Joint Arab party could backfire on minister
JERUSALEM • Aida Touma-Sliman, No. 5 on the new joint Arab party list and assured of winning a seat in the next Israeli parliament, credits Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s hardline foreign minister, for forcing the three Arab parties to run together for the first time in Israel’s history.
Mr. Lieberman was behind the government’s decision to raise the “threshold” — the minimum percentage of votes needed to win a Knesset seat — to 3.25%, from 2%.
The Arab parties saw this as an effort to decrease their representation in the Knesset — they currently have 11 seats together, but separately none of them would cross the new threshold. That fear caused them to put aside their differences and form a joint party.
“This list is the most effective answer to the racist intentions of Lieberman who wanted to keep the Arabs out of the Knesset,” said Ms. Touman-Sliman, former director of Women Against Violence. “Our answer was to band together and to become even stronger than we were before.”
Her Hadash (Communist) party, is an Arab-Jewish party, but is considered an Arab party.
Israeli Arab analysts say the new united Arab list will convince Arab-Israelis, who make up 20% of Israeli citizens, to vote in the March elections. The goal is 15 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, making it the third or fourth largest party.
“If that happens, the government will not be able to ignore our issues including ending the occupation [of the West Bank and east Jerusalem] and pushing for equal rights for Arab citizens of Israel,” Ms. Touman-Sliman said.
Lawyer Hassan Jabarin, the founder of Adalah, an organization that advocates for Israel’s Arab minority, says he helped push the three parties together by entertaining their representatives several times in his home, where “my wife gave them all good things to eat.”
He calls the new joint list, which includes Hadash, Ra’am (an Islamist party) and Balad (an Arab secular party), historic.
“This is the first time in the history of the Arab nation that you have a list which includes nationalists, secu- larists, Islamists, Jews and Arabs,” he said.
“You don’t have a list like that anywhere in the Middle East. People kill each other for these kinds of differences in Syria, in Egypt and in other places, and here we run together.”
In the last election in 2013, just 57% of the Arab public voted. At least 25% of those who didn’t vote said they would, if the Arab parties united. Now, Mr. Jabarin hoping for a 70% turnout.
Israel’s fractious system of parliamentary democracy means the only way to govern is through a coalition. Traditionally, the president asks the party with the largest number of seats to put together a coalition. They don’t always succeed.
In 2009, Tzipi Livni, today running on a joint ticket with Labor party leader Yitzhak Herzog, led her Kadima party to what looked like victory with 29 seats. Yet she was unable to get agreement on a coalition.
Even if the joint Arab list wins 15 seats as expected, analysts say it will not join the government.
“I don’t see them joining any government that could make a decision on going to war in Gaza and Lebanon or that could demolish Palestinian houses,” said Mtanese Shihadeh, an analyst with Mada al-Carmel. “All of the Jewish parties want Israel as a Jewish state, while we want Israel as a state for all of its citizens.”