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The leader of Israel’s Balad party has condemned the country’s main political leaders for refusing to form a coalition with Arab parties, even after a record showing in polls could make them kingmakers for the next parliament after no clear winner emerged.

Sami Abu Shehadeh told Al Jazeera that Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up about a fifth of the population, are being treated as illegitimate partners despite their turnout.

“This is racism,” he said. “We are a legitimate elected leadership of the national minority. The vast majority of our people decided that we are their leadership.”

Arab parties are on course to win a record 19 seats, giving them potentially decisive leverage over the main political blocs. With 85 percent of the vote counted, Israel’s Central Elections Committee has Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc ahead with at least 53 seats, and the opposition bloc led by Gadi Eisenkot on 48.

Both are short of the 61 needed to govern. Netanyahu says Israelis chose a strong right-wing government, while Eisenkot says they voted for change.

Abu Shehadeh, who leads Balad, one of the Joint List’s three parties, was not a candidate.

Israel’s elections committee voted to disqualify him at the request of far-right Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who accused him of supporting the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack due to an article issued the following day in which Abu Shehadeh called it an “important historical event”.

Abu Shehadeh subsequently told the Supreme Court he did not support “armed struggle” but acknowledged that a paragraph in the article had been incorrectly worded. He said his intention was to call for moving the conflict towards a political process.

He withdrew in October after a majority of the Supreme Court panel appeared willing to approve the disqualification. He rejects the grounds and said the court had made clear that Israel has “two different judicial systems, one for the Jews and one for the Arabs”.

“We are very proud of the Arab Palestinian minority in Israel that went in this very high percentage of voting,” he told Al Jazeera. The community’s first promise to voters, he said, was to prevent “this gang of criminals” from returning to power, naming Netanyahu and far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. “So our first promise, we can keep it from now .”

Numbers point to Arab parties but opposition bloc resistant

Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, said Netanyahu “has scared off everybody from talking to the Palestinian Israeli parties”, leaving him best placed to “call the shots”. She said that Eisenkot and his allies have indicated that they want a Zionist government and “do not want to form a government” with the Arab parties, leaving them few options.

Danny Ayalon, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, told Al Jazeera that turnout among Palestinian citizens of Israel came in “really unprecedented numbers” and that the parties “are going to have some significant clout”.

Mathematically, he said, Eisenkot’s bloc could join forces with the two Arab parties and pass the threshold, though it would take “political wizardry”. Yousef Jabareen, who leads the Joint List, has said his alliance’s “hands are extended” to oust Netanyahu.

Abu Shehadeh set out what Palestinian citizens want from the next government.

“We are against genocide and we are against apartheid. We want to promote a different political alternative, one which is based on the values of freedom, justice and equality for both people who are living between the river and the sea.”

Of Netanyahu, he said: “Our problem … is that he is a war criminal.”

A UN commission said in a report published on Monday that Israel has continued to commit genocide in Gaza after last October’s US-brokered ceasefire in the enclave.

The Hague-based International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu in 2024 for war crimes during the Gaza war.

Record-breaking voter turnout in Palestinian-Israeli communities around 80 percent, early indications show.

Israel’s Arab parties are projected to win 18 seats in the Israeli parliament, exit polls indicate, after voting among Palestinian citizens of Israel surged to their highest levels in decades.

Exit polling data from Tuesday’s vote suggested that the leading Arab-led parties, the Joint List and Ra’am, are set to hold a record number of seats in the 120-member Knesset. Updated exit polling indicated that the opposition bloc led by former Israeli military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party and the bloc led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party were tied at 51 seats each.

Early indications put voter turnout among Palestinian citizens of Israel at around 80 percent, historic numbers that break 1999 records, Israel’s Channel 12 reported on Tuesday.

The leader of Ra’am, or the United Arab List, Mansour Abbas, said he hopes the final election results will allow the anti-Netanyahu bloc, including his party, to win the 61 seats required to form a government.

“With the numbers we have now, there is no government,” Abbas told Israel’s Channel 12.

Abbas, whose Ra’am party currently holds five seats in the Knesset and joined the coalition that governed Israel from 2021 to 2022, added that both main blocs reached out to his party before and after the election.

‘Arabs can’t be kept outside’

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli ambassador, said creating a government might prove difficult for parties such as Eisenkot’s – which earlier exit polls had put narrowly ahead – because they promised not to form coalitions with Arab parties during the campaign.

“There’s a price to pay,” Pinkas said, because the “Arabs can’t be kept outside and only being considered and co-opted when you need their votes”.

He added that the Arab-led lists will make demands that a Jewish-led coalition government may not support.

Netanyahu and his far-right coalition made last-ditch efforts on Tuesday to get their supporters to the polls, warning of surging voter turnout among Palestinian citizens of Israel, a tactic Arab politicians denounced as racist and inflammatory.

Cars flying Netanyahu’s Likud party flags drove through Jerusalem blaring the Islamic call to prayer and urging supporters to cast their ballots because “Arabs are voting”, witnesses said.

In social media posts, the embattled prime minister highlighted long queues at polling stations in Arab communities and published an image that he said showed Arab voters, including women wearing the niqab, a veil that covers the lower half of the face, waiting to vote.

“If we don’t wake up now, we’ll find ourselves with a government of Mansour Abbas and Ahmad Tibi,” he said, referring to two leading Palestinian members of the Knesset.

Overall voter turnout was also historic, reaching its highest level since 1999 with 77.7 percent casting ballots in Tuesday’s election, the Central Elections Committee reported. Palestinian citizens of Israel make up about 21 percent of the country’s population of 10 million and have traditionally voted at lower rates than Jewish Israelis.

‘Existential moment’

Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, called the election “an existential moment for Palestinian-Israelis”.

She noted the record turnout among what has emerged as a key voting bloc, which drew “even [voters] who would usually boycott elections, who didn’t believe it would amount to any kind of influence, that it would change their reality, that it would alter the systemic discrimination that they face”.

The Knesset has passed more than 100 laws discriminating against Palestinian citizens of Israel, who also face discrimination in receiving state funds, Odeh said.

Israel’s top court has overturned an election panel’s ban on Arab parties contesting parliamentary elections this month, saying the decision had not met the legal requirements for excluding them, according to Israeli media.

The Supreme Court justices ruled unanimously on Friday to undo the Central Elections Committee’s disqualification of the country’s two main Arab-majority political lists – Ra’am, also called the United Arab List, and the Joint List, which is an alliance of Hadash, Ta’al and Balad.

The decision keeps Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up about 20 percent of the population, in the race after critics accused the committee of double standards ahead of the October 27 Knesset vote.

The court also voted 7-2 to reinstate Ofer Cassif, a sitting Jewish member of the Knesset from the Arab-Jewish Hadash party and an outspoken critic of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, media reports said.

The two dissenting justices said Cassif backs “armed struggle against the state of Israel”, which is grounds for his disqualification.

In September, the elections committee voted to disqualify the Joint List and Ra’am as parties, as well as Cassif and Sami Abu Shehadeh, head of the Balad party, as individuals.

Balad leader withdraws

The Supreme Court has nearly always overruled the committee when it votes to ban candidates.

However, at a hearing on Thursday, Supreme Court President Yitzhak Amit told Abu Shehadeh that a majority of the nine justices favoured disqualifying him from the election.

They gave him until Friday to withdraw, saying that if he did not, he would be disqualified, according to the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation.

Abu Shehadeh withdrew from the election after that.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, led the push to bar him over an article written after the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023. Abu Shehadeh described the attack as “an important historical event” in the piece, but denies supporting it.

Balad said in a statement that a court-ordered removal, rather than a voluntary one, would have had “grave consequences for the country’s political and parliamentary life” as it would set a precedent around the removal of Arab candidates.

Double standards

The Ra’am party made history after the 2021 election, becoming the first Arab party to join an Israeli government when it took part in a disparate coalition that briefly removed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from power. Most Palestinian citizens of Israel had stayed out of coalition politics until then.

In this election, Ra’am is also fielding a Jewish Zionist candidate for the first time, Yoav Segalovitz, who won popularity in Arab communities for his work to curb crime as deputy minister for internal security.

The election committee’s September vote drew accusations of a double standard, as Palestinian-led parties faced exclusion while parties led by far-right ministers, some of whom have been sanctioned internationally, stayed on the ballot.

Speaking to Al Jazeera on Friday, Abu Shehadeh said he withdrew because he “didn’t have any other choices”.

Although the Supreme Court has restored the Arab parties to the ballot, Abu Shehadeh said the reversal did not make the original disqualifications acceptable.

“In the end, what happened yesterday was a historical catastrophe for democracy, or the very narrow margins of democracy in the State of Israel,” he said. “I was disqualified because I think differently, because I have a different narrative on how to read history, the present, and the future in the place that we live today.”