Akiva Eldar describes Netanyahu’s campaign tactics and their consequent fallout on AL Monitor:
In Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s school of morality and politics, accepting a bribe is no reason to unseat an elected premier, nor is a hostile takeover of the country’s media. He insists that a prime minister should not be replaced because of criminal indictments or guilty verdicts. According to Netanyahu, a prime minister can only be “replaced at the ballot box,” although what he means is that a prime minister can only be “replaced by Jews at the ballot box.”
March 17 marks two years since his horrible election-day video warning — “Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls” — and calling on Jews to turn out en masse. It’s hard to know how many votes he picked up for the Likud with this alarmist message, but the damage he caused to relations between Jews and Arabs is discernible.
The annual index compiled for more than 40 years by professor Sammy Smooha of Haifa University points to a decline in the Jewish majority’s perceived legitimacy of the country’s 20% Arab minority. The proportion of Jews accepting the Arabs’ status as a minority with full civil rights in a Jewish and democratic state fell from 75% to 68%. Three out of 10 Jews think the Arabs should leave the country and receive appropriate compensation. The percentage of Jews who refuse to have Arabs as neighbors grew from 41% to 48%.
At the same time, the Arabs’ perception of the state’s legitimacy has also changed. Whereas 66% of Arabs recognized Israel’s right to exist in the 2015 survey, the rate declined to 59% in the 2017 survey. Only a minority, 47%, of Israeli Arabs are reconciled to Israel as a state with a Jewish majority compared to a majority of 60% two years earlier. In addition, the study discerned a significant increase in the threat perception of Israeli Arabs, with 73% fearing a severe undermining of their basic rights compared with 68% in the previous poll.
There is a certain resemblance to GOP tactics for riling up their base, isn’t there? Get the emotions going, call the other side “God haters”, get the fight or flight mechanism firing – and then harvest the votes.
It’s really quite despicable, isn’t it? And it has consequences, as the cohesiveness of the Israeli state falls apart, which in turn exacerbates the tensions in the Middle East.
