Israeli leader Netanyahu accused of using ‘ugly’ smear tactics to cling to power :::: Arab parties pan ‘racist’ campaign as PM claims alleged foreign influence plot ‘stole’ election

Acting Central Elections Committee Director General Dean Livne on Thursday rejected allegations of widespread fraud in Tuesday’s election as baseless, despite claims from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies that the election was “stolen.”
“The Knesset elections were conducted lawfully. 

The integrity of the elections at polling stations was rigorously safeguarded, and to the best of our knowledge, there is no basis for allegations of systematic violations of election integrity,” Livne wrote in a letter to Yesh Atid MK Vladimir Beliak, who sits on the committee.  

Israel Prime minister claims Arab Israeli parties used foreign backing to steal elections, in which his coalition lost its majority.   Benjamin Netanyahu has been accused of using smear tactics to cling to power, after he claimed that Arab Israeli parties had used foreign backing to “steal” Tuesday’s election, in which the prime minister’s coalition lost its parliamentary majority.

Left to right: Ra'am chief Mansour Abbas speaks in Sakhnin, Yashar chief Gadi Eisenkot in Tel Aviv, and PM Benjamin Netanyahu speaks in Jerusalem, following the release of poll results 

Netanyahu and his allies called on the internal security service, Shin Bet, to investigate alleged vote buying and other irregularities in Palestinian communities in Israel, supposedly funded by foreign money.

Gadi Eisenkot, the leader of the main opposition bloc, accused the prime minister and his Likud party of trying to derail the election results.  “It’s already clear that Likud and Netanyahu have embarked on a coordinated, organised campaign seeking to delegitimise the results of the election,” Eisenkot said in a video message.  

Leading opposition candidate Gadi Eisenkot and several Arab-led party leaders on Thursday lambasted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for alleging that an alleged foreign interference scheme had “stolen” Tuesday’s election, as the premier’s allies lined up to demand interrogations and arrests of Arab politicians.

Qatar, reported to be at the center of the alleged scheme, also decried the accusation, calling it “ridiculous and dangerous” and linking it to other allegations of the Gulf state’s illicit dealings with Israel, which it likewise rejects.

Eisenkot also linked the allegations to Qatargate, the scandal surrounding allegations that aides advising the premier were also doing paid public relations work for Qatar.  

Arab countries are not interested in a war with Israel  

The Israeli security mind is frozen in the 1960s and 1970s. It still pictures a ring of Arab states coiled for the next invasion, waiting for the moment of weakness. 

That picture was once accurate. It is now a museum piece. The Arab world that fought those wars no longer exists, and the failure to grasp that is an intellectual stagnation, the error of a security doctrine reading a map that has already been redrawn.  

Begin with why those wars happened at all. They were not simply about borders. They were the military expression of an ideology. Arab nationalism was born as a reaction, to Ottoman decline, to European colonial carving of the region, to the humiliation of peoples who had been ruled by outsiders for generations and were now trying to name themselves. 

Out of that reaction, it told every Arab that they were one people, one ummah, bound by a single destiny and a single struggle. Solidarity was not sentiment; it was obligation. 

You helped the other Arab because his cause was your cause. Gamal Abdel Nasser embodied that idea, and within it Palestine was not a foreign file. It was the shared wound, the proof of the project.

ends