Change seems to be the election theme of 2008, but there is little 'Yes we can' attitude in Israel's Arab sector for the upcoming municipal elections.
By LARRY DERFNERraed salah 248.88(photo credit: Associated Press)
Down the Nazareth street where the massive Church of the Annunciation and a Muslim shrine now coexist in peace, if not necessarily harmony, Faisal Abu Yakub waited for customers in his produce store. He had a long, thick beard and wore a knitted white kufi, the Muslim equivalent of a kippa. His young daughter stood beside him in a head scarf and long dress. "I am a devout Muslim," he mentioned in passing.
I asked who he was going to vote for in next Tuesday's local elections - Nazareth's entrenched, left-wing Hadash list, or the all-Muslim opposition, which includes the Islamic Movement.
"I'm not going to vote," said Abu Yakub. "In this city the Christian politicians discriminate against the Muslims and the Muslim politicians discriminate against the Christians. The best thing would be if a Jew took over, if a va'ada krua [an administrative committee appointed by the Interior Ministry] ran the city. That's the only way the fighting between the politicians here will end."
In the shouk in Rahat, the raw wasteland in the Negev that stands as the "capital" of Israel's Beduin sector, Suleiman Abu Madigan stood behind his produce stand, also with a thick beard and kufi, also a devout Muslim. He won't be voting, either, in the local election - not for the Islamic Movement nor for any of the other parties, which represent Rahat's various extended families.
"If we Muslims were worthy, God would make us the rulers of the world," said Abu Madigan. "But we aren't worthy, we are always fighting with one another. In Rahat, there are 10 different parties competing for power."
Despite what many Israelis think, the Islamic Movement is not about to take over the country's Arab villages and cities. Despite the Acre riots, in which an Arab man driving through a Jewish neighborhood on Yom Kippur set off several days of Jewish-Arab mob clashes, there doesn't appear to be a rise in Israeli Arab militancy that will make itself felt in the municipal races. If anything, the new militancy is on the Jewish Right in mixed cities such as Karmiel, in the mainly Arab-populated northern Galilee.
"We can't expel the Arabs from Karmiel, but Jews who live here should not sell them apartments," said Rina Greenberg, head of the local city council opposition and mayoral candidate for Israel Beiteinu, an anti-Arab, predominantly Russian immigrant party. Oren Milstein, a council candidate on an independent list, has campaign signs up around the city featuring a Star of David next to the slogan "My house is not for sale."
In the face of such sentiment, the city's small minority of Arabs and left-leaning Jews formed a joint list called Karmiel L'kulanu (Karmiel for All of Us). "The idea arose after we started reading in the local weekend papers how this politician says Arabs shouldn't live in Karmiel, another one says Jews shouldn't sell their apartments to Arabs, a third one says Arabs are a strategic threat to the Jewish people," said Rabiya Jahshan, the Arab attorney who heads the list.
WHATEVER ISRAELI Jews think, the Islamic Movement runs only two Arab towns - Umm el-Fahm and Kafr Kasim. (A much larger number of Arab municipalities, including Rahat, are run by parties aligned with Kadima, if only for instrumental, rather than ideological, reasons.) There are no signs that the Islamic Movement will increase its power substantially in Tuesday's elections.
"The Islamic Movement chooses its battles very carefully because it doesn't want to risk losing. It works slowly. It figures it can bide its time until the Jewish state disintegrates," said Tel Aviv University professor Elie Rekhess, a leading authority on Israeli Arab politics.
What's more, the Islamic Movement, for all its ideological steadfastness, isn't immune to internal power struggles and even political heresy. In Umm el-Fahm, Mayor Hashem Abdel Rahman is not running for reelection because he was moved aside by Islamic Movement power brokers. "Some say he's too successful. Some say he's done too much to strengthen relations with Jews in Galilee," said Rekhess.
Israeli Arab politics at the local level is very different from Israeli Arab national politics, if for no other reason than that nationally, Arab politics operates in the shadow of Jewish majority power, while locally, it's Arabs vs Arabs. (Even in the mixed cities of Ramle, Lod, Haifa, Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Acre, Upper Nazareth and Karmiel, the Arab minority tends to be so fractured politically that it has either one or no members on the city council, with no chance of electing an Arab mayor.)
Now that the Islamic Movement's novelty has worn off, there are no radical movements galvanizing Israeli Arabs anymore. Hadash (Democratic Front for Peace and Equality) used to be an outpost of Soviet communism, but with communism finished, Hadash has become rudderless. In the 1990s, Balad (United Democratic Assembly), led by Azmi Bishara, offered a compelling if quixotic vision of Arab autonomy in a binational Israel, but Bishara has since become a fugitive from indictment for subversion, leaving Balad with a vacuum at the top.
"Today, national issues don't play a role in local Arab elections," said Mahmoud Abu Rajab, veteran editor of Nazareth's Al-Ahbar newspaper, a notably moderate publication. "The Palestinian issue is not on the local agenda."
Thus, there is no ideological struggle guiding Tuesday's elections. In fact, with few exceptions, Israeli Arab local governments have all they can do just to stay afloat - to meet the payroll and thereby avoid being dissolved by the Interior Ministry and replaced by an administrative committee of political, usually Jewish, appointees. Bankruptcy in city hall is not limited to Arab municipalities; several poor Jewish towns have been taken over by Interior Ministry order, too, but the proportion is much higher in the Arab sector.
Nine Arab localities, including one of the largest, Taiba, will not be holding elections next week because they are being run by administrative committees. And even beyond these nine, said Rekhess, "Arab municipal government has basically collapsed. It's barely functional at all."
There are several reasons. One is the local Arab politicians' corruption and incompetence. Another is the state's land expropriations and budgetary discrimination against Arab municipalities. Another is the Arab population's soaring rate of poverty and resistance to paying municipal taxes. Consequently, Israeli Arabs have come to see city hall as nothing but a piñata fought over by local rivals, with the goodies - municipal jobs, contracts, housing permits, business licenses and such - spilling into the hands of the winner's family and cronies.
So with ideology hardly a factor in next week's elections, with "good government" basically a joke, with cynicism everywhere, what principle will guide Israeli Arab voters? What is the driving force behind local Arab politics today?
Mainly, said both Rekhess and Abu Rajab, it's the hamula - the Arab clan, the extended family, the traditional source of Arab group identity. The belief had been that with modernization, Israeli Arabs would stop voting for the hamula and start voting for ideology, or for good government, but with Arabs disappointed by ideology and meritocracy, the hamula remains the chief determining factor in local Arab politics.
"What the average Israeli Arab is asking himself in this election is how he, as a member of hamula X, stands to gain by voting for one list of candidates or the other," said Rekhess.
Three municipalities, however, are exceptions. Nazareth, the Arab sector's "capital" and one true urban center, a mixture of 65,000 Muslims and Christians, is too large and diverse to be ruled by clans. In Umm el-Fahm, where Sheikh Ra'ed Salah launched the Islamic Movement's radical "northern faction," the movement dominates city politics, weakening the clans' influence over elections. The same is true in Kafr Kasim for the Islamic Movement's relatively moderate "southern faction," started in that town by Sheikh Abdallah Nimr Darwish.
Otherwise, local Arab politics is a competition among extended families. Smaller ones join forces with one large, prominent family to run lists in municipal elections. If a group of families teams up with a national political party, it generally does so not for ideology or the welfare of the town, but rather for what's in it for them and theirs. A vivid, depressing illustration of this principle is Rahat, the largest of seven Negev towns built in the 1970s for the relocation of desert Beduin.
DRIVING INTO town, you feel like you've entered a Third World hellhole. A valley of garbage and animal waste stretches in front of you, with sheds and flocks of sheep on the slopes, and the air is filled with the smell of burning garbage, the bleating of sheep and the angry barking of wild guard dogs. A faded sign overlooking the valley announces: "Infrastructure Completion Project." Beyond it are residential neighborhoods, but these, too, are blighted by animal pens and fetid patches of grazing land in the backyards.
At city hall, I asked Khaled el-Tayaha, an aide to the mayoral candidate on the "Reform and Change" list, whether the Beduin living around the valley like that traditional way of life, or whether they'd prefer living in a standard residential neighborhood. "Some of our people still prefer the traditional, agricultural life. That's how they make their living," he said.
There doesn't seem to be a blade of grass in Rahat, only fields and valleys of dirt covered with trash. In the middle of town are roads and sidewalks and a traffic circle or two, a few schools and public buildings, a few streets with shops and a shouk, but every stretch is an eyesore. There's graffiti on the walls of city hall; at the main entrance, someone has torched the Rahat municipal seal.
Yet some of the houses look new and fairly lavish, while the streets and parking lots are taken up by late-model cars, including a lot of 4x4s. So with all the unemployment in Rahat, quite a few residents are making money - but all, or nearly all, of it seems to stay in their pockets, it doesn't do the town as a whole much good. About a century ago, the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes said civilization is bought with taxes; that statement no doubt goes a long way toward explaining Rahat's uncivilized conditions.
It's very hard to get through to anyone in city hall by phone, and on a morning last week most of the offices were deserted, but Tayaha, of the Reform and Change party, agreed to talk to me about Rahat. I asked him about the scenes of private prosperity in the midst of public destitution. "There's no program for local development here; there's no economic plan," he said. Yet the word "development" features in the signs of many offices in and around city hall.
"Our motto is social change - education, investing in human resources and the local economy," said Tayaha. He seemed sincere - a young, forward-looking Beduin. Yet he acknowledged that reform and change wasn't exactly a new campaign pitch in Rahat.
The party, like every other one in the Rahat elections except the Islamic Movement, is built around a large extended family. It was started by the el-Huzayil family; its mayoral candidate is Dr. Amer el-Huzayil, the municipality's head of strategic planning. On the city council, the ruling el-Krenawi party has four seats, the el-Huzayils three, the Touri family two, the Jimdal family two, the Islamic Movement two, with a pair of smaller extended Beduin families having one seat each.
"I'll tell you how politics works in Rahat - whoever is closest to the well, drinks," said Ehab, smoking a nargila in front of his little cafe next to the shouk.
Elections in Rahat, as in many Arab municipalities, are dubious affairs. A man sitting with a nargila next to Ehab identified himself as a Kadima member, saying he was at city hall last month on the night of the Kadima leadership primary when "somebody ran in, grabbed the ballot box and threw it out the window," thus disqualifying all the Rahat votes. Somebody's local associates didn't like the way the voting had gone, he said.
The two young Beduin at the cafe and a couple of others selling clothes in the shouk all said they wanted "change," they wanted to break the power of the big families and clans, they wanted Rahat to be run for the benefit of all residents, not just those with connections. They also seemed sincere, but they could only speak in generalities about "equality" and "progress." It sounded old hat.
By now, what was the point of elections in Rahat at all? "Look," said Ehab, smiling thinly, "every five years you look at what the people in power did, and if you don't like it, you get rid of them and elect new people. Then in another five years you get rid of them, too."
LOCAL POLITICS in Rahat is representative of local politics throughout Arab municipalities - again, with a few exceptions. In Nazareth, the hamula doesn't play a role. Religion, however, does.
Nearly 70 percent of the city's residents are Muslim, the others Christian. Economically and educationally, the Muslim majority on the whole trails behind the Christian minority. Most Muslim children go to the badly overcrowded public schools, while Christian pupils, along with gifted and well-off Muslim kids, attend the far superior Christian academies.
Day-to-day, Christians and Muslims here get along smoothly, but the intersection of religion and politics divides them, most memorably at the beginning of the decade when the Muslim wakf and the Vatican disputed over control of a piece of land next to the Church of the Annunciation. For months, crowds of angry Muslims rallied in the heart of the city; at times, fired-up Muslim youths stoned Christian shops. The wakf wanted to build a huge mosque right next to the church, but Israel, siding with the Vatican, ultimately disallowed it.
That confrontation raised tensions between the city's two groups, and in the election five years ago, an all-Muslim coalition including the Islamic Movement nearly unseated Mayor Ramez Jeraisy, a nominal Christian who heads the non-sectarian Hadash list that's run Nazareth since the 1970s.
Tuesday's election in Nazareth is a toss-up, said local editor Abu Rajab. The Muslims may be a large majority, but this is offset by three factors: "99.9% of the Christians will vote Hadash out of fear of the Islamic Movement," said Abu Rajab, adding that local Christians vote in higher percentages than Muslims, and that a minority of Muslims vote Hadash.
At the United Nazareth List's headquarters, green lights and posters - green is the color of Islam - were being readied for the election-night rally. Ahmed Zoabi, the city council opposition leader who is again challenging Jeraisy for mayor, said the two rival lists agreed not to hold outdoor rallies before election night, to avoid the acrimony of the 2003 campaign.
A big, sociable man with a trimmed beard and black leather jacket, Zoabi, 45, argued what all Israeli Arab candidates seem to argue - that his side didn't discriminate against any religion, ethnicity, family or clan, only his opponent's side did.
"Communists are against Islam and Christianity both," he said, sitting behind his desk. "The only two places in the world where communism is still in power are Cuba and Nazareth."
While the hamula doesn't rule in Nazareth, a respected family name has political value here like anywhere else. The name Zoabi is on the signs of several Nazareth shops. Seif a-Din Zoabi was mayor of Nazareth and an MK on David Ben-Gurion's Mapai ticket beginning in the first Knesset. Abdel Rahman Zoabi was the country's first Arab Supreme Court justice.
Ahmed Zoabi stressed that he is not a member of the Islamic Movement, and that the Islamic Movement - the relatively moderate southern faction - holds only minority representation on the United Nazareth List.
"It's true we have no Christian candidates running on our list, but many Christians in the city support us," he claimed, "because they are tired of Jeraisy and Hadash."
He accused the mayor of perpetuating Nazareth's severe shortage of land for development by refusing to incorporate surrounding Muslim villages "because he doesn't want to bring more Muslims into the city. This is a Christian religious ideology he's pursuing."
It's a little ridiculous, not to say inciteful, to accuse Jeraisy, whose family name is also on the signs of many Nazareth shops, of being a Christian ideologue. In a phone interview, he wasn't even offended by the label "communist." "I'm proud to be a man of the Left," he said.
As for his opponent, Jeraisy said "the Islamic Movement is part of his list, and from the beginning that coalition built itself up by stirring religious emotions." Jeraisy noted that his predecessor as mayor on the Hadash ticket, Tawfik Zayyad, killed in a car crash in 1994, "was a Muslim who got the support of 90% of the city's Christians." This shows how Muslim political allegiances have changed in Nazareth over the last generation.
Abu Rajab, who agrees with local grocer Faisal Abu Yakub that the Nazareth Municipality should be dissolved and taken over by an administrative committee, said Jeraisy has lost support, even among Christians, because of some of his efficiency measures. "A lot of Christian residents complain that Jeraisy doesn't do them any favors, that he's a law-and-order man," said the editor. "He fines them for building violations, for traffic violations. Jeraisy's even hired an outside firm to do a better job collecting municipal taxes."
All that, of course, speaks well for Jeraisy. At 57, he's been mayor for 14 years, after 15 years as deputy mayor. This is the problem, maintained Zoabi: "The communist regime has been in power in Nazareth for 33 years. It's time for a change."
FROM BARACK Obama to Tzipi Livni and onward, change seems to be the election theme of 2008. If it comes to Nazareth on Tuesday, this will be the big news in Israel's Arab sector.
As for the effect of the Acre riots, no one I talked to in Nazareth or Rahat said they'd noticed any in the campaign. But in mixed Jewish-Arab cities, where about 10% of Israel's Arab citizens live, Acre is on voters' minds.
For Rabiya Jahshan, head of Karmiel's new Arab-Jewish list, the riots "reinforced our conviction that Jews and Arabs in this city have to come together." However, the riots also reinforced Israel Beiteinu mayoral candidate Rina Greenberg's conviction that "Karmiel should not become a mixed city. There are a lot of problems. I don't want intermarriage. A lot of our Jewish girls get pregnant by Arabs."
Karmiel, a city of 50,000, is a well-kept, well-landscaped town with wide boulevards running up and down hills covered with low- and mid-rise apartments. Built in the 1960s, as Greenberg says, to "settle Jews in the Galilee," it looks out on Arab villages in all directions.
Officially, the city only has about 700 Arab residents, but many more rent apartments here while maintaining their official residency in their villages. Jahshan estimates that 2,000 to 3,000 Arabs actually live in Karmiel. About 40% of the city's population are Russian immigrants, who tend, on the whole, toward nationalistic, anti-Arab political views. At the entrances to Karmiel, election billboards have been put up by Israel Beitenu, whose signature issue is the demand to expel hundreds of thousands of Galilee Arabs to the West Bank in a land swap with the Palestinian Authority. The billboards show party leader Avigdor Lieberman's full, bearded face and read: "Strong leadership - Lieberman now!"
Still, Jahshan described casual relations between Karmiel's Jews and Arabs as "excellent, excellent," noting that the great majority of tenants in the buildings he lives and works in are Jews. He credits the municipality for treating Arabs equally, adding that in past elections he voted for long-time Mayor Adi Eldar, a Kadima man formerly with Labor. The problem, said Jahshan, is the extremist Jewish politicians who incite against Arabs, along with the young Jewish "hotheads" from town and their Arab counterparts who come in from the villages.
About three months ago, a couple of dozen young Karmiel Jews attacked an Arab man sitting in his car in the middle of the night, flipping his car over and putting him in the hospital. Eldar expressed regret to the man's family, and police arrested some of the marauders. Local newspapers reported the attack, and it was even written up by Nahum Barnea in his Friday Yediot Aharonot column, probably the country's most widely-read newspaper feature. "I never heard of such an incident," said Greenberg.
Despite what she may think, there's no evidence of an uprising being plotted in the Arab villages and towns or even in Arab-owned apartments of the mixed cities. Unlike what happened in Gaza a couple of years ago, there will be no Islamist electoral takeover in Israel on Tuesday. Israeli Arab politics, locally as well as nationally, has reached a state of inertia. If anything, it's going backward. The Rina Greenbergs of this country can relax.
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