This is a guest post by Kenneth Bandler, Director of Communications for the American Jewish Committee.
One of the first Israeli casualties in the recent war with Hamas was an Arab construction worker, felled by a missile fired from Gaza into Ashkelon. In an instant, Hamas made clear it does not distinguish its victims. All Israelis are fair game.
Hezbollah similarly didn’t care who was on the receiving end of the more than 4,000 rockets it fired from southern Lebanon during the summer of 2006. Forty percent of the Israelis killed were Arab citizens.
As these terror organizations continue to seek the destruction of the Jewish national home, Israel, they also aim to eviscerate the region’s only functioning multi-ethnic, multi-faith democracy. The right to vote, freedom of religion and press are enjoyed by Arabs as they are by Jews in Israel. And, Arabic, the language of the country’s minority, is one of Israel’s official languages
Like any democratic nation, the United States included, majority-minority relations in Israel are not perfect. Much more can and should be done to improve the economic and social conditions of Israeli Arabs. Successive governments - Labor, Likud, Kadima - have not adequately responded with sufficient resources for the needs of this population, now 20 percent of Israel’s 7 million population.
Significantly, the democratic fundamentals at the foundation of Israel have endured for more than 60 years, notwithstanding the reality that Israelis have lived under constant threats from neighbors who share ethnic, and in many cases familial, ties to the Arab minority.
But, even as the rockets from Gaza were flying into southern Israel, and some Arab citizens were exercising their democratic right to protest peacefully against the Gaza operation, traditional suspicions of the Arab minority deeply ingrained in some Israeli Jewish political leaders came to the fore.
The Central Elections Committee in mid-January voted unanimously to ban three Arab parties from running in the February 2009 elections. Israel’s Supreme Court, wisely, voided that decision.
The main proponent of the ban was Avigdor Lieberman, head of Yisrael Beiteinu, the ultranationalist party that currently holds 11 Knesset seats and expects to win as many as 18 seats in tomorrow’s election, making it the third largest party. In Israel’s fractured political system, coalition governments are inevitable. Could Lieberman return to the Cabinet?
Lieberman initially served for two years in the government of Ariel Sharon, who fired him in 2005, because he opposed the Gaza disengagement. Sharon was not tolerating opposition within his Cabinet. However, after the 2006 elections, Ehud Olmert brought Yisrael Beiteinu into his coalition, and appointed Lieberman a deputy prime minister. He pulled his party out a year ago, to protest negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.
Now, Yisrael Beiteinu has shifted its focus from the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, where Lieberman lives in one of the settlements, to open hostility towards Israel’s 1.4 million Arab citizens. Attempting to ban Arab political parties was only one tactic. Lieberman openly advocates the transfer of Israeli Arabs, though this policy is couched in a proposal to swap lands of Jewish population density - that is, settlements - in the West Bank with areas in Israel of Arab concentration.
Wait a minute! A majority of the residents in the Galilee, the region bombarded daily for weeks by Hezbollah in 2006, is predominantly Arab. Whether or not the solution proffered by Yisrael Beiteinu is realistic does not matter, as long as the political rhetoric touches the heated emotions of Lieberman supporters, and also serves to anger enough Israeli Arabs to stay away on Election Day.
The Arab electorate already has the power to fill ten percent of the 120 seat Knesset. If they could mobilize in unison to support a single Arab party, an Israeli government likely would have to include it in the coalition. Like the Jewish majority, however, the Arab minority is similarly divided.
Over time frustrations among Israeli Arabs may well have overcome desire to realize potential aspirations. As Elie Rekhess points out in a Jerusalem Post op-ed, the percentage of Arabs casting ballots in national elections has been declining, and how many will show up on Tuesday is uncertain.
“Between 1996 and 2006, there was a 21 percent drop in election participation, from 77 percent to 56 percent, the lowest participation rate ever recorded for Arab voters in Knesset elections,” says Rekhess.
Some Israeli Arab political leaders have been calling for a boycott. That may give solace to those Arab citizens who are angry with the Israeli government, because of Gaza or the discrimination they experience as Israeli citizens. Unquestionably, though, a further decline in voter turnout will give succor to the likes of Lieberman and others.
“Hezbollah similarly didn’t care who was on the receiving end of the more than 4,000 rockets it fired from southern Lebanon during the summer of 2006. Forty percent of the Israelis killed were Arab citizens.”
It’s not that they don’t care. Any Arab deaths in the course of eradicating Jews is deemed by Hezbollah and Hamas to be a life given to glorious martyrdom, even if the martyr is 16-year old son of a strawberry farmer who was murdered while trying to help his parents expel a nest of “militants” who were launching missiles from the farm.
No in fact when Arabs kill other Arabs, the ferocious left displays its soft bigotry. “Well you know how THOSE people are…” and they simply move on to the next thing to blame on the Jews. And that’s the good case.
In fact you’ll find that the vanguard of antisemitism in the west is what it appears to be; paid propagandists spouting whatever their Arab paymasters tell them to say. Any hardcore ‘progressive’ blog, e.g. salon.com, with Glenn Greenwald literally pulls data out its collective asshole, pastes it up as fact and gospel truth and heaps personal abuse on any and all who dare question it. Factual contra-evidence is deleted.
It’s a mistake to think antisemites are stupid or ignorant. They say what they are paid to say.
Trudy, I was in a rush today and hastily approved your comment. I really should not have done. So I’m going to point out that we take no responsibility for what you say. And I’m going to ask you - again - not to make extravagant claims which you can’t back up with evidence, to refrain from using foul or intemperate language and to refrain from making provocative comments like the one you left last week which I deleted. This really is your final warning.
What do you think is provocative, the language or the claim? Why are you afraid to confront agitprop that doesn’t bother to even pretend otherwise?
BTW I would add that Israeli Arabs really don’t face an election that is any more decisive than any other. For years and years the Arab MK’s have played an odd game. They tell their own constituency that voting for the ‘zionists’ is a vote for the legitimacy of them, and should therefore be boycotted. Then in the next breath they complain that the Arabs are under represented as evidence of their own claim that Israel is somehow an apartheid state.
And because of the odd structure of Israeli elections, e.g. there are no voting districts or wards so voters elect members of a list wherever they reside, the Israelis play right into this.
No the fact is that Israeli Arabs aren’t voting according to whom Hamas kills. Their representation is already half of what the rest of the Israeli voting populace is, even accounting for their large families and large numbers of children. In fact they’re not voting much at all.