No to Netanyahu

On the twenty-fourth of April, nineteen thirty-four, in the chamber at Stormont, the monumental building outside Belfast to which the province’s legislature had moved two years earlier, Prime Minister James Craig faced a bitter debate on the rights of the Catholic minority. He reminded a member that the South boasted of being a Catholic State and said that the North boasted only of being a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State. His biographer would put the remark down to the heat of debate, and it outlived the heat, the debate, and Craig himself. Catholics made up more than a third of the population, and they voted, elected representatives, and remained outside the government for the whole life of that parliament.

The son of a whiskey millionaire, Craig had enlisted in January of nineteen hundred to serve in the Boer War, which the British Empire had been waging since the previous October against the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, the two states founded in southern Africa by the Boers, the descendants of Dutch settlers. London had justified the war by invoking the vote that the Transvaal withheld from the foreigners drawn by Johannesburg’s gold, most of them British. To break the guerrilla campaign, the British burned farms, herded the women and children of the fighters into concentration camps, where nearly twenty-eight thousand people died, twenty-two thousand of them children under sixteen, and locked Black Africans in separate and harsher camps, where they were forced to work and where at least fourteen thousand died, without the outcry that the deaths of white people provoked in England. The war waged in the name of white foreigners’ right to vote ended, after nearly three years of fighting, in a peace between two peoples who discovered a shared contempt for the Black vote. Signed on the thirty-first of May, nineteen hundred and two, the Treaty of Vereeniging set the question of that vote aside until the defeated had been granted self-government, and in nineteen ten the two sides founded the Union of South Africa together. Black South Africans did not vote on equal terms with whites until April of nineteen ninety-four, ninety-two years after Vereeniging.

Craig came back from Africa, organized the Ulster Volunteers with Edward Carson against Irish Home Rule, and governed the province as men govern who are convinced that the majority belongs to them by nature, from its founding in nineteen twenty-one until his death in nineteen forty, which carried him to a grave on the grounds of Stormont. In municipal elections, only the owners or tenants of a house and their spouses could vote, and that rule and the hand-drawn districts gave Derry, a city whose adults were sixty percent Catholic, a council that was sixty percent Unionist.

On the fifth of October, nineteen sixty-eight, in Derry, the police attacked with batons and water cannons a march that demanded the principle of one man, one vote. On the thirtieth of January, nineteen seventy-two, in the same city, British paratroopers killed thirteen unarmed demonstrators, and on the thirtieth of March London suspended Stormont and began to run Northern Ireland directly. The conflict that many date to that October march was already underway and would leave more than three thousand five hundred dead by nineteen ninety-eight.

Yesterday we voted, and early this afternoon, with more than eighty percent of the ballot boxes counted, the Central Elections Committee’s partial count gave fifty-four seats to Netanyahu’s bloc, forty-nine to Gadi Eisenkot’s bloc, and a possible seventeen to the Arab parties, figures that may still change before the final box is counted. The headlines have announced that Netanyahu is ahead, and on election night he himself proclaimed that his bloc of extremists had won a decisive majority among the public he called Zionist, and he promised to form a right-wing government. To find such a majority, he had to add to the electorate an adjective that no ballot records, and he spoke as men speak who are convinced that the majority belongs to them by nature.

Arab Israelis are a fifth of us, and they vote in the same elections, elect representatives, and remain outside the government. In this election they put the Arab parties on course for the largest delegation those parties have ever held, and this morning’s press set that delegation aside, so that the Knesset of the headlines has one hundred and three seats.

The defenders of the bloc count say that it includes only possible coalitions and that the Arab parties have never joined a government. On the second of June, twenty twenty-one, Mansour Abbas signed the agreement that brought his party, Ra’am, into the coalition of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid and gave that coalition its sixty-one-seat majority, and in November his party’s lawmakers helped pass the budget that wrote into law the plan Abbas had negotiated for Arab society. Before Bennett and Lapid, Abbas had been courted by Benjamin Netanyahu, of all people, who had tried and failed to bring him into his own government. In April of this year, Bennett announced that he would not accept any Arab party in a coalition, nearly five years after becoming prime minister thanks to Ra’am’s four seats. So I call it a choice of ours, this exclusion that Netanyahu practices after having courted Abbas and that Bennett repeats after having governed with him.

A press that counted every vote would write that Netanyahu’s bloc is seven seats short of a majority and that the other sixty-six members are outside it. The possible seventeen will be among them, each with the same vote as any colleague, elected by citizens who heal and are healed in the same hospitals, hear the same sirens, and bury their dead in the same land as we do. In the Knesset of the headlines, Netanyahu leads. In the one with one hundred and twenty seats, the majority said no to Netanyahu.