Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a rich record of outrageous pronouncements against Israel’s Arab citizens. On Election Day 2015, for example, he warned, "Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves,” boosting his support among those horrified at the idea that Arab citizens vote. These days, Netanyahu appears to have outdone himself in anti-Arab rhetoric twice in the past week — again in the midst of an election campaign, just like in 2015.

On March 9, television presenter and model Rotem Sela, angered by a minister who warned that the government’s political rivals would join forces with the Arab parties, wrote a post demanding to know when “will someone in this government convey to the public that Israel is a state of all its citizens.” Netanyahu responded: “Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the nation-state law we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people — and not anyone else.”

Two days later, during a live event on his Likud party’s propaganda webcast, Netanyahu took it up a notch. “The Arab citizens have 22 nation-states around us, they do not need another one,” he said. Netanyahu was responding to Facebook viewer Ajed Kamal Abu-Assi, a member of the Druze minority who had served in the Israeli military, who asked how the prime minister could consider him a citizen with equal rights in light of the nationality law.

On March 12, Netanyahu boasted of the ties he had recently forged with six Muslim Arab states that he did not name. However, even as Netanyahu was engaged in constructive diplomacy, he was voicing destructive rhetoric against the state’s Arab citizens, drawing angry condemnation by the foreign minister of the UAE, possibly one of the six Muslim states to which Netanyahu referred. “Not only are PM Netanyahu’s comments that ‘Israel is not a state for all its citizens’ repugnant, but they provide vindication sought by extremists. The road to peace is further undermined by this shameful approach,” tweeted Anwar Gargash.