By excluding Arab citizens, Netanyahu's rivals may hand him another term - opinion

As Likud once again emerged as the largest party, someone who had hoped for change told me that he felt as though he were living through the aftermath of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995.

For others, the results brought back memories of the 1996 election, when Israelis went to bed with exit polls predicting that Shimon Peres would become prime minister, only to wake to the news that Benjamin Netanyahu had won.

The disappointment and despair are understandable, but those making the comparisons are mistaken. Unlike in those two cases, this time there is a way out.

Rabin’s assassination can be viewed as a specific, if catastrophic, event: the result of a determined gunman and a security failure, both of which reflect mostly on themselves.

There was, of course, a broader political climate, but had the security failure not occurred, the outcome would have been different.

This time, the results tell us something else. October 7, the rising cost of living, Israel’s growing international isolation, the threat of crippling sanctions – none of these appears to have changed the minds of Likud loyalists who continue to support Netanyahu. Unlike Rabin’s assassination, this is not a one-off occurrence. It is a phenomenon.

The second precedent is also different. Netanyahu’s victory in 1996 was narrow but clear. In a direct election for prime minister, there can be only one winner.

This time, however, all it takes is one look at the results to see that we are dealing neither with the finality of death nor with the winner-takes-all logic of a two-candidate contest. Any reasonable person should understand that Netanyahu’s bloc has not won a victory.

What have we witnessed, then? Proof that the man who has presided over failures in virtually every sphere has excelled at one thing: defining the terms of public debate.

That debate presents us with a Netanyahu bloc, an opposing bloc, and a third group that supposedly belongs to neither. Arab Israelis are treated as a separate, detached entity, disconnected from everyone else and from everything happening in this country.

It is bad enough that, even while people who personally suffered at the hands of racists in the Diaspora are still living among us, supposedly liberal leaders in a supposedly democratic country categorically exclude one-fifth of the population because of its group identity, just as we experienced elsewhere.

It is bad enough that these leaders seem unable to imagine how they would react to declarations such as “The Jews are flocking to the polls," as Netanyahu wrongfully declared on Election Day in 2015 regarding Arab citizens of the country he leads, and what they would expect the civilized world to do in response to such demonization.

It is bad enough to discover that Jews can be every bit as racist as anyone else.

But where is common sense? Where is political logic?

Take the opportunity

Every leader of the so-called change bloc has warned that Netanyahu is leading Israel toward disaster. They understand how Netanyahu’s leadership is perceived abroad, and how it will affect Israel’s educated young people, and hence the country’s very future.

Are they really prepared to let this happen?

They have a choice. They can cling to a position that excludes a substantial part of the population, thereby giving Netanyahu a license to continue dismantling everything built here through blood, sweat and tears, through ingenuity, creativity, and determination.

Alternatively, they can acknowledge that all citizens are equal in a democracy, and that they – the political leaders, with the support of the very public they have excluded – have it within their power to save Israel from the fate its current prime minister is steering it toward.

They must understand that there is no victory for the Netanyahu bloc. Nor is there a tie. There is an opportunity – not only to reject the disgraceful racism that is eating away at every decent part of Israeli society, but also to rid the country of this government.

Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, Avigdor Liberman: the country’s fate is in your hands.

The writer was Israel’s first ambassador to the Baltic states after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, ambassador to South Africa, and congressional liaison officer at the embassy in Washington. She is a graduate of Israel’s National Defense College.