Ayman Odeh: conciliatory tone. Demotix / Mahmoud Illean. All rights reserved.
Despite much pre-election euphoria among those hoping to bring down the
prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, a democratic political upheaval towards a
new progressive era in Israel remains a receding horizon. And yet one political
novelty stands out: the increasing
visibility of its Palestinian citizens.
For decades, they had to cope with a life at the margins of both
Palestine and Israel, were largely excluded from the ‘peace process’ and were
ascribed an ‘identity crisis’
as a people hopelessly stuck in political limbo. For the first time in Israel’s
history, this month they voted collectively as Arab-Palestinians for a Joint
List, reaching 13 out of 122 seats. Under the widely-respected leadership of Ayman Odeh,
this now comprises the third-largest faction in the parliament. With increasing
visibility of their grievances amid rising international recognition, their cause
stands on solid ground.
Meanwhile, the paradigm of a two-state solution, to be negotiated
between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government, is crumbling
between an increasingly uncompromising Israel and a disappearing Palestine. With
a new government, the Israeli polity will return to ‘business as usual’: the
occupation of Palestinian territories, deepening control over the Palestinian
population there and further growth of Jewish settlements, despite their
disastrous humanitarian impact.
These ‘facts on the ground’ seem to undermine the viability of an
independent Palestinian state created through negotiations and Netanyahu’s
declaration that he would not allow the creation of a
Palestinian state if re-elected only deepened
the abyss. His promise may have been “written on ice on a very hot day”.
But despite his subsequent efforts to play it down,
the US president, Barack Obama, “took him by his word”, saying the US would
“evaluate what other options are
available”. Yet the most prominent alternative, a
so-called one-state scenario of Israel absorbing the West Bank permanently, is considered extremely unlikely,
according
to Nathan Thrall, a Jerusalem-based analyst for the International Crisis Group,
while “huge” numbers of Israelis favour the status
quo, because its costs are experienced as minor.
Strong
solidarity
The initial emergence of a unified ‘Arab’ camp in Israel’s election was
stimulated by a government-led change to the electoral threshold for
representation in the Knesset, from 2% to 3.25% of the national vote, which
would have threatened the survival of the three
main Arab parties and the intercommunal, left-wing Hadash. Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority
Rights in Israel, said: “The law reflected the imposition of the
political will of the Israeli Jewish majority in the Knesset against the
political participation rights of the Arab minority.”. This ‘forced unity’ exemplified the mounting anti-Arab
pressure and Jewish-Arab polarisation which reached a tipping-point with the 2014 Gaza war,
during which Arabs in Israel displayed strong solidarity with their brethren in
the Gaza Strip.
Palestinian
citizens make up roughly 17% of Israel’s population of 8m. Most are descendants
of the 160,000 Palestinian Arabs who did not become refugees in 1948 but remained
within the newly-created state. They share however
the Palestinian catastrophe of displacement as ‘exiles at home’, demanding an
end to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and thus an
independent Palestinian state, while calling for full equality as Israeli
citizens. They face socio-economic inequality, legal discrimination and
frequent provocations from Israeli officials.
In a last-minute effort to mobilise favourable voters on election day, Netanyahu
warned of Arabs turning out “in droves” and said Arab parties benefited from funding
by foreigners who sought to topple him. The outgoing minister for foreign
affairs, Avigdor Lieberman, said at an election conference that disloyal
“Israeli Arabs” should be beheaded.
He is not alone in calling Arab citizens who oppose the government’s policies a
“fifth column”,
thereby to mobilise those who want to ‘rescue’ this state project. Yet such polarising
statements have only strengthened the political claim of the Palestinian-Arab
minority and made questions of equality and the nature of the Israeli state
more visible.
International concern
What Israeli officials like to call ‘internal matters’ are quickly
becoming an international concern. Obama warned
that Israeli democracy may “start to erode” if everybody is not “treated
equally and fairly”. As Israel’s credibility as a party to a realistic peace process
is quickly disappearing, recognition of its sovereignty will decline too. The
absence of a viable process strengthens the role of, and draws more attention
to, its Palestinian citizens.
A wide array of local and international projects seek to address their
grievances, in employment
and specific sectors such as high-tech, supporting university graduates
and work-seeking women.
Yet most initiatives emphasise the welfare of Israel
and its economy, while these
projects’ aims and wording remain suspiciously depoliticised.
Politically marginalised and economically underprivileged they may be,
but Palestinian citizens are ever more unwilling to accept systemic inequality
and ever more willing to confront the status quo, according to the International Crisis
Group. In the context of increased attention and visibility, and inspired by
the prospect of stronger collective representation, an unusually large number cast their ballots
in the recent elections in an atmosphere of hope.
The Joint List was a problematic reaction to systematic marginalisation
in a flawed democracy, because it forced 17% of Israel’s citizens into a camp united
merely on the basis of their status as Palestinian-Arabs, pouring a diversity
of political trajectories into a single, ‘besieged’ mould. Such strategic essentialism is a common political tactic employed by members
of minority groups, acting on
the basis of a shared identity in the public arena in the interests of unity
during a struggle for equal rights. The Palestinian citizens of Israel temporarily
put aside internal differences to band together to survive.
The outgoing minister for foreign affairs, Avigdor Lieberman, said at an election conference that disloyal “Israeli Arabs” should be beheaded.
This further increased their visibility
and, in a sort of boomerang effect, the pressure that forced them to unite was
further increased to de-legitimise their vehicle—precisely because they had united:
“The unification proves that [the Jewish communist politician] Dov Khenin is
exactly like [the Arab nationalist] Haneen Zoabi,” Lieberman declared in January,
seeking to ban the unified Arab list from running in the elections. This
dynamic may well be a warning of the possible dangers of unification and
underlines that the move is a symptom of Arab citizens’ marginalised and
increasingly besieged status.
But for the first time in Israel’s history, its Arab citizens could
vote collectively for one list as Palestinians in Israel without having
to sub-divide into supporters of communist, nationalist or Islamist tendencies.
Although the diversity will remain, it now comes under a shared roof.
After decades of internal divisions and anaemic voter turn-out, and state-led
efforts to mark them as ‘Israeli Arabs’ separate from Palestinians elsewhere, did
they vote as Palestinians or as Israeli citizens? The answer, increasingly, is
both.
‘Good Arabs’
The notion of an ‘identity crisis’ is flawed. But the incitement of
right-wing politicians and the homogenising, ‘all-or-nothing’ tendency of the
Israeli state press Palestinians to compromise on their identity for inclusion
and success. Job seekers often face pressures to prove they are ‘good Arabs’.
Yet to most, no matter how hard they try, they remain ‘citizen strangers’ hitting many glass
ceilings. The ‘good Arab’ is invisible as a Palestinian, as Gideon Levy
suggested in response to the Arab TV-presenter Lucy Aharish accepting an invitation
to light a torch on Israeli Independence Day.
Recognition, identity and self-determination have many facets and there
are many ways of dealing with everyday demands pragmatically. The oft-cited
exceptions to the essentialist Palestinian-nationalist ethos, like Aharish,
Mira Awad or Sayed Kashua, are as much part of the spectrum as are nationalist
politicians like Hanin Zoabi, Israel’s ‘bad Arab’.
In an al-Jazeera interview, Zoabi made clear
that the three main political streams among Arab citizens of Israel had come
together without giving up their distinct ideologies or political platforms: the
nationalists (Balad) still believe in a state for all its citizens, the
communists still believe in two nation states (for Jews and Arabs) and “the
Islamists still do not believe in gender equality”. It is in this confluence of
diversity and unity that the real strength
of the Palestinian citizens of Israel emerges, with a growing ability to
straddle the extremes of a complicated political arena, integrating issues of
class struggle and social inequality, national self-determination and gender equality
while remaining firmly grounded in shared grievances and history.
The ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ Arab may thus work well together. The
polarising discourse of Israeli governments and public media has certainly
helped. As Zoabi explained,
“the more right-wing the state becomes, the less relevant our own ideological
differences become”.
In the face of official Israeli provocations, Odeh, head of the Joint
List, has struck a conciliatory tone.
He described the party union as an alternative “democratic camp where Arabs and
Jews are equal partners, not enemies” and he spoke of equality and democracy
for “all the weak and oppressed populations, regardless of race, religion or
sex”.
Certainly coloured by Odeh’s communist background, this baseline of
moderation does not contradict the parallel aspirations for Palestinian
self-determination and full equality in a state for all citizens (as opposed to
a ‘Jewish state’). He also said
that “there can be no real and substantial democracy as long as the 1967
occupation of Palestinian territories continues”, for “only by respecting the
right of the Palestinians to self-determination and independence can Israeli
society be freed from this ethical, economic and social burden”.
Novel
visibility
Acknowledging the repeated collapse of the ‘peace process’, one may go
as far as to say that ‘Netanyahu’s win is good for Palestine’,
because it will increase external and internal pressure. The Palestinian
citizens of Israel may be about to emerge as an internationally recognised
party to the settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a novel visibility
underpinned by their willingness to confront systematic inequality as Israeli
citizens, alongside their demands for historical justice in alignment with
Palestinians living under occupation. Yet can they demand equal rights as
citizens of the Israeli state while at the same time emphasising their
affiliation with other Palestinians in conflict with that state?
The newly achieved ‘diverse unity’ may be one step towards resolving
this dilemma, for it allows the various political factions to push some of
their agenda individually, as communists, nationalists or Islamists, while
still being able to act collectively on most issues they share as Palestinians and
marginalised Arab citizens. Certainly the successful unification of Arab
parties raised some hope among Israel’s Palestinians, who had lost it during
last year’s war-torn summer. In ‘After the war: Jewish-Arab relations
in Israel’, I cited a young Arab student at Tel Aviv University who had written
an emotional letter to Kashua, a prominent Israeli-Palestinian writer: “You
were supposed to be optimistic, you were supposed to give us hope. Instead you
are only proposing despair.”
This was a reaction to Kashua’s earlier announcement that co-existence
had “failed”. Yet, ahead of the elections he wrote: “I saw Odeh and understood
for the first time in many long months that there is still something to fight
for, that a regime of segregation and fearmongering can be beaten, that it’s
still possible to overthrow the government that silences the people, that it’s
still possible to prevent a descent into the abyss of apartheid.”
Although a Netanyahu government appears to have returned, the fight for
a more just future may not be over. As Odeh said in an interview,
“We hope to become an unavoidable political force … We wish to put our weight
in the political sphere, so as to exert influence, advance towards national and
civil equality in Israel, and strive towards ending the Israeli occupation and
achieving a just peace.”
