A Jewish State for all Its Diverse Citizens

"This list is the most effective answer to the racist intentions of Lieberman who wanted to keep the Arabs out of the Knesset."
"Our answer was to band together and to become even stronger than we were before."
"If that [majority of Arab citizens moved enough to vote] happens, the government will not be able to ignore our issues including ending the occupation [of the West Bank and east Jerusalem] and pushing for equal rights for Arab citizens of Israel."
Aida Touma-Sliman, Hadash (Communist) Arab-Jewish party; joint Arab party list, Israel

Hadash’s new party chairman, Ayman Odeh, along with the party’s second in command, Aida Touma-Sliman. What kind of compromises will Hadash have to make as part of a united list? (photo: Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

"This is the first time in the history of the Arab nation that you have a list which includes nationalists, securalists, Islamists, Jews and Arabs."
"You don't have a list like that anywhere in the Middle East. People kill each other for these kinds of differences in Syria, in Egypt and in other places, and here we run together."
Hassan Jabarin, lawyer, founder of Adalah, advocates for Israel's Arab minority

"I don't see them joining any government that could make a decision on going to war in Gaza and Lebanon or that could demolish Palestinian houses."
"All of the Jewish parties want Israel as a Jewish state, while we want Israel as a state for all of its citizens."
Mtanese Shihadeh, analyst, Mada al-Carmel

And there it is in a nutshell. Israel is a Jewish state, it was always intended for it to be a place of haven for the diaspora, Jews spread throughout the world, cast out of their ancient homeland by the forces of conquest; ancient Persians, Romans, Muslims. The world time and again spurned Jews and Judaism, targeted Jews for persecution, deadly slanderous accusations leading to ghettoization, victimization and mass death throughout history. The Holocaust was the last and most successful attempt at eradication of Jews from the world scene.

And that event and the subsequent and all-too-brief horror of the realization of complicity in genocide by the world body of the League of Nations/United Nations led to assenting in permitting the return of Jews to their ancient homeland and re-naming that place Israel. Persecuted ethnic groups like the Jews, like the Armenians, like the Kurds, are owed their own geography since it was their own to begin with before it was annexed by exterior powers both malicious and unmoved by justice.

While the Arab world reacted to the establishment of the Jewish State by forcing Jews living among them for millenna to relinquish their possessions to the state and flee an oncoming pogrom of religious-racist fury that Judaism would dare to challenge the universal supremacy of Islam in the Middle East by its very presence, Israel accepted the presence of non-Jews in their nation, valuing democratic justice as much as they did their own security of existence.


Ra’am-Ta’al MK Ahmed Tibi. (photo: Activestills.org)

And the result is that the Arabs living among the majority Jews in a Jewish state deplore that Israel is a Jewish nation. Even as Arabs are able to sit on the supreme court, in parliament, given equal rights, recognized as full citizens, they chafe at the ignominy of citizenship in a Jewish state, even while given the opportunity to leave Israel and take up residence in the West Bank or Gaza, they demur. What they do indulge in is attempts to undermine the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state.

And what many parliamentarians as elected Arabs sitting in the Knesset also do, is express support for the terrorist group Hamas which has sworn to destroy Israel and create a newer, more permanent Holocaust. The goal of Arab MKs is to transform Israel into an Arab state where Jews may also live. The goal being to retake all the land that Israel sits upon and return it to Arab/Muslim rule. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who unsurprisingly is a fervent supporter of Israel as a Jewish nation, sought to bring an end to Arab intervention in a Jewish state.

He persuaded the government to raise the "threshold" of the minimum vote percentage required to take a seat in the Knesset, to 3.25% from the prevailing 2%. Which led the fractured Arab parties reflecting their various political positions to respond by coalescing to collectively amass the required percentages. Singly they were unable to meet the new percentage requirements, together they succeeded.

Analysis are hoping that the new greater alliances will spur Israeli Arabs to set aside their traditional voter apathy and come out to vote in greater numbers. The 20% of Arab-Israeli citizens anticipate achieving a 15-seat goal in the 120-seat Knesset; that achievement if it became reality would make the combined party the third or fourth largest in the Knesset. Which speaks to the great divides among political parties in the country, in total.

Israel's fragmented, differentiated, opinionated citizenry with their varied viewpoints, values and urgencies guarantee that this is a country whose government is challenged by a multitude of political parties, unlike most other democratic liberal countries whose federal political parties can be counted on the fingers of half-a-hand. Which is why no single party can ever achieve a majority position enabling it to govern, without the support of other parties large enough to amass sufficient votes for the parts to make up a viable governing whole.

Which in turn, amounts to a lot of horse-trading, division, promises and heartburn before a coalition government can be successfully cobbled together, enabling a new government, post-election to take its turn at governing an unruly citizenship where everyone has an opinion not necessarily shared by their neighbours. But it is a country where the rule of law counts, and where the system of justice is fully independent, and where all its citizens have the opportunity to share in government.

Even those among them who make every effort to destroy that government.