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Palestinian-Israeli politicians fear fury over Gaza war will impact polls
Ihab Issa says he cannot take any more war in the aftermath of Israel's onslaught against the Gaza Strip and swears that he will not be voting in Israel's February 10 general election. The 28-year-old restaurant owner is one of 1.4 million Palestinian-Israelis Arab-Israelis living in Israel, caught between a Palestinian identity, a militarized Jewish state and calls from prominent politicians for their "transfer" - the Israeli term of art for transferring Arab villages to the Palestinian Territories for equal acreage of Israeli communities beyond the Green Line - an Israeli euphemism for ethnic cleansing - off ancestral lands.
Palestinian-Israelis Arab-Israelis, descendants of the 160,000 Palestinians who did not run away who were not ethnically cleansed from their lands by a Zionist terror campaign during the creation of Israel in 1948, now make up 20 percent of the population. But such a potentially powerful vote bank has been split by a proliferation of feuding parties.
For this election, however, Palestinian-Israeli Arab-Israeli politicians are daring to hope for the better, now that the supreme court has overturned a ban on their top two coalitions for allegedly failing to recognize Israel's right to exist. "We feel we are facing a real threat to our physical existence. In 30 years we might be 45-50 percent of the total population - a demographic time bomb for Israel," says Sheikh Ibrahim Sarsour, who heads the United Arab Party and the moderate Islamist movement in Israel, at his office in Kfar Qasem, a Palestinian-Israeli Arab-Israeli town overlooking Israel's coastal belt.
One leading proponent of ethnic cleansing is Avigdor Lieberman and his rising Yisrael Beitenu party, tipped to win up to 16 seats and possibly join the next coalition government. But even Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who heads the ruling Kadima party, has urged Palestinian-Israelis Arab-Israelis to join a future Palestinian state, sparking uproar in the community.
The Palestinian-Israeli Arab-Israeli turnout has dwindled from 90 percent in the 1950s to 62 percent in 2003 and 56 percent in 2006 - and some 30 percent of those voted for Zionist parties.
Wait... what?!? 30% support the Zionists?!?!?!?
"We are all working hard to better that percentage," Sarsour says with an eye on 12 to 15 Palestinian-Israeli Arab-Israeli MPs, which would be a significant increase on the nine in today's 120-seat Knesset or Parliament. Despite the growing concern, efforts to unite the main blocs in a single list of Palestinian-Israeli Arab-Israeli candidates failed, largely over personality issues.
Worse still, the Sons of the Homeland (Abna al-Balad) party has joined the hard-line Islamist movement in calling for a boycott of the ballot - a potential loss of around 10 percent of the electorate.
High in the hills at Umm al-Fahm - the main center of hard-line Islam in Israel -Afo Egbarieh sees depression all around. The senior Hadash communist party figure says the election is being held "in the shadow of war." "You can see it everywhere. People are depressed ... indifferent," says Egbarieh, who is number four on the coalition called the Arab Democratic Front for Peace and Equality. The front is fighting under the slogan "Protect our existence, build our future," but the doctor says he is concerned that "people are dealing with war as a protest, by not voting."
Posted by: trailing wife 2009-02-03 |
