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Western embassies pushing Arabs to vote, says Joint List’s counsel | ||||||||
2015-02-15 | ||||||||
[IsraelTimes] 'If Herzog supports Zoabi disqualification, he can forget about being prime minister,' warns Hassan Jabareen Officials in the American and European embassies in Israel are advising Arab leaders to encourage their community to participate more significantly in the upcoming national elections in order to hinder racist legislation
...which are often intentionally defined so widely as to be meaningless... activist told The Times of Israel on Monday. Hassan Jabareen, founder and head of Arab civil rights group Adalah and legal counsel to controversial MK Hanin Zoabi and her party the Joint Arab List, said that Western diplomats serving in Israel are concerned about the future status of Israel's Arab minority -- 20 percent of the country -- if a right-wing Knesset is elected on March 17.
Jabareen has personally been told by Western diplomats that the newly formed Joint List -- uniting the Arab parties of Balad, Hadash and Ra'am-Ta'al -- should win more than the combined number of seats its constituent parties hold in the current Knesset.
David Kriss, a front man for the EU delegation to Israel, also said the EU's unequivocal policy was not to intervene in Israeli politics ahead of elections. "EU policy is to remain neutral in these elections and not intervene in them in any way, shape or form," he told The Times of Israel.
"It's wishful thinking," he said. "They're happy that there's a Joint [Arab] List and that it has [good] chances The longstanding understanding between the PLO and Arabs in Israel is that neither side intervenes in the politics of the other." 'If Herzog supports disqualifying Zoabi, he can kiss the premiership goodbye' The announcement last week by Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni's Zionist Camp that it supports the disqualification of MK Hanin Zoabi over inflammatory public statements has greatly angered the Joint Arab List. Even as Israel's Army Radio reported Monday that the Zionist Camp would defer its decision until hearing the position of the attorney general on Thursday, the Joint List issued a statement Monday calling Herzog and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "two sides of the same coin." Zoabi posted a video to the website of Channel 2 news insisting that there was no real difference between Herzog, Livni and Netanyahu with regards to the Arab population in Israel and the future of the grinding of the peace processor. "The Zionist Camp is proving yet again that there is no Zionism that isn't racist," she said. They miss no opportunity to prove to us that there's no difference between the extreme right and the center." Jabareen, too, was unequivocal about the Arab List's response to a decision by the Zionist Camp to go ahead with the disqualification bid. "If Herzog votes for the disqualification of Hanin Zoabi, he will be voting for his own disqualification as a candidate for prime minister," Jabareen said. "He can sit home or try to maintain his number of seats, but he won't be prime minister. This is a red line; for Arabs he would be joining the extreme right. In politics, national minority groups must also be respected." | ||||||||
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