Only Arabs in Israel have true democracy
WHICH OF the hundreds of millions of Arab citizens in the Middle East will be able to vote in free and fair elections this year?
It’s obviously not Syria. Even before a brutal civil war that killed half a million people and made almost half the population refugees, the country was a brutal dictatorship. Libya is in carnage and Yemen is still the world’s biggest humanitarian catastrophe.
Egypt is under a state of emergency and the President’s main opponents were banned from the last election. Whilst there are varying degrees of political development in the Arab monarchies, the unelected Monarch retains the final say in all of them.
The first election for nine years eventually took place in Lebanon in 2018, after being called off by the government three times. Elections also take place in Iraq but are marred by corruption and Baghdad comes down hard on anyone who really tries to exercise self-determination, as the Kurds found out with the military action and blockade they faced after their referendum in 2017.
Many won’t want to hear it, of course, but apart from Tunisia, the likelihood is that the only Arab citizens in the whole of the Middle East who will get to elect the people who run their country in free and fair elections live in Israel.
Almost 380 million Arab citizens live in two dozen countries stretching across five million square miles and the only ones who truly have a say in who runs their country are the 1.9 million in the tiny state of Israel.
Later this month, all nine million Israeli citizens, whatever their religion, race, ethnicity or heritage, will have exactly the same rights at the ballot box. All citizens of Israel vote on an equal basis and Arab voter turnout for the 2020 election reached 64.8%, its highest level in the last two decades.
Visit the Knesset and you will see one of the most diverse and disputatious legislatures in the world representing every shade of opinion from the far left to the extreme right.
The Joint List, made up of the four Arab parties, was the third largest grouping in the 23rd
Knesset and its members were some of the government’s harshest critics.
The alliance won a record 15 seats in last year’s election, and the Islamist Ra’am (United Arab List) party leader Mansour Abbas was elected deputy parliament speaker in May 2020.
It’s important to recognise that opinion is diverse, with many ArabIsraelis casting their votes for parties other than the Joint List. There are Arab candidates standing for most of the main Jewish-led parties — from the left-wing Meretz to Netanyahu’s Likud.
Arabs and Palestinian citizens have served in the Cabinet, in the civil service and on the Supreme Court. An
Israeli Arab judge, George Karra, sent a former President of Israel, Moshe Katsav, to jail for seven years. Recent polling found that most Israeli Arabs support the normalisation agreements between Israel and its Gulf partners, a promising sign. Unfortunately, despite assurances that Palestinian elections will be held in May, it is unlikely that Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza will get to vote this year — so much for President Mahmoud Abbas’s promises. Palestinians have not been able to vote for their president since Abbas won in 2005 and they have not been able to vote for members of the Palestinian Legislative Council since Hamas won the election the following year. Violence erupted, Abbas abolished constituency seats and banned parties that did not recognise the PLO which he leads. President Abbas is now in the 17th year of a four-year term and repeated attempts to hold votes have failed. Less than a third of Palestinians expect the promised elections to be held.
The Israelis pulled out of Gaza in 2005 but no elections have taken place since Hamas took control the following year. Instead, they imposed a brutal dictatorship in which opponents face arrest and even torture or summary execution.
Imagine how different things could have been if the hopes raised by the Oslo peace process had been realised. Of course Israel bears a responsibility for that but so too do the leadership of the Palestinian Authority who turned down peace initiatives in 2000 and 2008 which would have led to the creation of a Palestinian state. Hamas, the de facto rulers of the Gaza Strip, seem more determined to wage war instead of negotiating a peaceful future for their 2 million Palestinians.
The situation in Gaza is desperate. But a two-state solution remains not only possible, but the best route to a sustained and lasting settlement.
I’ve spent thirty-five years campaigning for a two-state solution with an independent and viable Palestinian state, and want Britain to do everything it can to advance a peaceful and just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based upon security, peace and justice for both the Israeli and Palestinian peoples.
All Israeli citizens will be able to vote for leaders committed to that this month.
There are Arab candidates standing for most Jewishled parties’
ONE OF Germany’s most high profile football clubs has proudly taken the lead in tackling antisemitic and racist support amongst its own fans — as well as wider society.
Borussia Dortmund are amongst the top sides in Germany’s Bundesliga, regularly competing in the UEFA Champions League, where they have played against Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester United and Arsenal in the last eight years.
But the west German city, once famous for its steel and coal industries and its main football club have, since the 1980s, experienced a growth in neo-Nazi activity, violence and crime that threatened to spiral out of control.
As a result of Borussia Dortmund’s efforts to address the problem, however, incidents involving the far-right amongst supporters are now infrequent.
In a clear message that has subsequently been followed by other German football clubs, Dortmund became the first in the country to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism in January 2020 .
Furthermore, in an educational programme that has been taken up by thousands of supporters, the club have organised educational trips to concentration camps in order to ensure that fans are aware of the not too distant past so they are better able to tackle the resurgence of the modern far-right.
“There is a huge problem with the far-right in Dortmund and this has connections
The club have organised trips to concentration camps’
to the supporter base,” Daniel Lörcher, the football club’s Head of Corporate Responsibility, told the JC.
“I wouldn’t say it was a problem of the city and then it became the problem of the club, or the other way around. It was a problem for both — we had different threats and problems dating back from the 1980s which went on up until around 2013 when we tried to address the issues.” Mr Lörcher recalled how after far-right supporters connected to Borussia Dortmund attacked other fans at an away game in Ukraine, it was decided that action was necessary to proactively tackle the growing problem.
Away from football, since 2000 the city had also seen five people die as a result of attacks by extreme nationalists, leading to a police task force being set up in 2015 to clamp down on the local neoNazi movement.
“Against this background it was necessary to step forwards,” said Mr Lörcher. “We realised the extreme right at Dortmund had a very powerful network. They had places to meet as well as the violence and the physical situation to threaten people.
“Our aim was to empower those who wanted to change things, the positive ones. We really tried to educate everyone to become active — to empower the supporters to become active and try to change the climate in our stadium so everyone can feel comfortable.”
The club recognised that a tough approach was necessary to ensure that those who were identified as ring-leaders of the far-right were sanctioned. Stadium bans were routinely issued to those who were found guilty of far-right violence in the courts. A leader of a farright political party who used an image of Dortmund’s giant South Stand in publicity material was also successfully taken to court.
Meanwhile the United By Borussia initiative, which attempted to link fans from different age groups and backgrounds who wouldn’t otherwise meet and become a positive force was also successfully launched in 2014.
For Dortmund, an away game in 2008 in Munich had actually witnessed the first educational visit to made to the Dachau concentration camp for the club’s supporter liaison group. “It was connected to decades of problems we had faced from extreme right hooligans,” says Mr Lörcher, explaining the reasons behind a whole series of educational trips that have followed. “In our case, and also other clubs, I think it was a process starting with supporter base, and then to employees and also players.
“What is really important to me is that nowadays it is not necessary for there to be a problem for the club to be active in the way we are. It really has become part of the values of the club. We want to tackle antisemitism and racism in football but also in a wider way across society.”
Nothing illustrated this more than the decision to adopt IHRA in January 2020. It came about after discussions between Mr Lörcher and Lord Mann, the UK government’s independent adviser on antisemitism. “Our idea was that if we adopted the IHRA definition we could also start running our programme to a wider range and have answers to antisemitism nowadays.”
The coronavirus pandemic has impacted on what events the club has been able to stage, although more than 3000 supporters had taken part in educational trips prior to the pandemic. But online the activity has continued apace. More than 100,000 people view the news that the IHRA definition had been adopted on the club’s social media channels. Dortmund have also hosted online workshops, lectures and discussions with a project around antisemitism itself.
“We try to explain and counter the different forms of antisemitism — the IHRA definition has proved a great help in this,” said Mr Lörcher, who reveals that all of the club’s employees are given talks on the importance of understanding the definition. “It is was very important that when we adopted IHRA we used it to empower people to use it in their daily lives.”
At least nine other German sides have followed their lead and adopted IHRA. And in the business world six firms, including Deutsche Bank and Volkswagen, have sought guidance from Dortmund as they too adopted the definition. “It makes me really proud,” says Mr Lörcher. “Now there is this network, and more will follow, I think.”
GERMANY’S JEWISH community has welcomed the move by the country’s domestic intelligence service to classify the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party as “suspected far-right extremism”.
Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said the ruling confirms the “danger” the “destructive politics” of the AfD represents to German democracy.
The decision — taken at the end of February but made public on 3
March — allows the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) to place the AfD under surveillance.
The BfV is permitted to use undercover informants or tap the party’s phones and other means of communication in order to monitor the activities of the largest opposition party in the German parliament.
Domestic intelligence will have to wait, however, until proceedings in a lawsuit brought by the AfD against the BfV are concluded before their order can be enforced or enacted, an administrative court in Cologne ruled Friday.
The decision sets up a contentious battle between party and state ahead of all-important German parliamentary elections in September.
The far-right AfD, which won 12.6 percent of the vote in 2017, has been polling at between 9 and 11 percent in recent days.
Investigators are permitted to use undercover informants’