Meeting with representatives of the Israeli Arab community, Netanyahu apologizes for elections remarks

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (pictured) has apologized for the remarks that he made last week about Arab Israeli voters during the day of general elections.

I k"now the things I said several days ago offended some of Israel’s citizens, hurt the Arab citizens,” Netanyahu told invited representatives of the Arab community at the Prime Minister’s Residence in Jerusalem. “This was never my intent. I apologize for this.”

The apology was met with enthusiastic applause from the Israeli Arab representatives, several of whom embraced him after the statement.

On Election Day, Netanyahu’s declared : ‘’The Right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are going en masse to the polls. Left-wing NGOs are bringing them on buses.” He added that “funding from foreign governments to get more Israeli Arabs to vote worked, which means all Right-wing voters must make sure to go to the polls.”

Netanyahu told the Arab community leaders that he saw himself as the prime minister of every one of them, “without any difference in religion, race, or sex”.

“I see in every Israeli citizen a partner in the building of a flourishing and safe state of Israel for all,” he said.

Elected Arab members of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, had demanded that Rivlin press Netanyahu to apologize.

Netanyahu’s Likud party on the election with 30 seats, while main rivals, the Zionist Union, scored just 24 seats.

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin has started meeting with party represented in the Knesset.

Each party is invited to recommend a candidate for prime minister and, after the conclusion of these meetings, the President will ask the most likely candidate for prime minister to form a new coalition government within 28 days.

Kulanu representatives on Monday met with Rivlin, recommending that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be tasked with forming the next coalition. The nomination gave Netanyahu an absolute majority of 61 votes in his favor and prompted Rivlin to announce that the Prime Minister would be tasked with forming the next government likely on Wednesday.

Netanyahu later added an endorsement from Yisrael Beytenu giving him a total of 67 nominations.

Kulanu leader Moshe Kahlon told President Rivlin that his party was neither Left nor Right, but socially-oriented with a central focus on the human being.

“We nominate Netanyahu and the broader the base of the coalition the better it will be for all of us,” Kahlon said.

President Rivlin has made no secret of his preference for a national unity government, with Isaac Herzog’s Zionist Union brought in to the coalition, but that looks highly unlikely at this point, with Herzog himself ruling out the possibility.

Netanyahu is expected to form a government with other right-wing parties, the ultra-orthodox parties and Kulanu, the new centrist party of former Likud minister Moshe Kahlon.