Israel’s opposition must explain how it plans to govern the country it hopes to lead. The argument over Arab political partnership after Tuesday’s election makes that question immediate, but it will remain long after the coalition negotiations end.
Democrats chairman Yair Golan’s call on Wednesday for a government formed in partnership with Arab citizens brought the issue into focus. He argued that a vote cast in Tira carries the same weight as one cast in Givat Shmuel.
Whatever one thinks of Golan’s politics, the point stands. Arab citizens cannot be approached as potential partners only when their votes become necessary, while the harder conversation about their place in the country is postponed until another election.
Thursday morning’s reports of suspected foreign interference, including alleged Qatari funding, complicate that conversation. Central Elections Committee chairman Justice Noam Sohlberg called on the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) to investigate suspected foreign financing and election bribery.
Those suspicions require investigation. Even if unlawful funding is proved, however, that would not justify treating Arab voters collectively as participants in wrongdoing. Responsibility must be established through evidence. Citizens who cast their votes lawfully are still owed a political response.
What does the next government owe its Arab citizens?
The allegations could make opposition parties less willing to consider any arrangement dependent on Arab parties, even before investigators establish what happened. But closing off a coalition option would leave the underlying question unanswered: How do those leaders intend to build a shared future with Arab citizens?
Equal citizenship does not require agreement with every party or guarantee anyone a place in government. Parties can disagree profoundly over security, national identity, and the terms of a coalition. Treating Arab participation itself as disqualifying is another matter.
The language of a “Jewish majority” becomes troubling when it suggests that some citizens’ votes confer legitimacy and others do not. Jewish history, trauma, and the need for a national home are very real. They do not make that distinction compatible with equal citizenship.
This is where the discussion needs to move beyond the next government. What is being demanded of leadership is the ability to address Israel’s present while preparing for the society it is becoming.
Security is urgent; so are war trauma, education, and the social services people need to rebuild their lives. A government cannot postpone those needs. But it also cannot keep responding to each crisis without examining what will make the next one harder to resolve.
The debate over ultra-Orthodox (haredi) conscription is an example. Who serves now matters. So does what children are learning years before they reach military age, what opportunities they will have afterward, and what they understand their responsibilities toward the wider society to be.
The Shoresh Institution’s October 2026 handbook, drawing on Education Ministry data, puts haredi children at 25% of first graders and Arabic-speaking children at another 23%. These are children already in classrooms. We do not have to wait 50 years to understand why their education matters to the country’s future.
Their communities are different, and so are the educational challenges they face. Shoresh’s warning concerns the consequences of failing to give children the skills needed to participate in a modern economy. That failure would limit their own choices and the resources available for healthcare, welfare, and defense.
Prof. Dan Ben-David has made this connection repeatedly in interviews with The Jerusalem Post. Political leaders need to act on it while those children are still in school.
They also need to recognize that neither Arab nor haredi society stands still.
Moti Leitner’s Haredi Public party, for example, campaigned on incorporating mathematics and English into haredi education and on service for those not studying Torah. Its emergence demonstrates that arguments about work, education and responsibility are taking place within haredi society, too.
Leaders outside that community should be capable of hearing those arguments without demanding that people abandon their religious identity before being taken seriously. The same willingness to listen is needed in relations with Arab citizens, whose interests extend well beyond their usefulness to a Jewish-led bloc.
The Zionist framework through which we understand the country must contend with a society that changes from generation to generation. That does not make it less legitimate. It does require us to discuss what Jewish self-determination and equal citizenship mean in the lives of the people who share this country.
The responsibility rests with leadership, but voters cannot excuse themselves entirely. Politicians also respond to what their own supporters are prepared to accept. We cannot demand long-term thinking while refusing to hear anything that unsettles our understanding of who belongs and on what terms.
We need to hold on to our own history, connection, and identity while acknowledging those of others. Otherwise, we will keep putting out fires, paying in money, in lives and in the growing distance between us.
The opposition is asking to govern Israel. It needs to explain how it intends to govern alongside citizens whose votes it may need but whose political participation it struggles to accept.