MK Ahmed Tibi
MK Ahmed TibiHadas Parush/Flash 90

A senior Israeli-Arab lawmaker blasted the Likud Monday, after it made him the focus of its new campaign slogan.

MK Ahmed Tibi, chairman of the Ta’al party, accused the Likud of delegitimizing Arab voters with its new slogan for the 2019 election campaign.

“It’s Either Bibi – or Tibi,” the new slogan reads, referring to the possibility Tibi’s Ta’al faction could help secure a ‘blocking majority’ for Blue and White candidate Benny Gantz – and even potentially sit in a Gantz-led government.

Tibi ripped the Likud over the slogan, calling it anti-Arab propaganda, and compared it to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s warning during the 2015 election that Arab voters were “streaming to the ballots”.

“This is the same lady in a new suit, a continuation of that terrible sentence by the Prime Minister – ‘The Arabs are streaming to the ballots’,” said Tibi in an interview with Reshet Bet Monday morning.

“This is incitement against the Arab community and an attempt to delegitimize our votes.”

The former Yasser Arafat advisor went on to warn that the next Netanyahu government “will be even worse” than the current coalition.

“The next government will be even worse than its predecessor. We want to topple Kahanism, the Right, and Netanyahu. We want to advance the Arab community. Why not put a university or hospital in an Arab city? In Nazareth there are three hospitals – and none of them are state hospitals. I don’t understand it.”