Netanyahu lost his majority in parliament. Now he claims elections were stolen

By Tal Shalev, CNN

(CNN) — On election day in March 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu filmed a controversial 28-second video, warning right-wing voters that Arab citizens were heading to the polls “in droves.” A week later, after he had won against prevailing expectations, he apologized, saying he did not intend to offend the Arab sector as a whole.

Eleven years and six elections later, Netanyahu is playing the same game, only on a much grander scale.

Since losing his majority in the October 27 vote, Netanyahu and his allies have been pressing a serious accusation: the election was “stolen” by Arab parties through bribery, foreign funding and fraud. They are demanding investigations, arrests and, in the most extreme version, even canceling the vote and going to another round of elections.

They have yet to present any evidence, but the political goal is clear: to cast a veil of illegitimacy on the Joint List and Raam, the two Arab parties that saw record turnout and are likely to be a crucial part of any effort to oust Israel’s longest-serving leader.

“They are doing this because they lost”, Gadi Eisenkot, Netanyahu’s main challenger, said in a Thursday video statement.

Netanyahu did not lose the election outright, nor did he win it. The same is true for Eisenkot. Both fell short of the required 61-seat majority in the 120-seat parliament needed for a clear victory. Israel now faces weeks – perhaps months – of political uncertainty.

Netanyahu knows the math. His coalition dropped to 53 seats and has no clear way of securing a majority. The Eisenkot-led bloc has 48 seats on its own. But with the support of 19 seats from the Arab parties, it has a clear majority of 67 seats.

The only government to have ousted Netanyahu – the Bennett-Lapid government in 2021 – included Raam, and it collapsed after roughly a year. Now, Netanyahu’s primary goal after the elections, according to a source close to him, is to delegitimize and prevent any Jewish-Arab political cooperation that could weaken his grip on power.

The effort started weeks before election day.

In mid-October, Netanyahu and Religious Zionist party chair Bezalel Smotrich announced plans to deploy about 2,000 observers at polling stations in Arab communities, framing the Arab voting stations as sites of potential fraud.

Early on election morning, police arrested three Raam activists over an alleged cash-for-votes scheme, in a widely publicized incident. The original tip about the arrests, Israel’s Channel 12 News later reported, came from Netanyahu’s chief of staff, who bypassed standard channels to personally reach the police commissioner. Courts rejected most of the police requests for tough restrictions, and some of the suspects have been released. But Netanyahu’s campaign machine seized on the story, amplifying the arrests and claiming it was an effort to “steal the elections.”

As the ballots were counted, the campaign continued and intensified. On Wednesday, Netanyahu’s Likud party said it had submitted hundreds of testimonies alleging bribery, threats, violence and forgery from Raam and the Joint List, while the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14 reported suspicions of millions of shekels from a foreign source.

Then, a letter leaked.

The Central Elections Committee chair, Supreme Court Deputy Chief Justice Noam Solberg, had written to David Zini, the director of the Shin Bet security service, requesting an inquiry into “serious suspicions” of foreign funding. Israeli media later reported that Zini himself had asked for the letter, after reportedly meeting with Netanyahu earlier. Solberg wrote that he could not verify the seriousness of the evidence. But for Likud and other right-wing politicians it hardly mattered: the letter was treated as confirmation and proof.

Netanyahu’s far-right allies Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir called to arrest the Arab party leaders, with Ben Gvir alleging a Qatari-funded effort to boost Arab voter turnout, which Qatar categorically denied as “ridiculous and dangerous.”

On Channel 14, the story was dubbed “The Ballot Terror.” Likud lawmaker Boaz Bismuth wrote on X that the results of the “terrorist parties” should not be recognized until “every stone” was turned. On Sunday, Netanyahu himself shared a video of a right-wing activist claiming of massive forgeries and calling to “simply invalidate the elections.”

The episodes elicited sharp criticism of Israel’s police commissioner and Shin Bet chief – both Netanyahu appointees.

“There is a common denominator between the two affairs,” Amos Harel, Haaretz’s senior defense analyst, wrote. “In both cases the Prime Minister’s Office is stirring things behind the scenes with the Shin Bet and the police, and Likud immediately leverages the reports into a massive propaganda campaign” designed to delegitimize the Arab parties and reduce the opposition’s freedom of actions.

Election authorities, however, rejected Netanyahu’s narrative. The Central Elections Committee officially dismissed claims of widespread fraud as baseless and said there is no evidentiary basis for alleging a systematic compromise of the vote.

On Sunday, the committee chairman appeared alongside the head of the Shin Bet and the attorney-general in a special statement in which they said the elections were conducted properly. Even if the foreign funding suspicions are substantiated, they said it won’t overturn the result or undermine the integrity of the process. “Your decision at the ballot box will be honored,” Solberg said.

Likud was unmoved, insisting in a statement a “black cloud” hangs over the results.

The opposition has broadly backed the investigation but has framed Netanyahu’s allegations as an effort to undermine the outcome. Eisenkot called it a “despicable and malicious influence operation” meant to delay the publication of the results and delegitimize the 26th Knesset. Yair Golan, the leader of the left-wing Democrats party, said that is how “a dictator who refuses to accept defeat at the ballot box” behaves.

The Joint List, which is the target of the delegitimization campaign, fired back in its own statement.

“No smear campaign will erase the achievement of the Arab public, and no attempt to cast doubt on the legitimacy of our vote will change the will of the voters,” the party said in a statement last week. “You wanted us small and weak, and you got us big and strong.”

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