NBC News reports:

If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign for re-election will be remembered for one thing, it will likely be the unabashed vilification of Israel’s Arab citizens, who represent a fifth of the country’s population.

He accused Arabs of stealing the inconclusive April vote. Five days before last week’s election, his official Facebook page said that Arabs “want to annihilate us all — women, children and men,” although the Likud Party later disowned the statement.

Yet, these efforts to suppress the Arab vote by a prime minister who is known as a political wizard appear to have backfired.

“The incitement against the Arabs was very strong provocation from Netanyahu,” said Thabet Abu Rass, co-director of the Abraham Initiatives, a joint Arab-Jewish organization working toward equality in Israel.

“Arab voters didn’t like that, and they decided to do something about it.”

According to data from Arik Rudnitzky of the nonpartisan Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), Arab voter turnout jumped to 59 percent in last week’s election, up from a record low of 49 percent in April.

The Joint List of Arab parties is expected to be the third-largest party in the Knesset, with 13 seats, up from 10. For the first time in Israeli history, an Arab Knesset member could become Israel’s opposition leader, a post that comes with a security detail, briefings from the Mossad, meetings with all visiting international leaders, and rebuttals to the prime minister on the Knesset floor. [Continue reading…]