SAKHNIN, Israel — Like many of her neighbors in the Palestinian villages scattered throughout Israel’s Galilee region, Zahra Saeed had given up on national elections. Voting, in her experience, seldom led to anything getting better for Palestinian citizens of the Jewish state.
“For us as Arabs, we knew that not much will change,” said Saeed, 31, a radio host who hadn’t voted in more than a decade. Her 70-year-old father, born some eight years after Israel became a state, had never voted in his life.
Until now.
Both turned out to cast ballots on Oct. 27, part of a historic surge of voter participation by Israel’s Palestinian population that has given a sidelined minority a taste of its own power and could force Israel to reckon with a constituency it has long found easy to ignore.
Turnout among the country’s 2 million Palestinian Israelis, about a fifth of the country’s population, reached nearly 80 percent, up from about 53 percent in 2022 and the highest in decades. Two Arab-led parties won a record 19 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, Israel’s parliament.
With Jewish voters split, those seats could put Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s opponents within reach of a majority, if they can set aside long-standing objections by some Jews to partnering with Arab parties.
The vote has already had an impact. Both Arab factions recommended that Gadi Eisenkot, the former military chief who leads the opposition, get the first chance to form a government, helping him reach 67 recommendations to Netanyahu’s 46. On Sunday, President Isaac Herzog gave Eisenkot the mandate, and negotiations are underway.
But the significance of the surge in Palestinian Israeli participation goes beyond the wrangling to form a new government. The forces that galvanized Arab citizens of Israel could shape Israeli politics and Palestinian society for years.
How Jewish Israelis treat the Arab parties in the Knesset, whether they are empowered or sidelined, also stands to be a fundamental test of Israel’s professed commitment to representative democracy.
The surge, according to interviews with more than a dozen Palestinian voters, politicians and political analysts, was driven less by hope than by fear — of crime, of home demolitions, of far-right cabinet ministers who were increasingly making them a target of their own government.
“It felt like an existential vote this time,” said Yousef Jabareen, head of the largest Arab party, the Joint List. “People who had not voted in years, or who had never voted, were voting this time to protect themselves.”
None of the underlying grievances were new.
Israel’s Arab residents, who have long navigated tensions between their identity and their Israeli citizenship, live mostly in predominantly Palestinian towns and villages, across the Galilee and along the West Bank boundary, in unrecognized Bedouin villages of the Negev and in old neighborhoods of mixed cities like Haifa and Jaffa.
With the exception of certain spheres, including hospitals and tech companies, Palestinian and Jewish Israelis live largely in parallel cultures, with Palestinian communities in general enjoying fewer services, smaller budgets and less land.
Diana Buttu, a human rights lawyer in Israel and onetime adviser to Mahmoud Abbas — president of the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank — has spent years badgering her reluctant friends and family to vote, usually without success.
“Historically, getting Palestinians to vote has been an uphill battle,” said Buttu, who lives in Haifa. “People said, ‘We have members of the Knesset and we still have settlements, we still have racism, we still have crime.’”
What changed under the Netanyahu coalition that took power at the end of 2022, according to advocates and voters, were the scale and impact of government actions on Palestinian communities.
Violent crime in Palestinian towns, which had been a chronic problem, became a crisis. Some 924 people were killed in Arab communities during the government’s four years in power, more than double than in the preceding four years, according to the Abraham Initiatives, an Israeli nonprofit organization promoting Arab-Jewish coexistence.
In 2024, Palestinian citizens accounted for nearly four of every five homicide victims in Israel, according to the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies.
Palestinian leaders said Netanyahu’s national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir — the settler leader once convicted of supporting a Jewish extremist group — did little to fight crime in their towns and loosened gun-licensing rules that added weapons to the streets.
In their telling, neglect became policy. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich moved to withhold funds earmarked for Arab municipalities. Demolitions by government bulldozers of unlicensed homes spiked. In August, Ben Gvir boasted of nearly 6,000 illegal structures demolished in a single year, most of them in desert Bedouin communities.
“Not just house demolitions, but the demolition of entire villages, with hundreds of residents,” Jabareen said. “Everyone knows someone harmed by this.”
Hostility that was once coded became explicit. Smotrich called Palestinian citizens an “internal front” in Israel’s wars. Police arrested hundreds of people over social media posts.
In September, settlers tried to establish an outpost, on the land of Majd al-Krum, a small Galilee town, using the techniques of radical West Bank settlers within Israel.
Palestinians realized that being Israeli citizens might not protect them from the aggressive settler-driven expansionism they see in the West Bank and the demolitions they see in the Negev.
Saeed, a mother of two, saw an election billboard go up near her village, emblazoned with Smotrich’s face and the words: “We will do in the Galilee and the Negev what we did in Judea and Samaria.”
“My son asked me, what is Judea and Samaria?” Saeed recalled. “I told him it’s a biblical name Jews use for the West Bank — it’s Ramallah and Nablus, where we do shopping and go to restaurants.”
It was enough to shake Saeed and thousands of others from years on the sidelines, which for some reflected plain cynicism and for others a principle: Casting a ballot meant endorsing Israeli rule.
“This time, everything just switched,” said Buttu, who pressed her aunts and uncles to send photos from their polling places. “It felt existential.”
Longtime boycotters, including some imprisoned anti-Israel activists speaking through visitors, called on citizens to vote.
The parties and advocacy groups mounted door-knocking campaigns and social media outreach.
Despite rain storms in the Galilee and flash floods in the Negev, Palestinians came out and lined up in huge numbers, prompting a barrage of last-minute videos by Netanyahu warning his supporters that Arabs were “stealing the election.”
The turnout in Majd al-Krum, where the settlement had appeared, was 85 percent, officials said.
Masad Ka’adan, 59, a retiree in Baqa al-Gharbiyye, said he was used to seeing young people in his town walk away from long lines at polling stations. Not this time.
“What I saw in Baqa al-Gharbiyye, I hadn’t seen before,” he said. “Activists encouraged people to go out and vote via social media despite the weather, there were crowds at the polling stations. This level of enthusiasm was new.”
Many said they didn’t need to be pushed.
“No one asked me to vote,” said Liman Badarneh, 18, of Arraba, who cast her first ballot. “I voted for my future.”
Having experienced what she sees as a positive outcome, Badarneh plans to stay engaged with politics. “We have power now and influence,” she said.
In this part of the country, crime was a main motivator.
Ibrahim Zubeidat, 45, runs a family supermarket in Sakhnin. Gunmen shot out its windows in January. Demands for protection money followed. When the family refused, his brother received a message threatening to cut off his head. Their calls to the police went nowhere.
“We were convinced that the police would do nothing,” Zubeidat said. “Sakhnin sees a shooting every night.”
All 16 members of his family turned out to vote for the United Arab List, he said. His daughter Baraa, 19, a veterinary student in Irbid, Jordan, crossed the border on election day to vote for the first time, then went back to Jordan that night.
Whether Palestinians stay so engaged with Israeli electoral politics will depend on how this moment plays out. In Sakhnin, they still don’t expect much. Success would be to purge the government of its most extremist ministers, see a boost in policing and stop the demolitions.
“I do not trust the Israelis,” said Saleem Abu Younis, 29, a physician who voted for the Joint List. “I only hope for at least some small change.”
The two main Arab parties disagree about how to get it.
Mansour Abbas, head of the United Arab List, says he wants a seat in the cabinet. He has argued that his stint in the government that kept Netanyahu out of power during 2021 and 2022 delivered results, including approval of a $9.4 billion development plan for Arab communities.
The Joint List, which rejects Israel’s definition as a Jewish state, says it will not join any government that oversees the occupation of the West Bank. Instead, it offers outside support.
Jabareen points to 1992, when five lawmakers from Arab parties propped up Yitzhak Rabin’s minority government in exchange for funding and a commitment to peace talks. “There are good memories,” he said. “It enabled the allocation of more resources for Arab citizens.”
He says the Joint List is ready to be that “safety net” again.
Still, Eisenkot may seek to ally with ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties over the more controversial Arab parties.
In either case, few Palestinian voters expect a new government to be a friendly one. The parties seeking to replace Netanyahu have largely backed the war in Gaza and show little appetite for a Palestinian state, though Eisenkot had pushed for an earlier ceasefire in Gaza and has denounced settler attacks in the West Bank as “Jewish terror.”
“This is not going to be a dovish government at all,” Buttu said. “My vote was between evil and more evil.”
Zubeidat’s wish list is short.
“We want safety, security and our rights,” he said. “Simply, we want to live.”
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