Ramallah: A prominent Israeli politician has sparked outrage among Israelis after making comments that he would prefer it if Palestinians from the 1948 areas do not go to the polls to vote in the elections.

“If the Arabs [Palestinians from the 1948 areas] were not able to come to vote, that would be preferable,” said coalition chair David Bitan of the Likud party.

“Ninety-five per cent of the Palestinians of the 1948 areas vote for the Joint Arab List, which does not represent the Palestinians of Israel but rather Palestinian interests,” he added.

The Joint Arab List is a coalition of four parties – Balad, Hadash, Ta’al and the United Arab List – which operate together as one Knesset bloc, and which won enough seats (13) to be the third largest alliance in the 120-seat Israeli Knesset.

Bitan’s comments, delivered during a cultural event on Saturday, caused controversy, but the coalition chair declined to retract his remarks.

Israeli opposition leader Isaac Herzog of the Zionist Union, harshly criticised Bitan’s remarks, branding them as a new racist platform, and saying that, “The coalition chairman is calling for the voting rights of minorities to be denied, just as the anti-Semitic leaders of Europe did in the past to Jewish people.”

Tzipi Livni, former Israeli secretary of state and vice chairwoman of the Zionist Union, said, “While Netanyahu’s Likud is worried about the Palestinians of the 1948 areas, the laws to annex the West Bank that they are promoting will bring millions more Palestinians there to live, where they will demand voting rights, instead of in a state of their own.”

Ayman Odeh, who heads the Joint Arab List, described Bitan’s remarks as ‘racist, pathetic and cheap’ adding that they prove that Netanyahu’s Likud party is worried about the Joint Arab List’s increasing political power and influence.

“I am not surprised that the great democrat Bitan prefers that Arabs not vote in the elections,” he said in a harshly-worded statement.

The Joint Arab List demanded that Bitan be removed from his position as a punitive measure after his racist remarks.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak accused Bitan of leading Israel into an abyss.

Bitan’s remarks did not even sit well with far right Israeli parliamentarians. One member of the Knesset, Yehudah Glick, a fundamentalist advocate of increasing Jewish rights in Al Haram Al Sharif, said, “I would very much hope that the Arabs do vote. I hope that we are attractive enough that the Arabs want to vote for Likud.”

Palestinian citizens of Israel are the indigenous people of Palestine who remained on their land when the state of Israel was created in 1948.

After almost two decades of living under military rule, they were given Israeli citizenship, but continue to face systematic discrimination.