Reporting around the world framed the results of recent elections in Israel as “ambiguous”. Other descriptions were taken straight from the thesaurus: impasse, deadlock, stalemate.

Election results anywhere can be complicated. But this week’s elections in Israel were not. They were, in fact, crystal clear: opposition parties have won 67 seats in Israel’s 120-seat parliament. By any standard, that is a clear majority.

These results are straightforward. The complexity is not in the realm of counting votes. Rather, it is in the context of the structural racism dominating Israeli coalition politics since the state was established in 1948.

More than a quarter – 19 seats out of the aforementioned 67 – of the political power expressed in the opposition’s robust 56 per cent majority comes from the two Palestinian parties: the Joint List and the United Arab List. Their voters make up some 800,000 citizens out of the opposition’s three million.

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Yet the racist logic deeply ingrained in Israeli politics opts to almost always declare Palestinian political representation as off-limits, enemies of the state – or worse. Yes, Palestinians in the state of Israel are citizens in the formal sense of the word, but no, their representatives are not seen as viable candidates for coalition.

Liberal-Jewish Israelis and their political leaders repeatedly stated before the elections that the country could not endure........

© The Irish Times