The folly of the exclusion of the Arab parties

The liberal camp in Israel will have no revival, neither moral nor electoral, if it does not cooperate with the Arab parties and insists on continuing to ignore 20 percent of the citizens of the state who are partners in the struggle for democracy, equality, and human rights against the oppressive right.

Opposition leaders avoid any appearance of cooperation with the Arab parties, which are consistently excluded from the opposition leaders’ meetings held from time to time. Similar to large parts of the Israeli media, the opposition also accepts Arabs—only if they are “good” Arabs, meaning those who echo the Israeli-right narrative, and not Arabs who, alongside their Israeli citizenship and desire to integrate here, see themselves as part of the Palestinian nation.

“I will support the ousting of Ayman Odeh. Three people should not be in the Knesset: Ofer Cassif, Ayman Odeh, and Ben Gvir,” declared Opposition Leader Yair Lapid following Odeh’s tweet, in which he wrote that he was “happy about the release of the hostages and prisoners.” Thus, thanks to one tweet, which is indeed debatable, Odeh became a candidate for ousting by the leader of the opposition, of which he is one of the members.

In the eyes of many Israelis, every Palestinian prisoner is a terrorist, regardless of the nature of the crime for which they were convicted or the suspicions that led to their administrative detention. In their eyes, an Arab such as Odeh is not allowed to share in the joy of his people over the release of Palestinian prisoners, even though he vehemently opposes terrorism and has publicly stated this on countless occasions.

According to many Israelis, including Knesset members from the liberal bloc, any statement by an Arab Knesset member that does not fully align with the Jewish-Zionist narrative is grounds for complete and total disqualification.

And this is going on while in Israel’s some Jewish Knesset members explicitly supported murderers. I am not referring only to Itamar Ben Gvir, who was convicted of this in 2007. There are members of the Knesset who explicitly support Amiram Ben Uliel, who was convicted of the murder by arson of Saad and Riham Dawabsha and their one-and-a-half-year-old son, Ali, as well as the severe injury of their four-year-old son, Ahmad.

No less than 14 Knesset members from the coalition, from Likud, Shas, Otzma Yehudit, and Religious Zionism, even addressed a public letter to the head of the Shin Bet, demanding to ease his prison conditions: “There is a great concern for his mental and physical health,” they wrote. “A holy righteous man,” Knesset member Limor Son Har-Melech called him.

But despite the fact that it involves support for a terrorist who was convicted of burning an entire family to death, Lapid is in no hurry to call for the dismissal of those Knesset members. In the eyes of the opposition, the support of Jewish public representatives for a Jewish terrorist convicted of murdering a Palestinian family is seen as a statement within the realm of freedom of expression.

However, a much less serious, albeit still inappropriate, comparison between expressing joy over the release of kidnapped and imprisoned Palestinians immediately leads to condemnation and support for dismissal from the Knesset.

This is not just hypocrisy and double standards. It is also political folly. Members of Yesh Atid and the National Unity Party continue to lean to the right and collaborate with the rhetoric of delegitimizing Arab citizens without realizing that it is primarily aimed at them and at the existence of a political bloc that could compete with the right-wing bloc.

The right-wing inciters who attack Arab Knesset members day in and day out aim to disqualify Arab individuals and parties, since they view the exclusion of the Arab public from the democratic process as an essential tool for perpetuating their rule. Instead of preventing this, the opposition parties are cooperating with them.

Indeed, at a time when we are all traumatized and in pain, it is difficult to understand the complexity of the situation in general and in the special circumstances of the Arab society in Israel in particular. It is hard to see that there is pain on the other side as well, many of whom have national and family ties with the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

It is always difficult to understand the narrative of the other side. The sad reality is that too many Israeli citizens do not want to see the suffering in Gaza and are not interested in the differences between abominable murderers such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad and people convicted of vague offenses, like incitement, or those who have not been convicted at all.

Understanding the complexity in which the Arab public in Israel is immersed also has practical political implications. If the opposition wishes to serve as a governing alternative, it must internalize that this cannot be done without the Arab society and its elected representatives. Their elected representatives are quite simply those whom the Arab citizens choose to represent them, not those whom the opposition would like to appoint.

Instead of participating in the storm of hatred and delegitimization directed against Arab citizens of Israel, the opposition must stand against it, respond proportionally even when the statements do not align with its leaders’ views, and do so with a vital, social, and political purpose: to rebuild the bridge. Without it, they will never be able to return to hold the reins of power.