POISED FOR POWER?
Arab political parties could hold the balance in a fractured Israel
When Tawfik Toubi, the last survivor of Israel’s first Knesset, died four years ago, he was praised for embodying the ideal the Jewish state should be — as he put it, a “state of all its citizens.”
It was not always so. When he was elected in 1949, and denounced the destruction of Arab property in the Galilee, he was shouted down and shunned by fellow parliamentarians. This led Israeli literary icon Nathan Alterman to write a poem in his defence.
“Who is Tawfik Toubi? He is a Knesset Member; he is an Arab communist. By right and not by grace does he sit in the parliament,” it read.
“Such is the nature of democracy. If it is not instinctively understood, then we have no inkling of what it is about.”
That sentiment has taken on a new urgency as Israel approaches one of the tightest elections in memory. Arab parties have answered attempts to marginalize them by uniting under a single banner, known as the Joint List. As a result, they could hold the balance of power in the next Knesset, making their charismatic leader, Ayman Odeh, a major and unprecedented political force.
The awkward alliance — it includes four parties made up of Palestinian nationalists, communists, socialists, feminists, Islamists, far-left Israelis and others looking for a protest vote — illustrates all the pitfalls of ethnic politics in the Jewish homeland. Israel’s last government collapsed over cabinet-level disagreement about the plans of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to designate it an officially Jewish state.
“Certainly, anyone who’s voting for a joint slate will probably be holding their nose at some elements of what is a fairly diverse slate,” said Mira Sucharov, a political scientist at Carleton University in Ottawa who specializes in Israeli politics and identity.
“Historically, the Arab parties have never been invited into a coalition with the government of the day. There’s a sense of mutual delegitimacy, between the Arab parties, on one hand, and the openly Zionist parties — which is pretty much every other party, except perhaps some of the ultra-Orthodox parties — on the other.”
The alliance is a smart move, mathematically, she said. This is because the threshold for party recognition was recently raised to 3.25 per cent of the vote, from two per cent, after efforts by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, the far-right party leader. This is the highest threshold in Israel’s history and is being seen as an effort to sideline the smaller Arab parties.
“On the larger symbolic point, I think any time there’s a uniting of parties, you get renewed energy. Even some Jewish Israelis, admittedly ones on the far left, are writing blogs and op-eds. saying all Israelis should vote for the Joint List,” Sucharov said. “I think it’s really a cri de coeur about what it means to be part of a Jewish state.”
Israel’s system of proportional representation has long splintered the vote among many parties, in which none has a realistic hope of an outright majority. Post-vote coalition building is the norm. The two leading camps — Likud under Netanyahu and Labor-Hatnuah, together as the Zionist Union, under Isaac Herzog — are polling at just over 20 per cent each.
Comparisons of the Joint List to Canadian parties are difficult, but not impossible. Like the defunct Rhinoceros Party, it could attract a protest vote that illustrates the fatalistic complaint of some voters that no party represents them and politics is destined to continue as usual.
Like the Marijuana Party, Arab parties are often dismissed as a fringe single-issue camp, unfit to lead a proper government. But like the Green Party, they actually unite diverse interests under a common banner. And now, like the New Democratic Party, they have a shot at mainstream success and influence.
Their concerns “are as broad as any other party in Israel,” Sucharov said. The focus is on solving the Israeli-Palestinian issue and “ameliorating the socio-economic and cultural status of Palestinian citizens of Israel. That mostly comes in the form of ensuring that their towns and villages and school systems are being adequately funded.”
There has also been talk of legislation making Nakba Day an official day of commemoration of the displacement of Palestinians after Israel’s founding.
Polls say the Joint List could win 10 per cent of the seats, 13 of 120. Odeh said the goal is 15. This would match the historical pattern of Israeli Arab parties, only this time they would be united. In 1999, it was 10, in 2003, nine. In 2009, two Arab parties were briefly banned over statements about the legitimacy of Israel as a Zionist state, but that was overturned in court.
In 1977, a party led by Arabs and communists won fully half the Arab vote, prompting critics to worry Arab voters were, as the Israeli scholar Hillel Frisch put it, “‘Palestinianizing’ and therefore drifting out of the Israeli system into the orbit of the PLO (Israel’s ethno-national rival) or worse, from the Israeli point of view, into Palestinian Islamic fundamentalist denial of Israel.”
But others described a process of greater Arab political engagement, of “working within the system to ensure equal civil rights and equal allocation of the state’s resources; and seeking the resolution of the external Palestinian problem on the basis of a two-state solution.”
There are serious obstacles to power, primarily the Joint List’s declaration its members will not sit in a coalition with Zionists — and the mainstream Zionist parties’ reluctance to sit with them. However, history suggests these principles could be overcome.
Certainly, anyone who’s voting for a joint slate will probably be holding their nose at some elements of what is a fairly diverse slate.