Comment HAIFA, Israel — A breakthrough in Israel’s seemingly endless political impasse came last year, when an Arab party made the unprecedented move to join a coalition spanning the Israeli political spectrum to oust Benjamin Netanyahu after 15 years in power. It didn’t last, and as the country prepares for another election in November, the big question for many is whether Netanyahu will return — and what role Israel’s long-marginalized Arab voters might play in preventing or facilitating his return. It is a rare moment in the electoral spotlight for Palestinian citizens of Israel. Many, however, are frustrated that they are being treated only in the context of Netanyahu’s political fortunes, while their grievances, including discrimination against them, remain unaddressed. Long overlooked, Israel’s Arab citizens are increasingly asserting their Palestinian identity By contrast, in the year since Mansour Abbas’s Raam party joined the governing coalition, there is a growing division among Arab citizens about whether being in government helped get more money to long-neglected communities or hurt by giving legitimacy to a system they say doesn’t really represent them — or whether nothing changed during that period. “The center and the left say the most important thing is not to have Netanyahu because he incites against the Supreme Court, academics, journalists, the media, the police,” said Ayman Odeh, who heads the Joint List, an association of several Arab parties. , and strongly opposes Abbas. “But what about the Palestinian people? What about the Arab citizens inside Israel?’ The election season in Israel is intensifying ahead of the November 1 showdown. The parties have just finished primaries and, under the country’s proportional representation system, are finalizing their lists of candidates for September. What the landscape will look like for Arab parties, and whether they will again make a difference in the nation’s politics, is unclear. A recent poll found that about 69 percent of Palestinian citizens of Israel said they were worse off than last year, according to pollster Yousef Makladeh, head of the Statnet research institute, based in the Israeli city of Carmel. Eighty percent said they did not care if Netanyahu returned as prime minister. This month’s Israeli strikes on Gaza, which reportedly killed 47 Palestinians, confirmed for many that, in terms of security and the occupied territories, “there is little difference” in who is prime minister, according to the poll. Amir Milad, 53, a farmer in Ramla in central Israel, voted for Abbas in the last election and said he would do so again, even though he said he knew any changes would be limited to roads and infrastructure. “I deal with racism every day,” she said. “In the media. In the streets. … I don’t have the right to marry whoever I want,” he said, referring to a law passed this year that bars Palestinian Israelis from transferring their citizenship to non-citizen spouses, including spouses from the occupied territories. In May 2021, during the two-week Gaza war and shortly before Ra’am joined the anti-Netanyahu coalition, Israel faced the worst communal violence and largest Arab protests in two decades. For some Palestinian citizens of Israel, the protests were a kind of political awakening. Lod and nearby Ramla were the center of some of the worst unrest. People took to the streets because of the injustice, Millad said, recalling that a group of Jewish Israelis threw stones at his car. “So we have to fight [for our rights] from all quarters,” he added, explaining his support for Abbas. After Arab-Jewish violence erupts in Israeli cities, a divided country may never be the same Israel’s Arab citizens number about 2 million, or 20 percent of the population. Most are descendants of families who remained in Israel after many Palestinians fled or were expelled after Israel was created in 1948. They have Israeli citizenship but have long faced discrimination. Some have also risen to high positions in Israeli society and do not identify as Palestinian. For most of Israel’s history, these communities either did not vote or chose one of the many Palestinian-led parties that refused to participate in any government. Some, however, vote for other parties, including Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud. This dynamic had begun to change slightly when Abbas decided to join the governing coalition, but the coalition only lasted for a year and left a sour taste in the mouths of many Palestinian Israelis. This time around, many believe the percentage of Arab voters who participated could drop to 40 percent, compared to 45 percent in the last election and a high of 65 percent in 2015. Instead, Makladeh said he expected about 70 percent of Jewish Israeli voters to turn out. Abbas justifies his willingness to join the government on pragmatic grounds to meet the needs of Arab communities. “We decided to join the coalition because the burning issues of the Arab community cannot be solved outside the circle of influence,” he wrote on Facebook in early August. He declined repeated requests for an interview. Abbas said he pushed for $8.6 billion in Israel’s latest five-year plan to go to neglected Arab communities, while another $722 million was earmarked to combat the epidemic of gun violence in Arab communities. However, Israeli policies toward the Palestinians have repeatedly damaged Abbas’s standing with voters. While he pushed in the Knesset for the state to recognize many unauthorized Bedouin villages, critics said he did not do enough to support weeks of heavily policed Bedouin protests over land claims. There has also been an increasing number of house demolitions over the past year. In April, he symbolically suspended his participation in the government over the Israeli raids on Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque, although he said he would not leave the coalition. Abbas responded to criticism of Israeli attacks on Palestinians – most recently with violence in Gaza – by stressing that he has no control over those decisions as part of the compromise. “The truth is that Arab parties have no real influence on anything related to security and foreign decisions in the country,” Abbas wrote in the same post. “We have said from the beginning that there is no difference between the right and the left in Israel.” But for Khalid Anabtwai, 35, Abbas’s participation in the ruling coalition counts as “active support”. Anabtwai, a member of the nationalist Balad party, said Arab representation in the Knesset is important “to use it as part of the Palestinian movement to build our community and create an alternative to the Zionist parties.” Odeh, who heads Hadash, Israel’s Arab communist party, and many other Palestinians in Israel were also deeply angered by Abbas’ statement in December that Israel called Israel a Jewish state – a term they say negates Palestinian claim to the land and relegate to second class citizens. To make matters worse for Abbas and his pragmatic argument about increasing budgets, many of the Arab communities have not yet received the money he fought for, in part because of the additional red tape imposed on the use of funding in those communities and Palestinian programs; said Salam Irsheid, a lawyer with Adalah, a legal center in Haifa. Ultimately, the debate holds little appeal for potential voters like 29-year-old Shireen Amira, who works in a clothing store in a small shopping center in Lod near Tel Aviv and said she had not voted in any of the recent elections. “It’s not going anywhere,” she said with a wave of her hand. She said her main issues were violence against women, rising prices and tensions between Jews and Arabs. Voting or joining the government “will not change anything,” he said. “They ask us to vote and then they are racist to us.”
