Palestinian citizens of Israel – nearly a fifth of the population – are being urged to vote in an election that many have said they will boycott. Sections of the country’s largest minority have long refused to take part in national polls as a symbolic protest against Israel and its treatment of Palestinians.

In response, the rapper Tamer Nafar released a song last week that went viral online urging his community to use its voice at Tuesday’s ballot. “Either we vote or we end up being expelled,” he says.

The election has been marred by overtly anti-Arab campaigns waged by major political parties. Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, has made an election pact with a group of extremists called Jewish Power, whose candidates include a politician who wants to remove Arab citizens he says are not “loyal” to the state.

Another far-right candidate, Oren Hazan, released a video of a shootout in the spaghetti western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly but edited to show him killing an Arab parliamentarian.

The Israel-based not-for-profit Arab Center for Social Media Advancement has documented nearly half a million incidents of hate speech against Palestinians last year on social networks.

Netanyahu’s main contender, Benny Gantz, has portrayed himself as the more liberal candidate and even tried to appeal to Arab voters. But at one of his party’s campaign events in an Arab village, local people complained of being subjected to unusually invasive security checks. And Gantz has ruled out asking Arab parties to join his government if he wins, saying that he is looking for “anyone who is Jewish and Zionist”.Members of Israel’s main Arab parties have been out on the campaign trail, not just calling for people to vote for them but to vote for any politician who can act as a bulwark against the powerful right wing.

But in the northern city of Haifa, which is ethnically mixed, election posters have been vandalised with red words saying: “I will go to vote when the martyrs will vote”, a reference to Palestinians killed during decades of conflict.

Nafer has used his music video to debunk arguments against voting. In it he plays the role of two boxers, one for voting and one against.

“They’re using us to look liberal,” his pro-boycott alias quips, citing a well-trodden argument that Arab participation gives Israel a false image of equality. “The majority is racist, we’ve lost, this war isn’t mine,” he later adds.

The pro-voter character rebuts “it doesn’t mean that we’ll liberate Palestine”, but if Arab votes help to “imprison Bibi, then we’re ready”, using Netanyahu’s nickname.

Under Israel’s coalition government system, any extra seats that go to an Arab party might be one less that Netanyahu – who is battling corruption charges – can use to form a majority government. A strong Arab turnout, the thinking goes, could end the leader’s 10-year run.

Palestinian citizens of Israel come from families who remained on their land during the wars surrounding Israel’s creation in 1948, while several hundred thousand others fled or were expelled.Largely supportive of Palestinian efforts towards statehood, they are poorer than average and complain of widespread discrimination. A 2016 survey found nearly half of Israeli Jews thought Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel.

Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party points to its $4 billion investment plan for the Arab sector. But last year it pushed through a law affording Jewish people the “unique” right to self-determination that many Arab Israelis said formally acknowledged their status as second-class citizens.

Weeks from election day, and adding to a sense of defeat, the Israeli leader exacerbated those fears. “Israel is not a state of all its citizens,” he wrote online. “Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people – and only it.”