Country faces question: How much democracy should Arabs receive?
JERUSA LEM» Israelis eager to end Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s career won a slim majority in last week’s election.
But one thing has kept them from uniting to send him packing: A sizable chunk of the anti-Netanyahu majority consists of Arab lawmakers, and the Jewish ones cannot agree on whether to consider them partners or the enemy.
Netanyahu says the Arab bloc includes lawmakers who support terrorism and oppose Israel’s self-definition as a Jewish state.
His opponents, led by former army chief Benny Gantz, who held coalition talks with Arab party leaders Monday, say a vote is a vote. But even some of Gantz’s supporters balk at teaming up with Arab politicians, saying that a state established to protect the Jewish people, and still in conflict with the Palestinians, cannot entrust weighty policy decisions to people whose sympathies may be with the other side.
The roiling debate, which has set back the effort to depose Netanyahu and could force Israel to hold a record fourth election, turns on a question at the heart of the country’s existence as a democratic and Jewish state:
Are the votes of Arab citizens worth as much as those of Jews?
Arab citizens make up a fifth of Israel’s population and for the first time have come close to proportional representation in Parliament. The predominantly Arab Joint List won nearly 582,000 votes and a record 15 parliamentary seats, enough to be decisive in an election in which neither Netanyahu’s bloc nor Gantz’s won a majority.
But Netanyahu declared those votes “not part of the equation.” The Joint List, he said, “attacks our soldiers and opposes the state of Israel.”
Critics said his dismissal of the Arab vote was not only self-serving — the 15 seats combined with Gantz’s coalition would boot Netanyahu from office — but also racist and antidemocratic.
“Dismissing more than half a million citizens by rendering the 15 members of the Joint List illegitimate, coupled with incitement against anyone who engages with them, crosses a red line,” Yuval Diskin, a former head of the internal security agency, wrote Wednesday in Yediot Ahronot.
“He’s appealing to racists,” Dan Meridor, a former minister from Netanyahu’s Likud party, said in an interview. “And it goes against a basic tenet of Zionism:
We strove for a Jewish majority in the land. The assumption was, Arabs vote. Otherwise why would you need a majority?”
But Jewish reluctance to rely on Arab support in forming a government is so widely felt that three lawmakers backing the centrist Gantz have now said they would not go along with such a coalition. The loss of three seats would deny Gantz a majority even if he joined forces with the Arab members.
That equation leaves Israel mired in the political standoff that has paralyzed the government for more than a year, with Netanyahu clinging to power even as he faces trial on corruption charges starting next week, and Gantz refusing to join a coalition that leaves Netanyahu in charge.
But the dilemma cuts deeper than who leads the next government. In its history, Israel has held its Jewish essence and its democratic system in an often uneasy balance. It could now wind up giving one primacy over the other.
“They are saying that our votes don’t count exactly because this time we are able to change the game,” said Aida ToumaSuleiman, a lawmaker from the Joint List’s farleft Hadash party.