The Arab Vote in the Jewish State

One of the least understood, but most significant results of these elections, is the unprecedented voter turnout of Israeli Arab-Palestinians, and perhaps even more significantly, the refusal of Jewish-Zionist parties from the center and right to consider them as potential coalition partners. This is getting increasing attention overseas as a prooftext for the exclusionary nature and inherent racism of the very idea of a Jewish state. For those who aren’t simply looking for talking points to prove that Israel is an illegitimate state in the family of nations, I’d like to take a more serious look at what is happening, and what is at stake.

Understanding the Jewish-Zionist boycott of Arab political parties as racism, a frame lifted directly from the American experience, is being imposed on an Israeli reality with a very different history and political context. Such frames imposed from above are their own form of intellectual colonialism, and they confuse rather than clarify. The underlying problem is not race but national conflict.

Jewish–Arab politics has far more integration than one is led to believe. Looking at a local level brings this into focus.  In all seven mixed cities, elected Arab city council members have joined governing coalitions, regardless of the mayor’s national political affiliations. In April 2021, while Netanyahu was searching for a way to reach the elusive 61 seats, the religious Likud mayor of Lod urged him to consider governing with Mansour Abbas, the leader of Ra’am. Mayor Revivo wrote on his Facebook page, accompanied by a picture of his coalition: “As someone who heads a mixed city whose governing coalition includes the right, the left, Arabs, ultra-Orthodox Jews, and immigrants, I know that it’s difficult—but certainly possible.”

There is a difference, of course, between local and national politics. Municipalities need to keep the garbage collected and the schools teaching. It is the place where consensus is built so that things work. National politics is primarily the arena for conflict around identity, religion and state, war and peace. Jewish–Arab political partnership has always been much harder at this level,

And it has been a two-way street. Arab parties have historically rejected the premise of a Jewish-Zionist state as inherently discriminatory. Even now, the Joint List has announced that it will not join a coalition, although it might support one from outside. That is its democratic right. But democracies are not sustained by rights. They require the trust, the affections, and some basic confidence in a shared political enterprise that makes governing together possible.  Rejecting outright each other as legitimate partners does little to build the trust necessary to cross the divides.

That is what made Mansour Abbas’s joining Bennett’s coalition in 2021 so remarkable. Bennett, a religious Zionist from the right, described by the Times when coming into office as an ultranationalist, wrote afterward in the New York Times about his own metamorphosis working with Abbas, whom he came to describe as “a brave leader just about my age who turned out to be something of a mensch.” Netanyahu himself had seriously considered bringing Abbas into his government. Mansour Abbas understood these dynamics and moved to change the rules of the game, accepting a Jewish state as a self-evident fact, and building trust and relationships that would allow political partnership: “a mensch”.

And then came October 7th.

It is difficult to describe, even to the most empathetic of observers, what happened to the Israeli Jewish public that day. The shocking success of Hamas led to weeks when many Israelis believed that the very existence of their country was in danger, recalling the days before the Six-Day War and the dramatic surprise attacks of the Yom Kippur War. The murder of some 1,200 people, Arabs included, many in the most brutal manner, is etched into historical memory.

So when even Abbas and Ra’am, while condemning the atrocities, resist clearly defining Hamas as a terrorist organization, it should not come as a surprise that many Israeli Jews have no interest in giving them a seat in government. Imagine candidates for office immediately after September 11 refusing to characterize al-Qaeda as a terrorist organization. Of course, the world looks very different from the Arab Palestinian side in Israel, where the destruction in Gaza, literally the killing of their cousins, looms large, the extremist rampaging on the West Bank invites outrage, and the policies and practices of Ben Gvir as Minister of Internal Security demeans their everyday lives. There is a fundamental, cavernous clash here that cannot be explained, indeed trivialized, by racism.

And there is another danger. Fearing that Eisenkot will make a governing coalition that relies on Arab political parties, perhaps supporting from outside the government, Netanyahu accentuates these fears to make Arab political participation illegitimate and thus to make an Eisenkot coalition impossible. Continually, and once again, he assumes a fifth column, which thankfully, is very far from the lived reality of actual coexistence.  But this is playing with fire.

These are difficult times. Social media allows us to live comfortably within our echo chambers, political leaders often turn polarization into political capital, and fear is experienced not as an abstract argument but as something visceral. There are no simple solutions.  It is certainly not at its core a problem of Jewish supremacy, a democracy only for Jews, a state racist to its core.  It is a profound and understandable lack of trust, for reasons that are clear for all to see, with a reality that once again strengthens the hand of deep suspicion.

Martin Buber famously reflected on the three promises of the French Revolution: liberty went West, equality went East, and fraternity was left an orphan. We spend enormous energy arguing about rights and equality, but far too little on the affections without which those universal rights lose their human context.

There is no replacement for the lived experience of being with others, not as abstract human beings or ideological positions, but as people filled with passions and contradictions, with identities and loyalties, members of a dramatically diverse polis with whom we share this place. Democracy is rooted in the possibility that different people can come together, in spite of their differences, indeed because of their differences, and build a future that is good enough for all.  Our deep differences are not imaginary.  They are rooted in real difference.  Real suspicion.  Real fear.  Rather than ignore them as irrational stereotyping of the other, we would be better served to understand how hard crossing that divide really is, and respect the necessary political dance to find a way to work together at this fragile moment in time.