The chairman of Israel's Central Election Committee, Salim Joubran, a judge on the country's Supreme Court, is an Arab Israeli. In other words, the man who just supervised the Jewish state's latest election (and who also, by the way, sent a former Israeli president to jail), is not Jewish. This, of course, is a good thing. Arab Israelis (or Palestinian-Israelis, as many prefer to be called), suffer from various forms of discrimination as a minority group, but they have the franchise (17 members, out of 120, of the next Knesset will be Arab), and they are playing increasingly important roles in the law, academia, science, and in medicine (it's become a bit of an inverted Jewish joke that so many Jewish Israelis go to Arab doctors).

Israel should be proud that, in a disintegrating and brutal Middle East, it has managed to maintain its democratic traditions (in Israel proper, not in the West Bank, of course) and that it treats minorities in ways that minorities in much of the rest of the Middle East can only dream of being treated.

The now-and-apparently-forever prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, ought to be proud of his country's record of enfranchisement. He should be happy that Arabs vote in large numbers, just as Jews vote in large numbers. But Netanyahu was not happy yesterday when he saw Arabs heading to the polls. He said, in a message distributed on social media and meant for his base, "Right-wing rule is in danger. Arab voters are streaming in huge quantities to the polling stations."