Netanyahu: I mobilized voters against 'Arab money'

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended himself in an interview against accusations that he used racially charged language to discriminate against Israel’s Arab minority before saying that he was trying to mobilize voters against “Arab money.”

“I was trying to mobilize my own forces,” Netanyahu said in an interview with NPR published Friday. “And that mobilization was based on Arab money — sorry, on foreign money, a lot of foreign money that was coming in.”

Netanyahu raised eyebrows on Tuesday when he warned voters on Israel’s election day in a Facebook post that the “right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls.”

In a White House briefing on Thursday, Secretary Josh Earnest called the warning “cynical” and “divisive.”

“That cynical election day tactic was a pretty transparent effort to marginalize Arab-Israeli citizens and their right to participate in their democracy,” Earnest said.

Netanyahu defended himself by saying that Israel automatically registers all citizens to vote and that “Arab and Jews, alike, have the right to vote.”

“Well, actually, I was talking about the mobilization of specific communities for a specific party,” Netanyahu elaborated. “It’s bizarre lines of Islamists and anti-Israel forces who are trying to topple my government. So I wasn’t trying to block anyone from voting. I was trying to mobilize my own forces.”

Netanyahu’s Likud party won a plurality of seats in the Israeli parliament despite polls showing his rivals pulling ahead.

When asked if he is “suspicious of Arabs” who are attempting to gain citizenship in Israel, Netanyahu answered a flat “no.”

“I’m the prime minister of all of Israel’s citizens. Jews and Arabs, alike,” he said.

Netanyahu has said that “tens of millions of dollars” in foreign money was deployed to engineer his ouster.

The Washington Post reported Friday that Netanyahu’s claim was exaggerated, and that much of the funding in question came from European governments and Jewish citizens of other countries, and in many cases only indirectly played a role in the election.