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By Jason D. Greenblatt
Former White House Middle East Envoy
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Last week, I had breakfast at a café in Jerusalem. All around me, Jewish and Arab Israelis were laughing, talking, drinking coffee and shopping. It was an ordinary morning.
That same day, I took my family zip-lining in Jerusalem. Right behind us were two women fully covered in Muslim dress, zip-lining too. Nobody looked twice. It was completely normal.
I thought about both scenes again on election night in Israel, when a good friend from one of the Arab Gulf states texted me. He said it was amazing that so much of the world accuses Israel of being an apartheid state, when Arab parties had just won so many seats in its election. He had always known the charge was false, he said, but these results drove the point home.
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On October 27, Arab citizens of Israel turned out at a rate of about 80 percent, according to an estimate by Israel's Channel 12. That would be the highest Arab turnout in decades. In 2022, it was 53.2 percent.
With most votes counted, Israel's two main Arab-led parties are on track for about 19 seats, with soldier and other special ballots still to be tallied. That would be more than they have ever won. The previous high was 15, in March 2020.
Those two parties are Ra'am, which is rooted in the Islamic Movement and led by Mansour Abbas, and the Joint List, an alliance of three Arab-majority parties. In September, the Central Elections Committee, a body made up mostly of party representatives, voted to bar both from the election. The motions alleged ties between Ra'am, through the Islamic Movement and affiliated charities, and groups linked to Hamas, and of telling Hebrew and Arabic audiences different things. They accused the Joint List, largely based on the platform of one of its member parties, of rejecting Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and supporting armed struggle against it.
Israel's attorney general opposed their disqualification. On October 2, Israel's Supreme Court unanimously overturned both bans, ruling that the evidence did not meet the legal standard and calling disqualification an "extremely drastic measure." Try finding that in an apartheid state.
So both parties ran, and their voters showed up in droves.
The 1973 United Nations Apartheid Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court both define apartheid as a crime involving inhuman acts intended to maintain systematic racial oppression and domination. Neither fits the facts, or the Israel I know.
Arab citizens have served in the Knesset since the first one was elected in 1949. Arab parties have even helped govern Israel. In 2021, Ra'am joined the governing coalition, the first independent Arab party to do so.
In 2004, Salim Joubran became the first Arab to receive a permanent appointment to Israel's Supreme Court. In 2011, he sat on the three-justice panel that upheld the conviction and seven-year prison sentence of a former president of Israel, Moshe Katsav. In 2022, Khaled Kabub became the court's first Muslim permanent justice.
In 2023, Arabs made up about a quarter of Israel's working doctors and nurses and nearly half its pharmacists, according to a study in the Israel Journal of Health Policy Research. Jewish patients are treated by Arab doctors every day.
Arab citizens in Israel's parliament, on its highest court and throughout its hospitals flatly contradict the charge that Israel is an apartheid state.
Arab Israelis do face serious challenges. Crime in Arab towns is a crisis. In 2025, about 250 Arab citizens were killed in crime and violence, the deadliest year on record. Arab communities have long lagged in public funding, housing and economic opportunity. The 2018 Nation-State Law downgraded Arabic from an official language to one with "special status," and many Arab citizens were angered by it.
These are real problems, and the next Israeli government, however it is made up, should take them seriously. Israel's governments adopted multiyear plans in 2015 and 2021 to address those disparities. In Israel, these problems are reported by a free press, challenged in the courts and debated in a parliament where Arab citizens hold seats.
The apartheid charge is a smear. Israel's enemies use it to brand the country's very existence as illegitimate. On election day, Arab citizens exposed this lie again, at the ballot box.
Jason D. Greenblatt was the White House Middle East envoy in the first Trump administration. He is the author of In the Path of Abraham: How Donald Trump Made Peace in the Middle East, and How to Stop Joe Biden From Unmaking It, the founder of Abraham Venture LLC and the publisher of the Substack "How to Watch." Follow him on X, @GreenblattJD.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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