Dozens of Arab men attempted to intimidate a ballot supervisor carrying out his duties in the town of Majd al-Krum in the central Upper Galilee during Israel’s general election last week, a witness told JNS on Monday.
The incident in Majd al-Krum is one of hundreds of cases of alleged irregularities at voting stations with a sizable Arab constituency in the Oct. 27 election, in which Arab parties received a record 19 seats out of 120 in the Knesset.
Police have arrested at least four people they say are connected to the Ra’am Islamist party, keeping two of those suspects under arrest on bribery charges and foreign intervention.
In Majd al-Krum, “it looked like the whole village rose up to intimidate a regional ballot supervisor, who was just doing his job,” Aviad Menachem Libman, a local ballot supervisor in Majd al-Krum, told JNS.
The regional supervisor, who has a beard and wears a kippah, did not answer the hecklers, who shouted at him: “We’re kicking you out tonight” as they followed him throughout the school that housed the voting station, videos of the incident that surfaced on social media showed. Several men faced off opposite the regional supervisor, prompting police officers to escort him away in an apparent attempt to avoid violence.
The regional supervisor did not reply by press time to requests by JNS for an interview.
Libman said: “The regional supervisor came to prevent election theft so they harassed and intimidated him. He did not argue, did not fight with them. Just trying to keep the election clean.”
Libman witnessed some irregularities a Majd al-Krum, he said. “We noticed there was a person at the voting station who was not part of the ballot committee, who was keeping tabs on who showed up. Marking a list. Voters gave him a serial number. We reported about it.”
He suggested that tracking the serial numbers was part of an illegal scheme meant to reward voters financially for showing up to vote.
A Bedouin city in the Negev
Amit Halevi, a Likud Knesset member who serves as the party’s representative on Israel’s Central Elections Committee, said he’d seen a similar system at several voting stations in Rahat, a Bedouin city in the Negev. “It’s meant to indicate who gets paid,” he told JNS.
On Sunday, Israel’s Central Elections Committee chairman, Justice Noam Sohlberg, confirmed that serious suspicions had prompted him to order a Shin Bet investigation into foreign funding intended to influence the elections.
Speaking alongside Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara and Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet) Director David Zini, Sohlberg said the investigation was based on classified intelligence and remained confidential. A joint team of the Shin Bet, police and state prosecution would investigate the allegations. He said official results would be published on Wednesday as scheduled, and that they remain valid despite the suspicions.
“Serious suspicions have recently emerged that require examination, concerning funding from foreign sources intended to influence the election campaign, which may have a security dimension,” Sohlberg said. He did not identify the suspected foreign sources or implicate any political party.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Arab parties of trying to “steal” the election, alleging bribery, intimidation and other irregularities. Referring to the arrest of three alleged Ra’am party activists in the Negev on suspicion of electoral bribery, he said in a video message: “It’s serious. It’s criminal.”
On Oct. 28, Likud issued a statement accusing Arab parties of stealing the election through bribery, threats, violence, forgery and illegal voter-mobilization software.
“The elections in Israel were stolen by Arab parties that support terror and the elimination of the Jewish state,” the statement read.
Halevi told JNS that Likud has flagged to the Central Elections Committee 1,200 cases, most in Arab-majority voting stations. He said Likud has identified 1,300 Arab-majority voting stations nationwide.
Halevi told Gadi Taub, an Israeli independent journalist who founded the Shomer Saf media platform, on Oct. 29 that he had learned on election night that supervisors had been offered a bribe of 400 shekels ($127), and later double that, to turn a blind eye to irregularities at the al-Khikmeh school in Rahat. The money was for voting for Ra’am, and was also offered in fuel payment cards, among other benefits, he said.
At a certain point, Halevi recalled, a power outage led to “all the ballots in Rahat going completely dark. People voted twice. Ballot supervisors sat there with flashlights, trying to locate, trying to figure out who had voted. They had no chance. It was a farce. I found two supervisors, women, in real distress. One was in tears.”
Ra’am categorically denied the election-fraud allegations, accusing Netanyahu and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir of trying to suppress Arab voter turnout. “There was nothing improper about our activists’ conduct. These are baseless arrests intended to undermine Ra’am and suppress voter turnout within Arab society, as part of Ben-Gvir’s political exploitation of the Israel Police,” the party said in a statement.
