Cracking the mystery of Arab joy at Netanyahu re-election victory
By Khaled Diab
When the election victory of Binyamin Netanyahu was declared, rather than grieve, Arabs in Israel were out on the streets celebrating.
Wednesday 25 March 2015
Dashing the hopes and wishes of the Israeli centre and left, the rightwing Likud party came out as the top party in the country's notoriously fractured political system, which would give those of Italy and Belgium a run for their money.
Despite the depressing prospect of another Netanyahu-led hard-right coalition, rather than mourning, Palestinians in Israel are in a celebratory mood. In the northern city of Nazareth, for example, motorists beeped their horns as if on their way to a wedding.
The reason for their apparently paradoxical jubilation had nothing to do with the Likud or Netanyahu but was related to the unprecedentedly strong showing of the Arab-dominated Joint List. “This is an excellent result because it represent a renewed vote of confidence from Arab citizens to their representatives,” reflected a friend from Nazareth.
And two men were to thank for this “vote of confidence” and the large Arab turnout following years of apathy.
One was Avigdor Lieberman of the ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party. The outgoing foreign minister initiated legislation to raise the electoral threshold which was widely interpreted as a bid to muscle out Arab parties, who tend to draw fewer votes than their Jewish rivals, from the Knesset. This, along with his and the far-right's vitriolic anti-Arab rhetoric, pushed these small parties to form an unlikely alliance, the Joint List, between Palestinian nationalists, Arab and Jewish progressives, not to mention Islamists.
The other was the lawyer-turned-politician from Haifa, Ayman Odeh, who came from relative obscurity to lead a charismatic campaign for the Joint List which had some observers describing him as the most exciting Arab politician in the Middle East.
“Our Joint List calls for the unification of all the weak and oppressed populations, regardless of race, religion or sex,” explained Ayman Odeh in the UK's Guardian newspaper. “We will be an alternative camp, the democratic camp – where Arabs and Jews are equal partners, not enemies.”
And with Arabs making up the bulk of Israel's under-privileged, the Joint List has devised a 10-year plan to close the socio-economic gap between them and the mainstream. “We intend to march on Jerusalem… to raise awareness of our 10-year plan and demand justice and democracy,” Odeh declared, echoing civil rights pioneers such as Martin Luther King.
Another important plank is strident opposition to the occupation in an Israel apathetic towards its subjugation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and fixated on “managing” the conflict. “We say that there can be no real and substantial democracy as long as the 1967 occupation of Palestinian territories continues,” Odeh observed.
It is unclear how successful the Joint List can be in its declared goals when faced with a possible ultra-nationalist rightwing coalition or a status-quo-friendly “national unity” government. But one thing is clear: the Joint List's success at the ballot box has finally and belatedly put Palestinians in Israel on the political map in which they may end up leading the opposition.
This carries the potential of being a game-changer and future historians may look back at this time as being the turning point when the Palestinian struggle began to morph into a civil rights movement.
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This article first appeared in Corriere della Serra on 19 March 2015.
Dear Mr. Diab,
you are missing a crucial fact. Not a few Arab citizens of Israel voted for right wing parties affiliated with the Likud. Two reasons: 1) They indeed do genuinely feel Israelis, citizens of the Jewish state, and 2) in a land swab towards the two-state solution, they do not want to be part of a future Palestinian state. Rami