more episode. It is the attempt to annul an election that those in power lost.

Unable to accept defeat and the loss of its majority in the Knesset, the Likud and its allies launched an incendiary accusation: they claim the elections “were stolen.” The accusation does not carry a single piece of evidence, yet it is enough to poison the institutions. They insinuate that the high turnout in Arab towns was not the legitimate response of a people fed up with years of state racism, but the product of alleged vote-buying and illegal funding.

For the far right and for Bibism, the democratic participation of the Arab public is conceivable only as a suspicion of crime. They find it intolerable that a sector making up a fifth of the country should rise up, stream to the polls, and demand its rights.

But that mobilization has reasons no one in good faith can ignore:

1. Years of systematic incitement, budgetary strangulation, and hate-filled rhetoric (led by figures such as the Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir) produced the opposite of the intended effect. Instead of intimidating the Arab electorate or paralyzing it, they ignited an emergency civic consciousness.

The far right’s own provocation was, ironically, the greatest incentive to vote.

2. Arab citizens voted over what they live every day: the scourge of organized crime in their communities, police abandonment, and an economic crisis that gives no respite.

The scale of that discrimination operates on two levels, that of the law (de jure) and that of institutional and budgetary practice (de facto), and it is the backdrop that makes the mobilization not only understandable but inevitable. Turning the victim into a suspect is the old maneuver of every cornered power.

Planning, land, and housing

• Arab municipalities suffer a chronic shortage of state land allocated for urban expansion compared with Jewish localities. The absence of state-approved master plans prevents the issuing of building permits, which pushes people toward unauthorized construction and, later, demolition orders.
• The Admissions Committees Law (de jure) allows hundreds of small rural communities in the Negev and the Galilee to filter applicants socially through “admissions committees,” which may reject Arab candidates on the grounds that they “do not fit the social-cultural fabric” of the community.
• Roughly 93% of Israel’s land is state-owned, administered by the Israel Land Authority. Legal mechanisms such as the Absentees’ Property Law have historically expropriated Arab land and earmarked it for predominantly Jewish development projects.

Constitutional framework and civic rights

• Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People (2018) (de jure) reserves the right to national self-determination to the Jewish people alone, downgrades Arabic from an “official language” to one of “special status,” and declares the development of Jewish settlement a “national value” the state must promote.
• The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (de jure) restricts family reunification and access to citizenship or residency for Palestinian spouses from the West Bank or Gaza married to Arab citizens of Israel, a filter the Law of Return does not apply to Jewish immigrants.

Budget, infrastructure, and public services

• Despite partial improvements under the government’s five-year plans, a structural gap persists in capital transfers from the state to Arab local governments, resulting in worse infrastructure, roads, sewage, and public transport.
• In education, the state school system is segregated de facto into Hebrew and Arab tracks. Arab schools receive lower state investment per pupil than the Jewish sector: in infrastructure, special programs, class hours, and psycho-pedagogical support.

Employment and economic development

• De facto, Arab citizens are underrepresented in the civil service, in senior positions at state-owned companies, and in the high-tech industry.
• Since most of the Arab population does not perform compulsory military service, both de facto and de jure, it is excluded from numerous state benefits: housing subsidies, education loans, and jobs in strategic or technological sectors where prior service is required.

Public safety and justice

• In public safety and organized crime there is a critical disparity in police effectiveness, both de facto and de jure. Arab communities suffer an epidemic of organized crime and armed violence, and the homicide clearance rate by the police is far lower than in Jewish communities.
• In moments of political tension, the Arab population faces more surveillance, more preventive arrests, and more judicial persecution over the use of social media than Jewish citizens, which amounts to a de facto limitation of freedom of expression.

To attribute all this to “corruption” or “foreign interference” is an attempt to erase nearly two million citizens as legitimate political actors.

The weaponization of the security agencies

The gravest thing is not the campaign rhetoric, but the use of the state’s security and intelligence apparatus, such as the Security Service (Shin Bet), to manufacture suspicions and cast a shadow of doubt over an entire electoral constituency.

Turning the security services into arbiters of political legitimacy sets a ruinous precedent. When their chiefs respond to the implicit order of the executive and investigate how the Arab minority voted, the message is unmistakable: the rules of democracy hold only so long as they guarantee the regime’s hold on power. If the people vote “wrong,” the result is placed under suspicion.

The attorney general, Gali Baharav-Miara, said it in no uncertain terms: without a serious evidentiary basis one does not investigate a citizen, let alone elected political leaders. She asked the head of the Shin Bet, David Zini, to produce the evidence underpinning the suspicions. Zini did not produce it. Instead of offering a single piece of evidence, Ben Gvir demands that Arab leaders, Ahmad Tibi among them, be hauled in for questioning, into “the basements of the Shabak.” The phrase is not an outburst but a program: those basements evoke the treatment the state reserves for security detainees, and extending it to elected representatives of Arab citizens is to criminalize the political representation of a fifth of the country.

To ignore the attorney general’s request is to act against the law, and it is worth saying why. The Shin Bet’s remit is fixed by the General Security Service Law of 2002, which charges it with protecting the security of the state and the democratic regime against terrorism, sabotage, subversion, and espionage. Investigating a suspected electoral fraud means pursuing an ordinary crime, a matter for the police and the prosecution, not for the intelligence service. Using it for this takes it outside its legal framework. On top of that, Ben Gvir has no authority over the Shin Bet: the service answers to the prime minister, while the Ministry of National Security oversees the police. For a minister to point out who should be questioned is, moreover, an intrusion of the political echelon into law enforcement. The attorney general’s word, in the Israeli system, is the legal interpretation that binds the government. To override it amounts to placing oneself outside the law.

What if the Shin Bet did, after all, have the evidence, holding it back to spring it later as a knockout blow? It is possible, but hardly credible. The service claims something enormous: that thousands upon thousands of people received money to go and vote. An operation on that scale cannot be hidden; it leaves massive traces, accounts, transfers, witnesses. If they existed, they would already be on the table. Their absence points to the simplest explanation, that there are none.

That the warning comes from within the security camp itself is no accident. Gadi Eisenkot, the former chief of staff, reminded Zini of it in no uncertain terms: those who serve in the security establishment, in law enforcement, and in the public service “serve the kingdom, not the king; woe to anyone who corrupts his authority and his office for political considerations.” He went further: in their distress, he said, the Likud and Netanyahu “are trying to carry out a pogrom against democracy and the rule of law” and to “drag us all into a dangerous constitutional crisis,” which is precisely what makes them unfit to go on holding power.

The line between electoral bribery and campaign propaganda

One question remains that is secondary today, and will stay so as long as there is no evidence, but it is worth clearing up, because it is the one the government deliberately muddies. Is it forbidden to encourage people to vote? Is it illegal for a citizen to be paid to go to the polls?

Israeli law distinguishes two things the accusation blurs together. Electoral bribery is defined in Section 122 of the Knesset Elections Law: it is an offense to give or offer a voter a benefit in order to sway their vote, or to make them abstain, punishable by up to five years in prison, and the offense is complete the moment the offer is made. What the law punishes is payment directed at a particular voter in exchange for their vote.

None of that resembles campaign propaganda. Party campaigns cost money, a great deal of it, and that spending is legal: it is regulated by the Party Financing Law of 1973, drawn from public funds and audited by the State Comptroller. Paying for advertising, billboards, the transport of voters to the polls, or the activists who knock door to door is campaign expenditure, not bribery. The difference is not one of degree but of nature: spending to persuade and mobilize the public at large is one thing, and buying an individual’s vote in exchange for a consideration is quite another.

That is why the Shin Bet’s thesis, as it is being leaked, is legally flimsy even before examining the evidence it does not present. That hundreds of thousands of Arab citizens voted en masse proves no crime; it is, quite simply, what is called an election.

The imperative of democratic mobilization

We are facing a state of emergency for the defense of democracy. In the face of this maneuver, apathy and skepticism are a form of surrender. The government’s strategy seeks to break the morale of the democratic camp. It wants to instill the idea that the popular will does not count and that any alliance between the opposition and the Arab parties is, by definition, illegitimate, a “betrayal.”

Taking to the streets, by itself, is no longer enough. Years of protest have worn out the demonstration: mass marches have shrunk in numbers and become routine. Those in power have learned to wait for them to burn out. The fight must therefore be waged where it produces results, in the institutions and in the law, and mass mobilization must be kept for the moment when everything has to be staked.

What those who oppose the coup can do

There is no need to wait for a leader’s permission. The response must be legal, concrete, and coordinated, and it must begin now:

• Demand the immediate certification of the results. The Central Elections Committee and the courts must stand firm against pressure from the executive and certify, without a single day’s delay, what the citizenry voted.
• Take the coup to the courts. Civil-rights organizations can petition the High Court of Justice (Bagatz) against any attempt to postpone certification or to open investigations without evidence, and seek injunctions to halt it on the spot.
• Demand evidence, not suspicions. Back the attorney general in her demand that the Shabak hand over concrete evidence before anyone is questioned, and activate parliamentary oversight and the State Comptroller over the political use of the security agencies.
• Form a government now. The opposition must publicly commit to recognizing the Arab parties as full partners and build the coalition without delay, because every day it loses is a day gained by the fraud hoax.
• Convene the Knesset, elect its speaker, and secure control of the procedures, so that no result is delayed.
• Legal aid and observers to document and respond to raids and selective interrogations of Arab citizens, so that every abuse is exposed before the law and before the public.
• Pull every civic lever. Bar associations, universities, trade unions, and municipalities must speak out and act with targeted, verifiable measures, far more formidable to those in power than the diffuse march no one watches anymore.

A democracy does not die only on the day constitutional guarantees are suspended all at once. It dies, above all, when it becomes normal to accept that the vote of one part of the people is worth less than another’s. To defend the result of these elections is to defend the very possibility of a shared future. This is no time to look away.