Leaving aside the electoral consequences of Netanyahu’s statement, was it racist, as some have contended? Does it erode Israeli democracy, as Obama warned? Arguably these assessments are overblown and even hypocritical. While it is true that political references to race are often discomfiting, this is not always the case: in American elections, African-Americans, Hispanics, Jews and other racial and ethnic groups are legitimate demographic classifications. So too with the Arab vote in Israel, which this time around was watched with special interest because, as a result of a rise in the electoral threshold needed to enter the Knesset, the main Arab parties had combined into one coalition, which enthused the Arab community (the higher Arab turnout has made the Joint List alliance the third largest party in the Knesset after Likud and Labour). The notion that the Arabs were flocking to the polls thus merely confirmed what many on the Right had anticipated — and, for electoral reasons, rather feared.

Moreover, there was nothing derogatory as such in Netanyahu’s words, nor was he discouraging the Arabs from voting. Rather, he was urging greater and more tactical participation at the polls by conservatives if they wanted their voices heard. His point, he later clarified, was to emphasise the organised fashion in which foreign-funded groups were bringing voters to the polls, rather than the fact in itself that the Arabs were voting, which he insisted is entirely legitimate and welcome. Thus his reference to the Arabs, in his view, was not disparaging but simply descriptive. This, argues Dror Eydar, a leading columnist for Israel’s most popular newspaper, Israel Hayom, which backed Netanyahu, actually makes    Netanyahu’s words far less offensive than some of the epithets used by the Israeli Left against supporters of right-wing parties, whom they constantly — and very definitely pejoratively — dismiss as “the settlers”, “the religious” and “the ultra-Orthodox”. In one rally, they were disdained as “amulet-kissers, idol-worshippers and people who prostrate themselves at the graves of saints”, a statement of flagrant condescension toward the Sephardi Jews of Middle Eastern descent who, though typically poorer, consistently support right-wing parties. Indeed, inside Jewish Israel, the prejudice of the Ashkenazi elite against the Sephardis has long been considered Israel’s real race problem — and is the reason for Likud’s decades-long dominance at the polls.

But Eydar goes further, submitting that if the Left believes it sees racism in the Right, that is actually a result of the Left harbouring such sentiments itself. Take Tzipi Livni, who ran with Herzog in this election. She threatened that electing Netanyahu would lead to “Israel becoming an Arab country”, and observed that “we didn’t make aliyah [move to Israel] so that there would be an Arab country here”. Her implication is that Netanyahu’s hesitation on the question of Palestinian statehood will lead to Israel becoming majority Arab. Obama, too, defends his support for a Palestinian state on his desire to see Israel remain Jewish and democratic — in other words, so that it does not become majority Arab. Surely, Eydar maintains, fretting about Israel becoming an “Arab country” is more provocative than a reference to Arab voters.

Underlying this entire discourse across the political spectrum is ambivalence about the status of the Arabs in Israeli society, which is far more complicated than the international media and the country’s critics care to portray. For one thing, the category — about a fifth of Israel’s population — comprises Muslims, Christians, Druze and others; urban Arabs and Bedouin; religious and secular; Zionists and Islamists; and Arabs who have lived in Israel since before its inception on the one hand, and on the other hand those who live in the annexed territories of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Moreover, within those subsets there is enormous variety: some Bedouin are well integrated and serve in the military, others support Israel’s adversaries; Israeli Druze tend to be staunchly patriotic, except those in the Golan Heights, who retain an allegiance to Syria. These differences are not primarily the diversity of individual opinion in the Arab community, but the product of differing ethnic, religious, tribal and cultural loyalties and priorities.