Good Read -How Netanyahu's campaign against Israel's Arab citizens backfired

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/how-netanyahu-s-campaign-against-israel-s-arab-citizens-backfired-n1056826
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TEL AVIV — 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.

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.

According to Abu Rass, Arab votes for the centrist Blue and White party gave Netanyahu’s chief rival Benny Gantz an edge of two seats, depriving Netanyahu of the majority he needed to form a right-wing coalition government.

“Incitement has a price,”Joint List leader Ayman Odeh tweeted the morning after election day.
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Byebye Bibi - get thee and your wife to prison