It is a rare moment in the electoral spotlight for Israel’s Palestinian citizens. Many, however, are frustrated at being viewed just in the context of Netanyahu’s political fortunes while their grievances, including discrimination against them, remain unaddressed.
Instead, in the year since Mansour Abbas’s Raam party joined the governing coalition, there’s been a growing division among Arab citizens over whether being part of the government helped by getting long-neglected communities more money or hurt by giving legitimacy to a system they say doesn’t really represent them — or whether in that period nothing changed at all.
“The center and left say the most important thing is to not have Netanyahu because he incites against the Supreme Court, academics, journalists, the media, the police,” said Ayman Odeh, who heads the Joint List, a union of several Arab parties, and strongly opposes Abbas. “But what about the Palestinian people? What about the Arab citizens inside Israel?”
Israel’s election season is ramping up ahead of the contest on Nov. 1. Parties have just completed their primaries and, under the country’s proportional representation system, are finalizing their candidate lists for September. What the landscape for the Arab parties will look like, and whether they will once again make a difference in the nation’s politics, is unclear.
A recent poll found that about 69 percent of Palestinian citizens of Israel said they were worse off than last year, according to pollster Yousef Makladeh, the head of the Statnet research institute, which is based in Carmel City, Israel. Eighty percent said they did not care whether Netanyahu returned as prime minister.
This month’s Israeli strikes on Gaza, in which 47 Palestinians are reported to have been killed, confirmed for many that, when it comes to security and the occupied territories, “there is little difference” in who is prime minister, according to the pollster.
Amir Milad, 53, a farmer in Ramla in central Israel, voted for Abbas last election and said he will again, even though he said he knows that any changes will be limited to roads and infrastructure.
“I face racism every day,” he said. “In the media. In the streets. … I don’t have the right to marry whom I want,” he said, referring to a law approved this year that bars Palestinian Israelis from passing their citizenship on to noncitizen spouses, including spouses from the occupied territories.
In May 2021, during the two-week Gaza war and just before Raam joined the anti-Netanyahu coalition, Israel faced its worst communal violence and largest Arab protests in two decades. For some Palestinians citizens of Israel, the protests were a kind of political awakening.
Lod and nearby Ramla were the center of some of the worst upheaval.
People went into the streets because of the injustice, said Milad, recalling that a group of Jewish Israelis stoned his car. “So we must fight [for our rights] from all places,” he added, explaining his support for Abbas.
Israel’s Arab citizens number about 2 million, or 20 percent of the population. Most are descendants of families that remained in Israel after many Palestinians fled or were expelled in the aftermath of Israel’s creation in 1948. They have Israeli citizenship but have long faced discrimination. Some also have risen to high positions in Israeli society and do not identify as Palestinians.
For most of Israel’s history, these communities have either not voted or have opted for one of several Palestinian-led parties that have refused to take part in any government. Some, though, vote for other parties, including Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud.
These dynamics had started to slightly shift when Abbas decided to join the governing coalition, but the coalition only held for a year and left a sour taste in many Palestinian Israelis’ mouths. This time around, many believe the percentage of Arab voters participating could fall to 40 percent, compared to last election’s 45 percent and the high of 65 percent in 2015.
By contrast, Makladeh said he expected around 70 percent of Jewish Israeli voters to turn out.
Abbas justifies his readiness to participate in the government on pragmatic grounds to meet the needs of Arab communities. “We decided to enter the coalition because the burning issues of the Arab community cannot be solved from outside the circle of influence,” he wrote on Facebook in early August.
He declined repeated requests for an interview.
Abbas said he pushed for $8.6 billion in Israel’s latest five-year plan to go to neglected Arab communities, while another $722 million was allocated to fighting the gun violence epidemic in Arab communities.
Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, however, have repeatedly hurt Abbas’s standing with voters. While he pushed in the Knesset for the state to recognize several unauthorized Bedouin villages, critics said he wasn’t supportive enough of weeks of highly policed Bedouin protests over land claims. There have also been a rising number of house demolitions over the past year.
In April, he symbolically suspended his participation in the government over Israeli raids on Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque, though said he would not leave the coalition.
Abbas has responded to criticism about Israeli assaults on Palestinians — most recently with the violence in Gaza — by emphasizing that he has no control over these decisions as part of the trade-off.
“The truth is that Arab parties have no actual influence on everything regarding security and foreign decisions in the country,” Abbas wrote in the same post. “We have said from the beginning that there is no difference between the right and the left in Israel.”
But for Khalid Anabtwai, 35, Abbas being part of the governing coalition counts as “active support.”
Anabtwai, a member of the nationalist Balad party, said Arab representation in the Knesset was important “to use it as part of the Palestinian movement to build our community and to build up an alternative to the Zionist parties.”
Odeh, who heads Hadash, Israel’s Arab-led communist party, and many other Palestinians in Israel were also extremely angered by Abbas’s statement in December calling Israel a Jewish state — a term that, they say, negates the Palestinian claim to the land and relegates them to second-tier citizens.
To make matters worse for Abbas and his pragmatic argument about increased budgets, many of the Arab communities have yet to receive the money he fought for, in part because of extra red tape put on the use of funding in these communities and Palestinian programs, said Salam Irsheid, a lawyer with Adalah, a legal center in Haifa.
In the end, the debate has little appeal for potential voters such as 29-year-old Shireen Amira, who works at a clothing store in a small mall in Lod near Tel Aviv and said she had not voted in any of the recent elections.
“It goes nowhere,” she said with a wave of her hand.
She said her key issues were violence against women, rising prices, and tensions between Jews and Arabs.
Voting or joining the government “will not change anything,” she said. “They ask us to vote and then are racist to us.”