The most drastic result of Monday’s election, at least in terms of vote share, was the 25 per cent rise in voters for the Joint List, which merges three Arab parties and the Arab-Jewish communist party Hadash.
The increase resulted in two additional seats for the Joint List which is now on 15, the most ever. The higher turnout in the election — 71 per cent, two points above the previous election last September — was therefore largely do to more Arab voters coming out.
This outcome can largely be chalked down to the fact that the other centre-left parties did not have Arab-Israeli candidates on prominent spots on their lists. There is also anger among Arab voters at the Trump plan, which includes the possibility that a number of Arab towns close to the “Green Line” would become part of the future Palestinian state, denying them of their Israeli citizenship.
It could also in part be a backlash to the way Benjamin Netanyahu focused much of his campaigning on warning Jewish voters that should Benny Gantz’s Blue & White win the election, they would form a government with the Joint List.
While there has been much attention paid to the rise of Jews voting for the Joint List, they are only a small part of the jump in the party’s support. The Joint List went up a whopping 105,000 votes in this week’s election compared to last September, but only about ten per cent of that was due to new Jewish voters.
It is impossible to accurately assess how many Jews vote for the Joint List in any given election, as there are Arab voters living in Jewish towns as well, but most psephologists accept that in September they were around the 20,000 mark in the Jewish sector.
Numbers are still being crunched for this election, but initial assessments are that the number went up on Monday by about 10,000. That would be a 50 per cent rise, a massive jump, but not in itself worth a Knesset seat, which generally equates to around 40,000 votes.
It seems clear that the Jewish vote still only counts for around seven or eight per cent of the Joint List’s electorate.
But this is nonetheless a huge increase, especially considering the alliance ran for the first time only in 2015, when the estimated Jewish vote for it was a mere 12,000.
Innovative campaigning by the leaders of the Joint List, who spent a significant amount of their time courting Jewish voters and bought billboard space in places like Tel Aviv, helped deliver the gains. There was also a feeling among some left-wing Jewish voters that the joint Labour-Gesher-Meretz list — which lost four seats — did not represent them.
A poster in Yiddish which appeared in the Charedi town of Bnei Brak also seems to have yielded results, albeit on a modest scale: voting there for the Joint List more than tripled, going from six votes to 22.