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.”

It is often said (by me, among others) that Netanyahu would do very well as a Republican candidate for governor or senator in America. In the past, I imagined him doing well in the fiscally conservative, rhetorically responsible, socially tolerant, foreign-policy hawkish wing of the party. What I didn’t fully understand was just how much of Lee Atwater he had in him. Atwater, you’ll remember, was the South Carolina Republican operative who was one of the prime innovators of racial dog-whistling, an approach used by a good number of Republicans to instill fear in white voters.

Netanyahu, of course, wasn’t dog-whistling here: He didn’t refer, say, to “people in Israel’s north who don’t have Jewish interests at heart,” or some other such variation (Paul Ryan’s “urban” voter formulation from 2012 comes to mind). Instead, he screamed, ‘The Arabs are coming!”