Exit polls from Israel's latest election project Arab-led parties — the Joint List and Ra'am — winning a combined 17 seats in the 120-member Knesset, a record. Partial results give Netanyahu's bloc 54 seats and the opposition alliance led by Gadi Eisenkot 49, with neither approaching the 61-seat majority needed to govern. The arithmetic is plain: Eisenkot plus Arab parties equals 66 seats and a functioning coalition. The politics say otherwise. Both Netanyahu and Eisenkot have rejected partnership with Arab-led lists, citing a lack of shared values. Netanyahu called such a coalition "a shame and a disgrace" and declared it "forbidden" to rely on "anti-Zionist Arab parties." Eisenkot has imposed preconditions — recognition of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, endorsement of the Declaration of Independence, commitment to national service — that function less as policy tests and more as ideological gatekeeping. Naftali Bennett, running third, has reversed his prior openness and now demands an exclusively "Zionist" government. The result is a structural veto that analysts describe in blunt terms. Honaida Ghanam, director of the Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies, calls it "rooted in a racist structure that regards the Arab citizen as illegitimate and as an unwanted partner." Political analyst Ahmed Najar frames it as a system where Palestinian citizens "are accepted as voters when their participation serves the system but rejected as political actors when they seek the power to shape it." Over one-fifth of the electorate can participate in elections but the parties they elect are treated as inherently disqualified from governance. There is precedent for cooperation. Ra'am joined the Bennett-Lapid coalition in 2021-2022, and Arab parties supported Yitzhak Rabin's governments from outside in the 1990s. Ra'am leader Mansour Abbas has signaled willingness to join Eisenkot's government and even placed Jewish lawmaker Yoav Segalovitz at number two on his electoral slate. Joint List leaders Yousef Jabareen and Ahmad Tibi have publicly offered to help oust Netanyahu, though formal coalition membership remains unclear. The obstacle, as Najar puts it, is "neither constitutional nor practical but ideological." The lone dissenting voice within the opposition comes from Yair Golan, leader of the centre-left Democrats party, who urged allies to "no longer accept Netanyahu's racist division between Jewish votes and Arab votes." But Golan is inside a bloc whose leader has already drawn the line. Ghanam outlines four possible outcomes: another election, a minority opposition government with outside Arab support, defections from opposition to Netanyahu's bloc, or a national unity government. None of these scenarios gives Arab parties genuine governing power. The structural pattern is clear and self-reinforcing. High Arab turnout strengthens Arab parties numerically but triggers defensive reactions from Jewish-led parties who fear the political cost of partnership more than they fear continued Netanyahu rule. The veto doesn't require formal legislation — it operates through consensus refusal, making the electoral system function as what Najar calls a mechanism "built to preserve Jewish political supremacy." The question Najar poses to Eisenkot — whether he is "prepared to challenge that racist political order or remain confined by the same exclusionary logic that Netanyahu has spent years exploiting" — is the structural question facing Israeli democracy itself.
