The Arab impact

After running jointly and emerging as the third largest faction in the Knesset, can the Arab parties stick together and redefine relations with the state?

By LESLIE SUSSER
Ayman Odeh, head of the Joint Arab List, and his children cast his ballot (photo credit: REUTERS)
Ayman Odeh, head of the Joint Arab List, and his children cast his ballot
(photo credit: REUTERS)
PRIME MINISTER Benjamin Netanyahu’s reelection is being widely depicted as an overwhelming victory for the Israeli right. But in actual fact the right-religious bloc garnered only 57 seats compared to the 63 won by the center-left.
One of the main factors that kept Netanyahu in power is the fact that on the left, the Arab Joint List, with its potentially tie-breaking 13 seats, is not part of the coalition stakes.
There are two reasons for this. The Arabs themselves refuse to join any governing coalition. They say they are not prepared to share responsibility for Israeli actions against the Palestinians or for Israel’s settlement policy. For their part, the center-left Zionist parties, especially the more centrist ones, are uneasy about sharing power or making parliamentary alliances with the Arabs.
After the 2013 election, centrist Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid declared disdainfully that he wouldn’t be part of a parliamentary bloc to stop Netanyahu that relied on “the Zoabies,” a contemptuous reference to Knesset Member Hanin Zoabi as the generic Arab politician. That paved the way for Netanyahu’s third administration, with Lapid as finance minister.
This time centrist Kulanu leader Moshe Kahlon announced in advance that he would not sit in a government that depended on Arab deputies for its majority.
The subsequent transfer of his 10 seats from the center-left to the pro-Netanyahu column decided the election – giving Netanyahu 67 initial backers for prime minister and a number of coalition options.
All that was more or less business as usual.
But there is one big difference. Running together for the first time as a single united list, the Arab parties emerged as the third largest faction in the Knesset. If through a successful projection of their newfound power they are able to change perceptions and sentiment on both sides of the Jewish- Arab divide, they could turn the Israeli system upside down. And if over time they come to work with the center-left as naturally as the right does with the Haredim, there could be a tectonic leftward shift in the political balance in Israel.
Given the Israeli-Palestinian and wider Israeli-Arab conflicts, that is a far cry.
But even if it does not engender that kind of political partnership, the unified Arab list could spark a redefinition of relations between the Jewish state and its Arab minority.
Its sheer size seems set to produce a change in kind.
In some coalition scenarios, for example if the Zionist Union joins Likud in a national unity government, Ayman Odeh, the 40-year-old head of the Joint List, would become leader of the opposition.
That would give Arab causes – from equal treatment in all aspects of Israeli life to equal distribution of the national pie – unprecedented prominence.
Even if Odeh does not lead the opposition, the Joint List with its 13 seats, could still head prestigious Knesset committees, work with the Zionist center-left to defeat discriminatory nationalist legislation and fight to retain the Supreme Court’s power to protect minority rights against the undemocratic depredations of a rampant right-wing majority.
Arab social thinkers argue that the new sense of unity and common purpose should also be exploited outside the Knesset to help resolve festering internal Arab problems.
For example, reorganizing the moribund Arab High Monitoring Committee to make it more effective in pressing Arab political and social goals; reconciling the different religious streams; breaking hamoula (extended family) politics; and fighting the relatively high rate of poverty and violence in Arab areas.
BY RUNNING together, Israeli Arabs have already shown they are capable of uniting rival ideological streams in the interests of a common national project. The key question is whether they see the way forward in mutually beneficial cooperation with the Zionist center-left or in radical opposition to the Zionist project – or, as is most likely, in an uneasy combination of both.
In the past, the separate parties tried to outdo each other in vociferous radicalism.
Now, united and not in competition, they might have the confidence to conduct a meaningful Arab-Jewish dialogue from a position of strength.
Partnership with the Zionist center-left could help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However it is only likely to come about, if at all, once the conflict is resolved.
For now, the signs for cooperation between the Joint List and Zionist parties are not auspicious. In the run-up to the election, the more radical Joint List leaders vetoed a surplus vote agreement with the dovish Meretz because of its Zionist affiliation – even though cutting the deal could have won them an additional Knesset seat. And in the new Knesset’s inaugural session, Joint List delegates pointedly walked out before the singing of the national anthem, Hatikva.
For the Zionist center-left, cooperation with the Joint List won’t come easy either. They will be wary of being tarred “unpatriotic” by the right. In general the center-left has tended to keep its distance.
The exception to the rule was Yitzhak Rabin’s Labor-led government between 1992 and 1995. Although Rabin did not bring the Arab parties into his coalition, he offered them a socio-political compact which they gladly accepted: Significant increase in government investment in Arab education, municipal needs, infrastructure and job creation, putting it on a par with analogous budgets in the Jewish sector, in return for Arab party backing from the opposition benches on key policy issues – most significantly the Oslo peace process. Although short-lived, the Rabin model shows that this type of cooperation is not impossible and could even be upgraded.
Labor’s unwritten alliance with the Arab constituency, however, was broken by Ehud Barak, when he turned his back on the Arab parties after receiving over 90 percent of the Arab vote in the direct election for prime minister he won against Netanyahu in 1999, mainly because of the Rabin precedent. Arab alienation from Labor under Barak intensified after police killed 12 Israeli Arabs and a visitor from the West Bank during demonstrations in northern Israel in October 2000, soon after the outbreak of the second intifada.
As a result, rather than vote for Barak, the Arabs virtually boycotted the 2001 direct election for prime minister which saw Likud’s Ariel Sharon elected in a landslide.
At only 18 percent, the Arab turnout was by far the lowest ever.
Low Arab turnouts had not always been the case. On the contrary, in the early days of statehood, in elections from 1949 to 1969, a mammoth 79-90 percent of eligible Arab voters had gone to the polls.
This was largely a result of pressure from the ruling Mapai party, using the military government until 1965 as a lever on Arab notables to get out the vote for its Arab affiliates.
Most of the dissenting Arab vote in those first two decades went to Maki, the Jewish-Arab Israel Communist Party.
It was only in the 1970s that the Arabs started voting in large numbers for what were seen as authentic Arab parties, first Rakah, a non-Zionist breakaway from the communist Maki, and then Hadash, a merger between Rakah and Maki, which polled over 50 percent of the Arab vote in 1977.
The big breakthrough for the Arab parties came in 1996 with the first direct election for prime minister. Under the new system, each voter had two ballots – one for prime minister and one for a party. This enabled people to vote for a candidate for prime minister without necessarily voting for his party, leading to a decline in the size of the large national parties and the strengthening of small and medium-sized single issue or single sector lists.
LIKE THEIR single sector Jewish counterparts, the Arab parties also benefited from the resultant fragmentation, with Hadash and secular non-communist Mada winning an unprecedented nine seats between them.
Success led to the emergence of other Arab parties – including the Islamist Ra’am, secular Ta’al and nationalist Balad – and in recent elections four out of every five Arabs who went to the polls voted for an Arab list.
Still there was a sense that the Arab parties were punching below their weight.
There was a growing lack of confidence among Israeli Arabs in the system and in the capacity of the Arab parties to better their daily lives, reduce anti-Arab discrimination in areas like housing and the job market, or achieve larger political goals like peace with the Palestinians or greater autonomy for Israeli Arabs themselves.
In recent polls, 79 percent of Arabs expressed no-confidence in the Knesset and 82 percent no-confidence in the government to make changes for the better.
As a result of this growing disaffection, the Arab election turnout had been declining steadily since the early 1970s. By 2009 it was down from the dizzy highs of the first two decades to just 53.4 percent. Indeed, one of the main goals in creating the Joint List was to reverse the trend, thereby increasing Arab representation in the Knesset and Arab power to force change on the system as a whole.
The idea of a joint list for greater empowerment had been bandied about for years.
But the immediate catalyst for its formation came only in March 2014, with the raising of the minimum threshold for representation in Knesset from 2 percent to 3.25 percent.
Ironically, this initiative by the overtly anti-Arab Yisrael Beytenu, intended to keep the relatively small Arab parties out of the Knesset, forced them to unite – and saw them win more seats than ever before.
PUBLIC PRESSURE on the Arab parties to unite, which had been welling long before the threshold move, gathered momentum.
Much of it came through social media.
A group of young Arab intellectuals opened an influential Facebook page entitled “United Arabs,” insisting that they and others like them would only come out and vote if a united list was formed. By December 2014, polls were showing that well over 80 percent of the Arab public wanted the various parties to unite and run on a single ticket.
A key motivating factor was a heightened sense of threat from right-wing parties pressing legislation perceived as inimical to the Arab minority. The Prawer plan for solving the issue of unrecognized Bedouin settlement in the Negev, the Nationality Bill elevating the Jewish character of the state above the democratic and calls by radical right-wingers to alter the status quo on Jerusalem’s holy Temple Mount were all seen as serious threats to the Arab future. Uniting around a common list, its advocates argued, would give the Arabs more political power to resist.
To create the Joint List, the protagonists had to overcome the egos of party leaders who would no longer lead and the ideological differences between Communists, nationalists, pan-Arabists, secularists and Islamists. The breakthrough came only after the parties agreed to accept the authority of an ad hoc public committee which would rule on contested issues.
The ideological differences proved far less an obstacle than initially feared. After all, Ta’al, the secularist Arab Movement for Change, had previously run with Communists, secularists and Islamists. Indeed, in 95 percent of cases, all Arab parties had voted the same way in the Knesset. All shared the same fundamental goals: full equality for Israeli Arabs in Israel proper and, on the Palestinian issue, two states for two peoples.
Despite the 13 seats it won, critics insisted that the Joint List could have done even better. It ran a weak, unfocused campaign and its election-day organization was virtually non-existent. All in all, there were 835,000 registered Arab and Druze voters, constituting some 15 percent of the electorate. Although the turnout was significantly higher than in 2013, 64 percent to 57 percent, it was still well below the overall 72.3 percent. If it is seen as a success and if Arab voter turnout equals that of Jewish voters, the Arab List could win as many as 15 to 18 seats next time round.
But will the disparate parties be able to stick together until then? And if they do, will they contribute toward Jewish- Arab cooperation from a position of mutual respect, strengthening Israeli democracy and improving Israel’s ties with its neighbors, or will they take a more radical path, exacerbating the Jewish-Arab divide, mutual fears and growing alienation? Either way, the Joint List seems certain to have a huge impact on Israeli political life.