De redactie van NRC selecteert de beste artikelen uit The Economist voor een breder perspectief op internationale politiek en economie.
It’s time Jewish political leaders acted on promises to work with moderate Arab parties, argues Yonatan Touval.
Dit artikel komt uit The Economist
For decades, Israel has asked its Arab citizens to prove themselves ready for partnership: renounce, moderate, integrate. The harder question is whether the state and its Jewish political class have proved themselves ready for partnership.
More than one in five of Israel’s 10m people is Arab. Many identify as Palestinian. They vote, sit in the Knesset, pay taxes, run municipalities and staff universities and hospitals. Yet their place remains conditional.
De redactie van NRC selecteert de beste artikelen uit The Economist voor een breder perspectief op internationale politiek en economie.
Nowhere is the contradiction sharper than in health care. Arabs make up around a quarter of Israel’s doctors and nurses and nearly half its pharmacists. The state entrusts them with its bodies more readily than with the body politic: they may heal the wounded, yet their representatives are treated as potentially poisonous to the political system. Nevertheless, the main parties may find them hard to ignore in the general election scheduled for October 27th.
The path to political partnership has been rocky. In 1976 protests against land expropriation in the Galilee—the first mass mobilisation of Arab citizens as citizens—ended with police killing six Arab citizens. At the start of the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, in 2000, police killed 13 Arab protesters, 12 of them citizens, deepening Arab estrangement from the state. Yet against that current, in 2021 Ra’am, a conservative Islamist party led by Mansour Abbas, became the first independent Arab party to join a governing coalition in Israel.
Mr Abbas did not make resolving the Palestinian question a precondition for bargaining over roads, schools or policing that treats the murder of an Arab citizen as murder. His bet was that Arab citizens could join or support a government while remaining Palestinian, religiously conservative and non-Zionist. Ra’am’s leverage secured a five-year, 30bn-shekel ($9.4bn) programme for Arab communities.
Jewish sectoral parties routinely trade votes for public goods; when an Arab party did so, the bargain became suspect. The money flowed; political legitimacy did not. Much of the Jewish political class portrayed the spending as a pay-off and Ra’am’s place in government as improper. Evidence that participation could work was treated as a dangerous precedent.
Arab parties have helped determine who governs before. After the Jewish ultra-Orthodox party Shas quit Yitzhak Rabin’s coalition in 1993, his government survived with Arab support. In 2021 Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid went further, forming a governing coalition that included Ra’am. But in Israel’s 78 years such episodes have been rare. The taboo is not on Arab influence itself, but on treating dependence on Arab parties as a legitimate basis for government.
The opposition is already revealing where that boundary lies. Mr Bennett, a right-winger, and Mr Lapid, a centrist, now promise to govern only with Zionist parties. Gadi Eisenkot, leader of the centrist Yashar party, the front-runner in polls, has made it clear that while support from Arab parties may make a government he leads possible, they will not become partners in it. The only exception is Yair Golan of the left-wing Democrats, who has called for Arab parties to join the next coalition; his list includes an Arab woman and he campaigns in Arabic for Arab votes. Mr Abbas is testing the boundary from the other direction: his party has placed Yoav Segalovitz, a Jewish former deputy minister, second on Ra’am’s list as part of an effort to recast the party as a Jewish-Arab political vehicle.
No one has exploited the general unease over relying on Arab support more cynically than Binyamin Netanyahu, the Likud prime minister. In 2018 his government enacted the Nation-State Law, a quasi-constitutional statute reserving national self-determination to Jews. In 2019 his campaign framed the choice as „Bibi or Tibi”, a reference to Ahmad Tibi of the Arab party Ta’al. Yet in 2021 Mr Netanyahu courted Mr Abbas when he needed Ra’am’s votes—apparently objecting less to Arab support itself than to his opponents benefiting from it.
The electoral arithmetic may force further courting. In current polling, neither of the main blocs holds a majority without Arab support. Mr Tibi’s Ta’al and two other Arab-majority parties, Hadash and Balad, have united in the „Joint List”. Ra’am has declined to join this alliance to preserve its freedom to enter a coalition. The outcome will test whether Arab votes merely enlarge the opposition or help determine the government.
The consequences extend beyond coalition arithmetic. Organised crime, illegal firearms, extortion and murder have turned daily life in many Arab towns into a measure of whether the state protects Arab citizens as citizens. A government that cannot protect a fifth of its citizens forfeits its right to lecture them on loyalty.
The massacre perpetrated by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7th 2023 drove Jewish fear and grief to depths no honest person should minimise. Many Arab citizens condemned it; some were among its victims; Arab medical staff cared for the wounded. Israel’s leaders should have drawn a line: Hamas is the enemy, and Arab citizens belong to Israel’s grief and future. Instead Mr Netanyahu has, not for the first time, turned suspicion into an electoral instrument: one of Likud’s slogans against Mr Eisenkot is „No Gadi without Tibi”. The subtext is clear: vote for my main rival and you get Arabs in your government.
What if an Arab party does end up in government? Then much will turn on how its leader’s efforts on behalf of his constituency are portrayed. If money for neglected towns, recognition for Bedouin villages or a new law allowing some homes built without permits to connect legally to electricity are branded illegitimate pay-offs, it would strengthen those in Arab politics who argue that integration cannot deliver, making moderation harder to defend and participation easier to portray as humiliation.
Israeli democracy may turn less on whether Arab citizens can accept the state than on whether the state can accept them as political equals: not as clients, guests, a demographic problem or a security file, but as full-fledged citizens. They need not become Zionists to participate fully. It is possible to do so while retaining a Palestinian identity and their community’s memory of dispossession in 1948.
For years, Jewish Israel has asked where the Arab moderates were hiding. The honest question is what Jewish Israel is prepared to do now that they have appeared.
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