Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 1999, pages 16-20

The Israeli Elections: Another Chance for Peace Or Just Domestic Job Rearranging?—Three Views

Under Two-Stage System, Choice of Israel’s Directly Elected Prime Minister May Belong to Israeli Arabs

By Rula Sharkawi and Simon Trevarthen

As Israel’s May 17 elections loomed this year, Israelis discovered that they live in a very diverse society. With Likud and Labor neck-and-neck in the polls, few on the left could forget that Shimon Peres lost the 1996 election by only 40,000 votes. Key to any Labor Party victory this time, therefore, are the votes of 887,000 Israeli Arabs.

While Arab-Israeli leaders have hinted that they may urge their followers to vote for Labor Party leader Ehud Barak if the contest goes to a second round, many Arab voters remain unconvinced.

When Shimon Peres stood for election in 1996, he must have thought he had the Arab vote in the bag. Traditionally, more out of pragmatism than belief, Arabs had always backed Israel’s main left-wing party out of fear of the right-wing alternatives.

However, Peres’ ill-fated pre-election pummeling of Lebanon changed all that. With television pictures of over a hundred dead Lebanese women and children being dragged from the rubble after Israeli forces shelled the U.N. post at Qana, few Arab-Israelis had the stomach to vote for Labor.

“In 1996 I didn’t vote for Peres,” says Sameer, a store clerk from Nazareth, “because it was impossible to forget the massacre in Khar Qana.”

In response, member of the Knesset Azmi Bishara, leader of the Democratic Arab Party (Balad), led a campaign to urge Arab voters to stuff ballot boxes with blank votes or to stay at home. Bishara stated that following the massacre there was no difference between Likud and Labor, as they are two sides of the same coin.

For Peres it was a disaster. Last-minute attempts to bus Arab voters to the polling stations proved unsuccessful as the ballot boxes closed.

The result when it came, was a shock.

Israeli journalist Aimee Rhodes, who followed the campaign trail, recalls, “I remember going to bed that night thinking, all right, Peres is my prime minister. But when I woke, to my surprise we had a new prime minister. It was Netanyahu.”

Peres had lost by a margin so small that a recount of the last batch of votes was needed.

Thirty-six months later that shock has faded. The Likud-led coalition has left the peace process moribund and the Netanyahu government pandering shamelessly to minority religious-right parties.

For many Arab Israelis, used to being treated as the “silent minority” corralled at election time into voting Labor and ignored between elections, some things have changed.

Part of Arab-Israeli misgivings about voting Labor this time stem from the fact that Barak is seen to be a very different man from Peres or Rabin.

A brilliant officer who rose to the rank of chief of staff, Barak has failed to become anything like a sparkling politician. What Americans call the “vision thing” is sadly missing from Barak’s campaign.

Gone are the references to a new Middle East shaped in the spirit of Oslo. Instead, Barak prefers to concentrate on the “safe” and more mundane issues of the economy and education.

This raises Arab voters’ suspicions that Labor, under Barak, is not as committed to peace as under his predecessors. Barak’s avoidance of the prickly topic of a Palestinian state is a particular point of concern to Israeli Arabs. With Israeli polls showing unease about a new Arab neighbor, Barak prefers the word “separation” to statehood.

While Barak skirts around the subject of a Palestinian state, his number two, Yossi Beilin, embraces the idea. Respected by both Jews and Arabs alike as a straight talker committed to peace, Beilin is known to be sensitive toward Israel’s Arab concerns.

Almost daily, Beilin and other Labor Party dignitaries are photographed sitting with Bedouin elders, meeting ordinary Druze and Arabs, and speaking regularly with the five Arab members of the Knesset.

Labor’s unofficial aim is to capture upwards of 90 percent of the Arab vote. However, as Labor Party spokesman Yitzhak Riara Ihiyya concedes, there are problems.

In tempting Arabs to vote Labor, Riara Ihiyya says that his party “promises two things” to Israeli Arab voters. “First, to continue with the peace process [and] on the economic and social level we promise equality in all means. We are promising equality not just as a statement but as a policy,” he asserts.

“That’s what they all say,” says Rania Abassi, an Arab Israeli from Haifa. “Once they get voted in, they forget about equality and about the Arabs. I have yet to see Arab Israelis treated on the same level as the Jews, politically, economically or socially.”

Riara Ihiyya blames Likud for neglecting the Arab towns and villages, adding that he understands why Arabs feel ignored. “When they see another [Israeli] town near them receive more money than it should be receiving, there are grounds for frustration,” he says.

Such pent-up frustrations have on occasion exploded into violence. Last September, Israeli land confiscation around the Arab-Israeli town of Um il Fahim triggered two days of rioting, in which over 400 people were injured.

Though clashes at Um il Fahim were an exception, the feeling that Arab Israelis are treated as second-class citizens is widespread.

“There are two methods of dealing with citizens in Israel—one for the Arabs, and one for everyone else,” complained Abassi. “We don’t face the severe hardships that West Bankers and people in Gaza do, but if compared to the Jewish population, we are definitely not treated the same.”

That sentiment is shared by Azmi Bishara, who says that Israel can be considered a modern democracy only when equal rights are given to all.

“As long as the state is defined as Jewish, by virtue of that definition an Arab must be a second-class citizen, while a Brooklyn Jew who arrived yesterday is immediately granted all rights,” he said in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz.

In an attempt to gather up this discontent into electoral support, Azmi Bishara announced on March 25 that he would be the first Arab to stand as an Israeli prime ministerial candidate.

At the launch of his campaign he stated he would focus on the bread-and-butter issues facing Israeli Arabs: enlargement of the Arab village boundaries, making Arab education separate, working toward the return of refugees and pushing for return of dispossessed residents of the two demolished Arab villages Biram and Ikrit.

 “I will address the problems that perturb the country’s Arab citizens, who constitute a fifth of the population,” Bishara said.

The real problem with the Arab-Israeli vote is that it remains a tactical weapon. Most pundits believe that none of the four (including Azmi) prime ministerial candidates will win enough support on May 17 to be elected without a second round in June. Polls indicate that a second round will be a two-horse race between Barak and Netanyahu. Under those conditions, although there will be no Arab candidates involved, Arab Israelis will be faced with a stark choice of going to the polls to vote for the Labor candidate or to have another Likud government. The runoff election’s outcome, it seems, will be in Arab-Israeli hands.

Rula Sharkawi and Simon Trevarthen are journalists based in Jerusalem.