Netanyahu’s comment about Arabs voting in droves — and the Likud party’s accompanying election day text messaging campaign warning of an increase in the Arab vote thanks to urging by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas and funding from America — drew on this Israeli anxiety about Arab loyalty and the role of foreign meddling in Israeli affairs. Netanyahu’s comments — as well as warnings by the Left about the potential demographic threat posed by the Arabs — resonate with voters because they too fear the influence of the Arab minority. In the case of the Right, the fear is that the Arabs will catapult the Left into power and undermine Israel’s Jewish character; in the case of the Left, it is that the Arabs might eventually come to challenge Israel’s Jewish majority and consequently possibly its democratic character. But the attitude of Israeli Arabs toward the Jewish state is complex and multi-faceted. Netanyahu’s apology for his remarks — that he never intended to cause upset to the Arab community and is sorry for it — was issued to a small group of Israeli Arab leaders who chanted “Bibi! Bibi!” (the prime minister’s nickname) and proceeded to give him a standing ovation and embrace and kiss him. Thus attempts to reduce the Israeli Arabs’ relationship to Israel to unflinching loyalty or to unmitigated treason either understate or overstate the dangers. Platitudinous foreign calls for Israel to ensure it upholds its democracy, however, such as those the White House has recently been inclined to make, are invariably examples of the former. An Israeli intifada is possible.

Netanyahu’s reference to Arab voters was not the only statement the Obama administration found offensive. The other was Netanyahu’s remark, made in an interview on the eve of the election, that with the present instability engulfing the Middle East, there would be no Palestinian state established during his premiership, since any Israeli withdrawal would lead to violent Islamism filling the void. This statement in particular was designed to win voters of parties to Likud’s right — parties that, unlike Likud under Netanyahu, are explicitly opposed to a Palestinian state on principle. Shifting these votes to the more pragmatic Likud would presumably be, theoretically at least, good for Obama, who would like to see such a state come into existence as soon as possible. So the White House should have been sympathetic to Netanyahu’s strategy. Instead, the administration chastised the Israeli leader for allegedly reneging on previous commitments. His attempts following the election to walk back the statement were rejected by the administration, which decided — rather arbitrarily — to accept his campaign rhetoric as his stated belief but not his subsequent clarifications.

Since it is a truism of all democracies that politicians say almost anything to get elected, the criticism of Netanyahu is not a little hypocritical. One recalls a certain Democratic senator running for the White House in 2008 assuring the American Israel Public Affairs Committee at its conference that year that he supported an undivided Jerusalem, only to clarify the following day that he did not, in fact, support an undivided Jerusalem. (For that matter, one also remembers him at a fundraiser in San Francisco making derogatory references to small-town Americans who “get bitter and cling to their guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them”, a comment arguably more distasteful than Netanyahu’s reference to Arab voters.) In contrast to the White House, the head of the Arab League dismissed Netanyahu’s comments as electioneering — an indication of the informal alliance between Israel and the pragmatic Arab Sunni states and the larger distrust between the Obama administration and Netanyahu.