Arab-Israeli voter turnout sees historic low despite eleventh-hour surge

Despite a last-minute surge to the polls, Israel's Tuesday elections saw historically low Arab turnout, with barely half of the population casting votes for the 21st Knesset.

With 97% of the votes counted, the turnout among Arab-Israeli voters stood at 50.4%, marking an unprecedented low following calls to boycott the elections. 

One hour before polls closed and several hours after Israeli media predicted historically low Arab voter turnout in Tuesday’s national elections, the Arab-majority Hadash-Ta’al alliance said the turnout rate had jumped to 44 percent.

Arab-Israeli lawmakers on Tuesday afternoon proclaimed “an emergency” after prominent pollsters warned of what could be the most depressed Arab voter turnout rate in the history of Israeli elections.

In 2015, 64 percent of Israel’s Arab population turned up at the polls, after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu famously warned his right-wing constituents on election day that “the Arabs were coming to vote in droves,” compared to a national percentage of 70.

This election, there are two major Arab lists: Hadash-Ta’al and Ra’am-Balad.

While Hadash-Ta’al presents itself as a secular outfit, Ra’am-Balad is a joint list of candidates from a nationalist party (Ra’am) and an Islamic movement (Balad).

The most recent polls showed the two lists receiving a combined 11 seats, with Hadash-Ta’al expected to earn slightly more votes, despite expectations that half of Israel's Arab population would choose not to vote.

Over one fifth of Israeli citizens are Arabs, some of whom actively or ambivalently boycott the Jewish state’s electoral process in protest against what they view as a government that does not represent their national interests.

“Successive Israeli governments have ostracized the Arab population,” Sondos Saleh, who is running on the Hadash-Ta’al list, recently told supporters in Acre.

In 2015, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported 50 percent of Arab Israelis lived below the poverty line, compared to 13.5 percent of Jewish Israelis (not including ultra-Orthodox.)

A’as al-Atrash, a Palestinian analyst based in the Israeli city of Nazareth, told the Times of Israel this week that Arab-Israelis aged 18 to 30 are more likely than older generations to support a boycott.

On Friday, popular Palestinian rapper Tamer Nafar released a music video for his new song that depicts an internal battle between the part of himself that plans to vote in Israeli elections and another that intends to boycott.

"If our vote can help send Bibi to jail and throw Lieberman out of the Knesset — then it's already worth voting. This is our struggle and I don't intend to give up any tool at my disposal. We must shed indifference, not for Israeli democracy, but rather because of racism and apartheid … we must not give up our representation," Nafar told Haaretz, explaining why he wrote the song.

There are 6.3 million eligible voters who are automatically registered in advance at one of the 10,000 polling stations open throughout the country.

According to Israeli law, initial election results are not allowed to be published until after polls close at 10:00PM. However, hours before, a number of Israeli media outlets vaguely referred to exit polls, noting a dramatic decrease in Arab turnout from previous elections.

At 3:30PM, Hadash-Ta’al released a statement saying only 20 percent of Arab voters in Israel had cast their vote.

Veteran Arab-Israeli parliamentarian and leader of the Hadash list Ayman Odeh called the very low turnout “an emergency situation,” in a video posted to Facebook Tuesday afternoon.

“There is a real danger of a Knesset without Arabs and without the Hadash-Ta’al slate,” Odeh warned.

Meretz party leader Tamar Zandberg and parliament member Esawi Freige travelled to Kfar Qassem - which sits on Israel’s border with Palestinian towns in the West Bank - to encourage residents to vote.

The left-wing party filed a request with the Central Elections Committee to keep polls open for an additional hour, arguing the Likud party’s use of hidden cameras represented a purposeful attempt to suppress Arab votes.

On Tuesday evening, calls to vote were broadcast through mosque loudspeakers in the Arab cities of Tamara and Taybeh.

Earlier Tuesday, Israel’s Central Elections Committee filed a complaint with the police after 1,200 right-wing activists from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party were reportedly discovered at polling stations in predominantly Arab areas equipped with hidden cameras to ‘ensure a fair vote.’

The party later admitted to outfitting the activists, with Netanyahu attempting to spin it the report in his favor, passing the covert measure as a means to uphold transparency.

The Hadash-Taal alliance confirmed it had presented an urgent complaint to the elections committee demanding the "illegal" cameras be immediately removed.

Last month, the Hadash-Ta'al pairing officially launched their campaign at a small event in Tel Aviv, after the originally separate Hadash and Ta'al outfits agreed to join forces just a few hours before the party registration deadline in late February.

The move came one day after the other two major Arab parties, Balad and Ra’am (the United Arab List) announced their partnership for the elections, splitting the Arab parties into two major factions.

Arab parties ran under one alliance and finished with a historic tally in 2015: they won 13 seats out of 120 parliament, making them the third-largest force.

See also:

Analysis: Low Arab voter turnout won't be good news for anybody