A claim that the April election was “stolen” from Netanyahu was made in a tweet from his Likud party’s official Twitter account that he retweeted.
The Likud claim that mass disqualification of polling stations in Arab communities would have hurt the left-wing bloc and helped the right wing is not entirely disconnected from reality, but neither does it have any evidentiary basis. “This is only speculation. This is not a scenario that anyone thinks has any basis,” a senior Likud figure admitted to Haaretz on Tuesday.
According to Breaking Israel News, an election watchdog group is questioning the results of the last elections, claiming that fraud may have cost Netanyahu the victory. But with the issue still unresolved and election officials reluctant or unwilling to investigate, the real concern is for the upcoming elections being held in two weeks.
The proposition is that Arab votes caused a loss for Likud last April. The blame for Netanyahu’s loss last April is being put on an Arab party, Balad, even though Balad did not run alone. It was part of an Arab political bloc. The coalition is not being blamed; just Balad.
The four parties running on the Joint list slate are Balad, Hadash, Ta’al and United Arab List. In April, Hadash ran with Ta’al, while Balad ran with the United Arab List. The two alliances won 10 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. In the 2015 election, the first one in which the Joint List ran, it won 13 seats.
According to Haaretz in its own study of last April’s election, precinct committees were “unbalanced” because not all precincts had the required 5 committee members from different political blocs. There were thousands of polling stations with unbalanced precinct committees, and over 1,000 polling sites had no opposition representatives at all.
The September election will still have unbalanced committees in 20 percent of the polling stations countrywide, including 238 sites where only rightist and ultra-Orthodox parties are represented, 1,921 where only rightist and centrist parties are represented and 11 where only leftist and centrist parties are represented.
Someone needs to be blamed. Central Elections Committee Chairman Hanan Melcer is being blamed for allowing Balad to skew the election numbers away from Netanyahu.
Adv. Simcha Rothman, Legal Advisor for Meshilut (the Israeli Movement for Governability and Democracy), testified that the Arab party Balad engaged in election fraud that gave their party an additional 10,000 votes.
Did those 10,000 votes cause Netanyahu’s and Likud’s loss?
First, let’s look at the fact that 238 sites where only rightist and ultra-Orthodox parties are represented, 1,921 where only rightist and centrist parties are represented and 11 where only leftist and centrist parties are represented might be the problem. Blaming Balad for Netanyahu’s loss when Balad was not even represented at 238 election sites is unreasonable. It doesn’t make sense to blame someone who was not there!
Now, let’s get to the actual numbers.
According to Israeli government figures, only 147,801 Arabs out of the 2.9 million who live there voted in April’s election.
The Israeli count is much higher at 4,161,469 Israeli citizens voting. The Arab vote only accounts for 3% of all votes in the April election!
It is disingenuous of Israeli politicians and media to compare the number of Arabs who actually voted against the number of Arabs that are eligible to vote, and not compare the numbers of Arabs who voted against the number of Israelis who voted. Why? Because 2.7 million Palestinians living in the West Bank do not have the right to vote in the Israeli election. That’s ironic considering what’s at stake for them and how they have become pawns in this political contest, according to this Haaretz article.
But someone needs to be blamed and Balad is it! Those darned Palestinians again, not doing what Netanyahu and the religious right political parties want! Just another reason to say the Palestinians have overstayed their welcome and need to be booted out of the country and for Likud to skew the September’s election in their favor by calling for greater representation at all the polls in Israel.
Beast Watch News is calling rubbish, flim-flam and straw man on this one!