Arabs Poised to Vote Divided Again, Despite Upheaval in Israel’s Politics

The recent turmoil in Israel’s political scene, probably the most dramatic since the Likud Party’s rise to power in the 1970s, seems to have bypassed Arab voters. Despite initial predictions that Arab voters will abandon traditional voting and flock to the Zionist parties, a recent poll conducted by Elie Rekhess of Tel Aviv University predicts that the nearly 400,000 Arab voters will stick to the pattern of spreading their votes among various Zionist and Arab parties.

If all Arab voters were unified behind a single party, they could place some 14 members in the next Knesset. However, judging by recent polls and the Arab electoral scene, internal schisms in the Israeli Arab sector will once again leave them as a marginal and impotent factor in Israeli politics.

Not only will half the votes be divided among Jewish parties such as Labor, Kadima, Likud, Meretz and Shas, but votes for the Arab parties also will be spread out, among Hadash, which is affiliated with the Communist Party; Balad, Azmi Bishara’s stridently Palestinian nationalist list; and the United Arab List, which is affiliated with moderate Islamist elements.

The status of the Arab parties is particularly sensitive since the minimum threshold in the upcoming election was raised to 2 percent. In other words, each party will need an estimated 70,000-80,000 votes to gain a seat in the Knesset.

The weakness of the survey is that it was conducted at the end of November, some four months before the actual election, a space of time in which anything could happen to influence voters. Events in Wadi Ara last week were a case in point: Police clashed with Arab demonstrators following the fatal Jan. 19 shooting of a young Arab.

“Events in Wadi Ara prove that the situation is very explosive,” says Rekhess, senior adviser to the Abraham Fund, which promotes Jewish-Arab coexistence projects. “It was a real alarm bell. The question of Israel’s Arabs is still very high on the national agenda. Anyone who believes that it’s over is mistaken.”

The Wadi Ara confrontation coincided with the beginning of the election campaign, possibly playing into the hands of Arab radicals.

Bishara used his party’s convention Saturday in Shfaram to lash out at the Zionist parties for trying “to steal votes from the Arab sector.” He said it was a “disgrace” that some Arabs would vote for Zionist parties.

But Bishara, as well as his colleagues in other Arab parties, faces a problem: A recent survey by the University of Haifa shows that Israeli Arab leaders are much more radical than their supporters. The survey was conducted by Sammy Smooha, who has followed Israeli Arab political trends for almost 30 years.

Smooha found a “striking” gap between the parties and their supporters. Whereas 60 percent of voters for Arab parties believe Arab citizens need to accept Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, only 18 percent of their leaders do.

Overwhelmingly, these leaders define themselves as anti-Zionist (nearly 86 percent), but only 32 percent of their voters do.

Abdul Wahab Darawshe, a former Knesset member and head of the United Arab List, concedes that there’s a problem.

“The Arab public, just like the Jewish public, now tends more toward the political center,” he told JTA. “Therefore the Arab parties should deal more with internal issues than with the Palestinian cause. Not that we do not fully support Palestinian national rights, but the Palestinians have their own leaders to take care of their interests.”

According to Rekhess’ forecast, several of the Arab parties may not pass the minimum threshold.

Darawshe, too, concedes that personal differences among leaders of the Arab parties are the main obstacle to Arab political unity.

Rekhess predicts that Labor will collect some 131,000 Arab votes in the election, more than any other party. However, the survey was taken shortly after Amir Peretz’s victory as head of Labor, and the party’s overall numbers since have dropped.

Additionally, Rekhess says, none of the Zionist parties has reached out to Arab voters.

“Peretz and Kadima did not pay sufficient attention to the Arab constituency,” Rekhess says. “They did not integrate Arabs into realistic places on their lists, and so far they have not come with a revolutionary platform regarding the welfare of the Arab population.”

However, he adds, the fact that the Zionist parties do not respond to Arab voters’ expectations does not necessarily mean that their votes will go to the Arab parties. Many might just stay home, accepting the position of the Islamic Movement, whose more radical faction boycotts Israeli elections to avoid legitimizing the Jewish state.

That leads to one of Rekhess’ most interesting findings: Some 50 percent of respondents wanted the Islamic Movement under the leadership of Sheik Raed Salah — who was released from prison in July 2005 on security charges — to run in the election.

Moreover, Rekhess adds, had the Islamic Movement participated in the election, it would have garnered 23 percent of the Arab vote.