Netanyahu’s Race-Baiting Was Long-Planned
Those focus groups led Likud campaigners to undertake a massive campaign of fear on Election Day. The fear of Arabs, and by implication, the involvement of Palestinian citizens of Israel in a government led by the Zionist Union, was used to drive right-wing voters to the polls and ensure that they would vote Likud rather than one of the other right-wing parties.
“At 11 a.m. on Election Day, it dawned on the Likud that they were trailing the Zionist Union,” Segal reports. “That was the signal to begin the bombardment. On Election Day alone, some five million text messages were sent…It cost eight million shekels more than they had planned, but to the Likud it was worth every penny.”
“On that last day,” Segal continued, “all the messages and status updates were on one subject. It was not about [Isaac] Herzog or [Jewish Home Leader Naftali] Bennett, but only about Arabs and the specter of the power of the Joint List (a mostly Arab coalition of parties).”
Segal reports that the messages sent included: “Voter turnout triples in the Arab sector,” “Arab residents of Be’ersheva vote en masse. Don’t let them appoint the ministers in the next government,” “Commentator Ehud Ya’ari on Channel 2 just now: Hamas calls on Arabs in Israel to get out and vote.”
At 8:00 p.m. that night, Israeli television projected the final exit polls. But, Segal reports, “In the next two hours between the end of projections and the actual closing of polls, a really dramatic thing happened: in the previous election, about 230,000 people voted between the hours of 8 and 10 p.m. In 2015, however, a huge turnout of almost 600,000 people flooded the polls—the vast majority, Likud voters.”
It’s clear from this report that, far from a simple, heat of the moment mistake, Netanyahu’s racist rhetoric was part of a strategy that was planned well in advance, one that was activated when the prime minister feared his re-election was slipping away.