Juan Cole Informed Comment
The Israeli newspaper Arab 48 reports that some 80% of Palestinian-Israelis voted in the parliamentary election. I use the term “Palestinian-Israeli” on the model of “Italian-American,” rather than the typical “Arab-Israeli,” which is racist since it implies that all speakers of Arabic are one ethnicity or nationality and that there are no Palestinians.
The community has not voted in that proportion since the 1960s, and it is a sign of widespread anger over the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is wanted for war crimes under a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court.
The editors of Arab 48 say that the Palestinian-Israeli parties may get 19 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, nearly 16% of seats. That isn’t quite equal to their 21.7% proportion of the population, but it is closer than they’ve been before. However, this representation will not turn into political power, since the Zionist parties absolutely refuse to allow Palestinian-Israeli blocs into their coalitions. This rejection of political participation for over a fifth of the population illustrates the oxymoronic character of the phrase “Jewish and democratic.”
The main rival to the ruling Likud, Gadi Eisenkot, has announced that not only will he refuse to admit the Palestinian-Israeli parties to his coalition but that he would not accept their passive support either. In a parliamentary government you need 51 percent of seats to avoid losing a vote of no-confidence, which would cause the government to fall and lead to new elections. But you could have a prime minister with 48 percent of the seats who stays in power a long time if parties that are not in her coalition pledge not to call a vote of no-confidence. They would do this if they generally liked most of her policies and disliked those of her rivals. Eisenkot, who bears some responsibility for the Gaza genocide, is saying he won’t accept even passive support from the Palestinian-Israelis, since, of course, it would make him at least a little beholden to them.
During the electoral campaign, Netanyahu and his Finance Minister / tsar of the West Bank, Bezalel Smotrich, constantly instigated against the Palestinian-Israelis.
Mahmoud Mujadala, writing in the same newspaper, reports that Netanyahu and other members of the ruling Likud Party are accusing the Palestinian-Israeli parties of “stealing the election.” Netanyahu is alleging fraud and bribery at the ballot box, sort of the way US President Donald Trump and his acolytes accuse minorities in this country of voter fraud and the way they reject their loss of any election as a form of fraud. Netanyahu called for a police investigation. He also attacked the Joint List for chanting “My country is my country.”
The Likud Party, among the more racist in the world, issued a communique saying “The election in the State of Israel was stolen by Arab parties, which support terrorism and the erasure of the Jewish state, through serious criminal offenses that included bribery, threats, violence, fraud and the deployment of disallowed voter mobilization programs.” It also accused Palestinian-Israelis of voting multiple times, taking a leaf from the crazy talk characteristic of Trumpism in the United States.
Because no Zionist, Jewish party will allow Palestinian-Israelis into its coalition, it is possible that the two major blocs, those of Netanyahu and Eisenkot, will be unable to form a government. If they continue to reject a government of national unity, and if none of their smaller constituent parties defects to the other coalition, then yet another election will have to be held.
Because Jewish parties in Israel refuse to cooperate with Palestinian-Israeli ones, Jewish politicians like Netanyahu can spew racial hatred and pursue a cold-hearted genocide without fear of voter backlash. In the US, even segregationists like Strom Thurmond and George Wallace tried to get the Black vote once African-Americans were allowed to vote and became a force in politics. That sort of moderation of extremist views isn’t happening in Israel because it still practices elements of Jim Crow.
Israel’s population is roughly 10,305,000, with 2,173,000 of them being Palestinian-Israelis. Jews, along with Israeli citizens not recognized as halachic Jews by the Grand Rabbinate, total 7,828,000. Typically nearly a million of the Jews are outside the country at any one time, since young people and even middle-aged people go abroad for education and careers and many only return decades later. The return rate has fallen, though, during the fighting of the past three years. There are also 304,000 foreign nationals working in Israel, including guest workers and asylum seekers. The Palestinian-Israelis are 21.7% of the total Israeli citizen population.
The Hispanic and Latine population in the United States is roughly 20.5% of the whole. So this would be like Anglo politicians here saying that Marco Rubio should never be in the U.S. cabinet. In fact, 22 Hispanics or Latines have served in US cabinet positions, beginning in 1988 with Ronald Reagan’s appointment of Lauro Cavazos as U.S. Secretary of Education.
Or it would be like saying that the 50 Hispanics and Latines who hold seats in the US House of Representatives all got there by voter fraud or bribery.
File photo of Israeli Knesset by Rafael Nir on Unsplash. Public Domain. “Unsplash is the internet’s source of freely usable images.”
In fact, the Zionist Israeli politicians, when they talk about “Arab Israelis,” sound an awful lot like Strom Thurmond and George Wallace in the bad old days of Jim Crow in the United States. Those segregationists stood against the 1965 Voting Rights Act. They didn’t want African-Americans to have the franchise! And neither do the Zionist Jewish politicians in Israel want non-Jews to have the franchise. Since the latter can vote, and get seats in parliament, the only thing left for the Zionists to do is to pull their wagons around and make sure no non-Jews are allowed into the ruling coalition or the cabinet.
And the UK Green Party was attacked for passing a resolution noting that Zionism is racist. Of course, not everyone who considers themselves a Zionist is necessarily a racist. But the leaders of the political parties that embody Zionism are pretty unanimous on this score.
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