Tel Aviv — 

As Republican losses in the US midterm elections came into focus, President Donald Trump said he would accept the results. The same cannot be said of Benjamin Netanyahu, the man Trump endorsed in Israel.

A week after Israel’s October 27 election, Netanyahu, whose bloc lost its majority, is still challenging the officially certified results. He and his Likud party allege, without presenting evidence, that the vote was “stolen” by Israel’s Arab parties and foreign actors.

The post-election dispute deepened this week after the David Zini, chief of the Shin Bet internal security service and a Netanyahu loyalist, pushed to investigate the leaders of the Arab parties. The attorney general, a longtime target of Israel’s right-wing, refused to authorize such an investigation without evidence.

“Likud and Netanyahu are trying to commit a pogrom against democracy and the rule of law,” Gadi Eisenkot, Netanyahu’s main rival, said Tuesday.

One day later, Netanyahu doubled down on his claims of fraud. “There are serious suspicions that foreign countries have been involved, using enormous sums of money, in an attempt to manipulate the results of the elections in the State of Israel,” he said in a video statement.

The official results show Netanyahu’s bloc plummeted from a commanding 68 to 53 of the 120 seats in the Knesset, or parliament. The opposition, led by Eisenkot, holds 67 seats. But nearly a third of those comes from the two Arab parties, the Joint List and Raam, after a historic turnout that secured 19 seats.

The Arab parties’ support is decisive to any effort to replace Netanyahu. That is why undermining their legitimacy has become the focus of Netanyahu’s post-election strategy.

Since the results came in, Netanyahu and his right-wing allies have been propagating claims that the election was “stolen” by the Arab parties through bribery, foreign funding and fraud.

A day after the vote, Likud submitted hundreds of testimonies to the Central Elections Committee demanding investigations and arrests. Over the weekend, Netanayhu shared a video on social media of a right-wing activist claiming massive forgeries and calling to “simply invalidate the elections.” The committee has rejected claims of widespread fraud as baseless, saying there is no evidentiary basis to allege systematic compromise of the vote.

The committee did, however, ask the Shin Bet last week to examine “serious suspicions” of foreign funding intended to influence the campaign. In a letter leaked to Israeli media, committee chair Justice Noam Sohlberg cautioned that he could not verify the seriousness of the material. But Netanyahu’s Likud party treated the letter as a confirmation of the broader fraud narrative.

Sohlberg appeared alongside the Shin Bet chief and Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara to make an unusual joint statement Sunday in which they assured the public that the elections were conducted properly. They said that even if the foreign funding suspicions were substantiated, it wouldn’t overturn the result or undermine the integrity of the process.

But Zini’s subsequent conduct has escalated the controversy. A retired Israel Defense Forces major general who describes himself as a “proud messianic,” Zini was appointed by Netanyahu last year from outside the Shin Bet ranks. He is now reportedly seeking to question four senior Arab political figures, including several party leaders.

The Shin Bet told the committee Wednesday that its intelligence “seemingly” points to “extensive phenomena” of large sums being funneled into Israel from foreign sources “on a scale exceeding thousands of people and possibly even more,” according to a source briefed on the matter. The agency said further investigation was needed before it could point “with a high level of certainty” to the scope. But the Shin Bet presented no public evidence.

In a rare statement Tuesday, the attorney general’s office said Zini had prevented the Shin Bet from passing any pertinent evidence to her office or to the police. “In a state governed by law, citizens or elected officials cannot be investigated without evidence justification,” it said. “Anyone who needs to be questioned will be, but no one will be investigated without evidentiary grounds.”

The Likud party, in response, accused Baharav-Miara of obstructing the investigation. Netanyahu’s far-right ally, Itamar Ben Gvir, called on Zini to arrest and investigate the Arab leaders even without the attorney general’s approval. The clash feeds into an ongoing conflict: Netanyahu’s outgoing government voted to dismiss Baharav-Miara in August 2025, but the Supreme Court blocked the move. Since then, the government has repeatedly challenged and defied her directives.

The Arab parties rejected the allegations, accusing Zini of participating in the Likud’s campaign to delegitimize the Arab public, their votes and their record political representation.

“Netanyahu is clinging to power and trying to deny the legitimacy of the Arab public which voted en masse and decided against his government. Zini, appointed by Netanyahu, is acting as a political arm in his service,” the Joint List said in a statement. Mansour Abbas, chairman of Raam, called the move an “an unacceptable attempt to tarnish the Arab public.”

Opposition leaders, who are now making plans to use their Knesset majority to replace the body’s speaker, accuse Netanyahu and Zini of dragging Israel into a constitutional crisis and eroding trust in the election.

Eisenkot called the moment a test for Israel’s future “as a liberal democratic state.” He urged security and law enforcement officials to remember they “are servants of the kingdom, not the king.”

Former Prime Minister Yair Lapid called it an “attempt to crush democracy and steal the elections with the help of regime loyalists planted in the security system.” Yair Golan, chairman of the left-wing Democrats party, said Zini has turned the Shin Bet into “a political tool in service of Netanyahu’s campaign to undermine the election results.”

The political test will come in the weeks ahead. If Netanyahu persuades right-wing parties and potential individual defectors in the opposition that relying on Arab parties is illegitimate, he may block the only path to his ouster. But his tactics could also push the divided opposition to come together and hasten the outcome he is seeking to prevent.