Democracy and a regime of apartheid cannot coexist
More than 5.5 million Palestinians may be getting a new overlord. The electorate of their occupier, Israel, will make its choice on Tuesday. This will be followed by weeks or months of grubby horsetrading, which may even lead to another ballot in the spring of 2023.
This will be the fifth Israeli election in less than four years. While this may be extremely consequential for Israel’s Jewish voters, most Palestinians merely shrug their shoulders.
The Israeli Jewish electorate does not even bother to debate the fate of the millions of people whose lives they not only control but dominate. It is hard to recall when the Palestinian issue was a central issue in an Israeli election.
Incredibly, Benjamin Netanyahu is the dominant issue of these elections. It is all about “Bibi.” Who will work with him, who will not. The Israeli right will get a majority of the Knesset seats, but a section of that right-wing vote will be for candidates who refuse to be in a coalition with Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.
However, none of the three likely scenarios would work for Palestinians. A Netanyahu-led coalition is perhaps the most likely. The second would be a further election and, in Israeli election seasons, increasing the oppression of Palestinians is a vote-winning tactic. The third and least likely scenario is that Yair Lapid somehow scrapes together another weak coalition. But any coalition would likely crumble within a year or two.
Things could get worse for the Palestinians, as a new Israeli coalition could shift from being right wing to extreme right, containing some of the most racist anti-Arab elements in Israeli politics, the neo-Kahanists. This includes the Religious Zionism alliance of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Netanyahu has said both would be ministers in his coalition.
What about the 1.7 million Palestinian citizens of Israel? They still suffer from discrimination, even if it is not as intense as in the Occupied Territories. The poverty rate in Israel is three times higher among Palestinians than among Jews.
However, disillusionment is very strong. Palestinian voters just do not see their vote as being able to make a difference. One poll suggests that the turnout among Palestinian citizens will be 43.5 percent. It was 44.6 percent in 2021, whereas the national turnout was 67.4 percent. There is a scenario in which all three Palestinian parties do not make it past the
3.25 percent threshold, something that would probably thrust Netanyahu back to the premiership. The Knesset may be Palestinian-free as a result. This is not helped by the demise of the Joint List, which was set up in 2015, meaning the Palestinian vote is spread thinly among three different parties.
Of course, the Palestinian parties cannot fight for equality in Israel. They cannot get rid of the laws and practices that discriminate against them.
Many Palestinians in Israel I have spoken to admit to being scared. The surge of the extreme right will only exacerbate these fears. They have seen the marches with “death to Arabs” chants and nothing being done about it. They have seen the number of attacks on Palestinians increase. Netanyahu has every motivation to suppress Palestinian voting. It is no surprise that he is once again threatening to use cameras to film voting, even though it is illegal.
Perhaps most galling of all, Palestinians will once again have to endure the reiteration of the myth that Israel is some form of liberal democracy. It is not. Only half the people that live in territory under Israeli control will have a meaningful vote. Those people are Israeli Jewish. It is no great democratic exercise. Democracy and a regime of apartheid cannot coexist.