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A few years ago, I took my mom and sister, who were visiting me in Israel, to Rosh HaNikra, a tourist attraction in northern Israel.
We were waiting in line, and there was a group of Israeli-Arab schoolgirls there on a field trip, probably around 10 years old. My sister said something to one of them, and she said back to her, “Welcome to Palestine.”
Welcome to Palestine? Who taught her to say that? Her parents? Her school? Arab media? All of the above?
I’ve met many Israeli Arabs who are good people, good citizens, grateful for living in Israel. Of course there is racism in Israel. It has improved over the years but has not been eradicated.
Newsflash: No country has eradicated racism. Thailand, a country I have visited often, has its own deeply embedded prejudices, including discrimination between light-skinned and dark-skinned Thais. I’m not saying that to excuse Israel’s racism, but I am saying that Israel is not unique in having it.
What bothers me is the hostility toward Israel’s very existence that persists within parts of Israeli-Arab political and public life, despite the enormous opportunities that Israeli citizenship provides.
We are talking about a country with sophisticated healthcare, universities, infrastructure, democratic institutions, economic opportunities, and freedoms that are extraordinary by regional standards. Israel is the only Jewish state in the world, yet its Arab citizens can vote, establish political parties, serve in the Knesset (Israeli parliament), challenge the government in court, and participate in national political life.
And still, the basic question of whether Israel should exist as the national homeland of the Jewish People remains a point of political contention.
That is not an insignificant disagreement about crime, taxes, education, housing, or transportation. It concerns the foundational identity of the country itself. A political movement can oppose a government, challenge discriminatory policies, and advocate for constitutional changes without rejecting the legitimacy of the state it wishes to govern.
But when the rejection of Israel’s Jewish character becomes central to a political movement’s worldview, Israelis have every reason to question whether that movement should be entrusted with executive power.
The events of the past three years should have made this distinction even more important, not less.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas demonstrated what its vision of a “Palestine” without Israel looked like. It was not coexistence, civil rights, or democratic pluralism. It was the systematic murder, kidnapping, and brutalization of Jews. The massacre was a reminder that the conflict is not simply about where borders should be drawn. It is also about whether the Jewish People have the right to exercise national sovereignty in our ancestral homeland.
That is why the political attitudes of those seeking to govern Israel matter so much.
Following the October 27th parliamentary election, the Arab-led Joint List and Ra’am won a combined 19 seats in the 120-member Knesset, a record result. Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc won 53 seats, while the Jewish parties opposed to him won 48. Neither camp has the 61 seats necessary for a majority, making Arab-led parties potentially decisive in determining Israel’s next government.
Hours after being sworn into Israel’s 26th Knesset on Tuesday, Ahmad Tibi (Joint List) told guests at a wedding, in Arabic: “We are the owners of the land.”
Ra’am’s number-three politician, Walid Taha, has a record of extremist statements. He called Islamic Jihad terrorist Maher al-Akhras a “heroic prisoner,” showed solidarity with antisemitic Sheikh Ikrima Sabri, and said he represents all areas of “Palestine.”
Arab members of Knesset routinely walk out of the Knesset when the Israeli national anthem plays; one of them justifies this behavior by saying he doesn’t “have a Jewish soul,” referring to the part of Hatikvah that says “nefesh yehudi” — but one does not need to have a Jewish soul in order to respect the national anthem by standing there, albeit in silence, not walking out of the room.
Meanwhile, just a few months ago, at a Fatah conference, Joint List members of Knesset stood for the “Palestinian anthem.” What message is this supposed to send to Arab-Israeli society?
Israel is being asked to place tremendous political trust in leaders whose relationship with the country’s Jewish national identity remains deeply contested. And this is precisely where I believe Jewish Israelis should draw a line.
The distinction is between having a right to participate in Israel’s democracy and earning the confidence necessary to govern it. The former comes with citizenship. The latter requires something more.
A governing coalition makes decisions about national security, intelligence, military operations, foreign policy, education, and the character of the state. These are not symbolic responsibilities. They determine whether Israel will remain the sovereign Jewish homeland for which generations of Jews fought and died.
Yoav Segalovitz, a Jewish politician elected on the Arab-led Ra’am slate, is set to become the first representative of an Arab-majority party to serve on the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, one of Israel’s most sensitive and powerful parliamentary bodies. Segalovitz reports to the chairman of Ra’am, Mansour Abbas, who has repeatedly refused to recognize Hamas as a terrorist organization.
The Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee oversees Israel’s defense and security establishment and handles highly classified information. That raises a serious question: What safeguards will prevent sensitive intelligence from reaching Hamas or its backers in Qatar, Turkey, and Iran?
Jewish distrust of Arab political leadership is not paranoia. In a 1994 speech in South Africa, Yasser Arafat — the man the world celebrated for supposedly embracing peace with Israel through the Oslo Accords — compared those agreements to the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, a 10-year truce between Muhammad and the Quraysh of Mecca. But just two years later, once Muhammad had amassed enough military power, he broke the truce and marched on Mecca, taking the city by force.
Arafat’s choice of historical analogy raised an obvious and deeply troubling question: Did he regard peace with Israel as a permanent objective, or as a temporary stage in a longer struggle?
Even more revealing was an account published in 2018 by Palestinian journalist Abd al-Bari Atwan, who claimed that Arafat had privately told him:
“I am entering Palestine through the door of Oslo, despite all my reservations, in order to return the Palestine Liberation Organization and the resistance to it, and I promise you that you will see the Jews fleeing from Palestine like mice fleeing from a sinking ship. This will not happen in my lifetime, but it will happen in your lifetime.”
In 2017, Basel Ghattas, a former Israeli-Arab Knesset member, was convicted after exploiting his parliamentary access to smuggle mobile phones and notes to Palestinian security prisoners, including convicted terrorists.
Said Nafa, a Druze politician representing the Israeli-Arab party Balad, traveled to Syria in 2007 while serving in the Knesset. During the visit, he met Talal Naji, a senior figure in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command. Nafa was convicted in 2014 of contact with a foreign agent, traveling to an enemy state, and assisting unauthorized travel there. He received a one-year prison sentence.
Azmi Bishara, a founding leader of Balad, was investigated over allegations that he supplied Hezbollah with information during the 2006 Second Lebanon War. Israeli investigators suspected him of providing information about military activity, advising Hezbollah on rocket attacks, and receiving payments. Bishara left Israel in 2007, resigned from the Knesset while abroad, and subsequently settled in Qatar.
This baggage cannot simply be wished away when politicians demand that Israelis place their national future in the hands of parties which have not clearly embraced the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty.
The current debate over Hamas illustrates the problem. Gadi Eisenkot, who has been given the mandate to form the next governing coalition, has insisted that parties seeking to join his government recognize Hamas as a terrorist organization.
Eyal Shviki, director general of the President’s Residence, asked Abbas: “Why not say that Hamas is a terrorist organization?” His response: “Leave me this space to build a bridge and to influence the other side as well. And leave me room to protect myself and my family. We are a bridge, let’s not destroy that bridge.”
What does that even mean? A bridge to whom, exactly? To Palestinian leaders and organizations that refuse to accept the Jewish state’s right to exist?
The Palestinian Authority has spent decades promoting hostility toward Israel through its institutions, while Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have made Israel’s destruction an explicit objective, pursued through terrorism and violence. Never mind the long and antisemitic history of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and other factions.
Abbas talks about building bridges as though the problem has been a lack of communication. The real problem is that those he seeks to reach must first accept the legitimacy of the Jewish state on the other side.
Why should explicitly acknowledging the terrorist character of an organization responsible for the October 7th massacre be a subject of coalition negotiations at all? It should be a prerequisite for anyone seeking responsibility over the country that organization attacked.
Israel’s Jewish identity should not become a bargaining chip either. Politicians who seek to govern Israel should be able to affirm, without qualifications or semantic gymnastics, that Israel has a legitimate and permanent right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state. They should be able to recognize that Jewish national self-determination is not a historical mistake awaiting correction, and that protecting that self-determination is among the government’s fundamental responsibilities.
These expectations should be measured through political platforms, public declarations, and conduct, rather than a politician’s surname or ancestry. In a democracy, nobody is owed a cabinet seat, and nobody has an automatic entitlement to join a governing coalition simply because their party won representation in parliament.
This brings me to an issue I believe Israel has failed to confront with sufficient seriousness: the expectation that the Jewish state must continually prove itself worthy of acceptance by political movements that remain unwilling to accept the state’s defining purpose.
Israel is perpetually told to do more. Spend more on Arab communities, improve their educational opportunities, expand their infrastructure, address their economic inequalities, strengthen their political representation. Some of these are legitimate governmental responsibilities, and fulfilling them serves Israel’s own national interests. But providing public services and guaranteeing citizenship rights cannot become a perpetual negotiation over whether the Jewish state deserves to exist.
A country can address social and economic inequalities without allowing its national legitimacy to be treated as an unsettled question by those aspiring to lead it.
I am far less frightened by European governments condemning Israel, American politicians threatening to withdraw support, Australian activists marching through the streets, or South African officials dragging Israel before international courts than I am by the possibility of Israel’s own national institutions being controlled by political forces that reject the country’s fundamental identity.
Foreign hostility is dangerous, but Israel can confront it as a sovereign state. Internal political hostility toward the continued existence of that sovereignty presents a different problem altogether. A government cannot defend its country’s founding purpose if its own governing partners regard that purpose as illegitimate.
And that is what makes the current coalition arithmetic so consequential. Nineteen parliamentary seats are an extraordinary political achievement for Israel’s Arab-led parties. Their voters have every right to representation under Israel’s democratic system. But winning seats is not the same as demonstrating suitability for every responsibility of government, particularly when the governing coalition must preserve the state whose institutions give those parties their political authority.
Jewish political leaders should not be so desperate to replace Benjamin Netanyahu that they abandon the principles by which they decide who is qualified to govern. Israel’s survival, identity, and national security are more important than any individual prime minister, political party, or coalition arrangement.
The conditions should be explicit. A prospective governing partner must affirm Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish and democratic state, reject terrorism against its citizens, support the protection of its sovereignty, and demonstrate through its conduct that it can uphold these commitments. These are not unreasonable expectations. They are the foundations of responsible government.
I keep coming back to that little girl at Rosh HaNikra. She was probably too young to grasp the political and historical significance of what she said. But she had already learned to greet Jewish visitors to Israel with the words “Welcome to Palestine.” Somewhere along the way, she had absorbed a conception of the country profoundly different from the one in which she was actually living.
And that is why education, political leadership, and national identity matter. A society cannot build a durable shared future when the legitimacy of the country itself remains an open question.
I am not arguing that Arab citizens should have fewer rights. Israeli citizenship carries political rights that must remain protected. But the right to participate in a democracy is not an unconditional claim to govern it. Political parties seeking the authority to lead Israel must demonstrate that they are committed to preserving the state they seek to lead.
Israel should never have to apologize for insisting that its leaders believe in its right to exist. That is the standard its governing parties must meet, and it is one the Arab-led parties seeking executive power have yet to establish convincingly.
Arabs shouldn't be allowed to govern in any areas of authority within Israel at all, not even within the Knesset.
No MK should be allowed to serve before being sworn in with a loyalty oath.