Malign, Then Go for the Vote: Netanyahu Reaches Out to Arabs
(Bloomberg) -- With less than a week before what’s shaping up to be another tight and inconclusive race against former military chief Benny Gantz, Benjamin Netanyahu took his election campaign to the people it’s bad-mouthed to galvanize his base: Israel’s Arab citizens.
The prime minister stopped at an Arab town on Wednesday to try and rustle up votes, or possibly more likely, to attempt to defuse a protest vote against a major theme of his -- that a government resting on Arab support would be a calamity for the country.
“Now he’s crawling on all fours to us,” said Ayman Odeh, the head of the Joint List, an alliance of Israeli Arab parties. “I’m glad he had the opportunity to look the Arabs in the eye just before we end his political career.”
Israel Radio reported that only a few dozen people, including some brought from outside to beef up the ranks, showed up for the brief campaign stop in the town of Tamra, where Netanyahu discussed what his government has done for the Arab community. A small number of protesters also arrived, with a Palestinian flag, Israel Radio reported.
Netanyahu’s appearance was uncharacteristically closed to the press.
Relentless Quest
The prime minister says Gantz can’t form a government without the backing of the Joint List, which holds 13 of parliament’s 120 seats. Polls show it faring similarly in Monday’s election.
Israel’s Arabs account for a fifth of the country’s population and have ethnic ties to Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, who aren’t citizens and can’t vote in Israel’s national elections.
Netanyahu has been relentless in his quest to finally beat Gantz after two inconclusive votes in less than a year. He opened his campaign positioning himself as a peerless statesman able to wrest unprecedented concessions from the U.S. and consort with Arab leaders suddenly eager to establish ties with Israel.
When that didn’t budge the polls in his favor, the loftiness evaporated as he launched a nasty campaign against Gantz and his running mates, and went populist by vowing to expunge the criminal records of marijuana users, keep taxes in check, and bring about 400 Ethiopian Jews languishing in camps to Israel.
These tactics may have helped, although not enough to suggest a victory. Netanyahu’s Likud party overtook Gantz’s Blue and White this week for the first time since polling began for the upcoming vote, but his nationalist and religious bloc is still short of a parliamentary majority.
“He tried everything and none of that changed the polls,” said pollster Dahlia Scheindlin, who is advising the Joint Arab List party for the March 2 vote. “He will stop at nothing to get every single vote.”
(Updates with report on the campaign stop in fourth paragraph.)
To contact the reporter on this story: Yaacov Benmeleh in Tel Aviv at ybenmeleh@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Nayla Razzouk at nrazzouk2@bloomberg.net, Amy Teibel, Mark Williams
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