In my hometown of Tira, an Arab community in central Israel, word spread on election day last week of many residents deciding to vote at the last minute. During the campaign’s final weeks, families watched as the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu launched ferocious tirades about the threat of a “leftist-Arab government”. He told his followers the Arabs “want to annihilate us all”, and that they were “stealing” the elections through rampant voter fraud (his legislative attempts to place surveillance cameras at Arab polling stations failed to get through the Knesset).

Tira’s residents were no strangers to the prime minister’s history of racist incitement, but for many people his shocking escalations compelled a response. If they couldn’t stop him from winning, they thought, they would at least try to make his job as difficult as possible.

So far, they have succeeded. About 60% of eligible Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up a fifth of the state’s population, cast their ballots last week – a leap from 49% in the April elections, which failed to produce a governing coalition. The Joint List, a reunified alliance of four Arab-led political parties, restored its place as the third largest slate in the Knesset with 13 seats, aided in great part by its intensive campaign to regain public support. Opposition Jewish parties also received small shares of the Palestinian vote.

Like much of Israeli politics over the past decade, the value placed on Palestinian voting power has been centred almost exclusively on one issue: ousting Netanyahu

Traditionally, Arab parties have refused to nominate an Israeli prime minister – their last recommendation was for Yitzhak Rabin in 1992, who went on to sign the Oslo accords with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. But in a historic and controversial move on Sunday, Ayman Odeh, the head of the Joint List, formally recommended to President Reuven Rivlin that Benny Gantz, leader of the centre-right Blue and White party, be appointed to form the next government. Only one of the List’s factions, the nationalist party Balad, withheld its support. Had Odeh declined to nominate Gantz, the task was more likely to be assigned to Netanyahu again. (At Rivlin’s urging, the two leaders have now begun talks about forming a unity government.)

These surprising developments have been praised as major steps towards “integrating” Palestinian citizens into national politics and reigniting the opposition to increasingly hard-right rule. But such claims are seriously flawed. Like much of Israeli politics over the past decade, the value placed on Palestinian voting power has been centred almost exclusively on one issue: ousting Netanyahu. There has been little engagement in Israel or abroad with the community’s larger policy concerns, which include stopping home demolitions and land seizures, eradicating gun violence in Arab towns, revoking dozens of discriminatory laws and ending the occupation of the Palestinian territories. And yet as the Palestinian writer and feminist activist Samah Salaime put it, the Israeli centre-left now thinks that it is the responsibility of Palestinians “to take Bibi down – as second-class citizens, but first-class voters”.

This narrow narrative, which the Joint List itself often resorts to, reduces Palestinian citizens to pawns in a competition between Jewish political elites, whose differences have more to do with personality than policy. It’s not just that Blue and White’s platform mirrors Likud in nearly all but name: Gantz and his partner, Yair Lapid, have repeatedly derided the Joint List as extremists who don’t represent their constituents, and have rejected the conditions put forward by Odeh for backing Gantz’s candidacy – conditions ranging from recognising dozens of Bedouin villages in the Negev to cancelling the Jewish nation-state law, which reflect the basic needs and rights of Palestinian citizens. “Centre-left” Zionist parties, such as the Democratic Union and Labour-Gesher, have also shifted rightwards in many of their positions: the two-state solution, once the centre-left’s flagship agenda, is no longer a priority.

Given this divide, Arab parties usually prefer to stay out of the Jewish majority’s leadership battles. But with today’s competing blocs neck-and-neck, with Palestinian national politics severely fragmented and with Palestinian citizens demanding results from their infighting leaders, the Joint List found itself between a rock and a hard place.

Removing Netanyahu and disrupting the rightwing’s decade-long hold on power could provide many strategic benefits to Palestinian citizens – a path that appears to be endorsed by most of the community, who are feeling the brunt of the government’s increasingly harmful policies. But to do this, they must back Gantz, a former army chief who boasted of bombing Gaza “back to the stone age”, and who declared that he would only sit with coalition partners who were “Jewish and Zionist” – echoing the racist politics of the very rival he is trying to depose. Palestinians are damned if the List steps away and allows Netanyahu’s return, and they are damned if it steps in and offers Gantz a path to power.

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By opting for the latter, the List has taken a gamble that is already polarising Palestinian opinion, and which could backfire devastatingly if a unity government is formed. Regardless of what unfolds, the obsession with Netanyahu’s fate must shift to the bigger problem at the heart of Israeli politics. Despite differing ideologies, Palestinian citizens remain united around a core political consensus: full equality and social justice for all, and an end to the military occupation. These pillars – which would be basic values in any other part of the world – are still viewed by most Jewish-Israeli parties and voters as uncomfortable at best and an existential threat at worst. That makes the Joint List, despite its numerous flaws, the only truly progressive party in Israel.

But as long as Israel’s “democracy” is predicated on accepting racial primacy and disenfranchising millions, it won’t matter how many parliamentary seats the List can muster – its “first-class voters” will remain second-class citizens.

• Amjad Iraqi is a contributing editor at +972 Magazine and a policy analyst at Al-Shabaka