Israeli Arabs and the vote

Mideast I

Uri Dromi

Published: FRIDAY, MARCH 24, 2006

JERUSALEM: Unlike previous election campaigns in Israel, the current one seems to lack heat, perhaps because there is no great mystery about the results of the vote next Tuesday. Ehud Olmert's Kadima party has been steadily leading in the polls.

Add to this a general disenchantment with politics - only 65 percent of the voters are expected to cast ballots, far less than in the past - and the smell of corruption recently coming out of the corridors of power, and you understand why these elections seem almost boring.

Yet something very significant is happening in this election. At stake is the relationship between the Jewish majority and the Arab minority in Israel, an issue that could decide Israel's future as a Jewish and democratic state.

Israel Beytenu (Israel Our Home), a right-wing party led by a staunch hawk, Avigdor Lieberman, is very clear about this issue. The party's platform flatly calls Israeli Arabs "a demographic threat," and"the most serious threat to the character and the nature of the state."

Lieberman's solution is simple: land swap. In the future settlement with the Arabs, areas in Israel heavily populated with Arabs will be handed over to the Palestinian state in return for some large Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which will be annexed to Israel.

Sounds good, except that Lieberman never bothered to ask the Israeli Arabs if they were willing to give up their Israeli citizenship and become citizens of a Palestinian state.

Sammy Smooha of Haifa University, who published the Index of Arab-Jewish Relations in Israel in 2004, did ask them, and they answered with a resounding No. Despite all the rhetoric about being Palestinians first, hardly a single Israeli Arab would trade Israeli citizenship for a Palestinian one.

Simply raising the idea scares Israeli Arabs. In his Index,Smooha found that 81 percent of the Arabs were afraid of a serious assault on their civil rights. The majority (63.6 percent) also feared a transfer of Arab citizens or annexation of Arab villages to the Palestinian state against their wishes.

Lieberman, an immigrant from Moldova, has a solid power base among the million immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Yet his ideas also seem to have developed a broader appeal.

Polls show that his party stands a good chance of becoming the fourth largest party in the Parliament - and therefore a serious candidate for any future coalition. And a poll conducted by the Center for Combating Racism in Israel, released this week, found that many Israeli Jews share Lieberman's views - 68 percent would not like to have an Arab neighbor; 63 percent believe that Israeli Arabs pose a demographic and security risk to Israel, and 40 percent agree that Israel should encourage them to leave.

It's a shame that Jews, who have always been victims of such attitudes, should in their own Jewish and democratic state behave like that.

The answer to that should be given next Tuesday, in the ballots. Both Jewish and Arab voters, who care about their common future, and who wish to live together in equality and mutual respect, should only vote for parties which uphold these ideals, and punish those parties which advocate the opposite.

With all due respect to security, social and economic matters, this might well be the most important issue of these elections.

(Uri Dromi is the director of international outreach at the Israel Democracy Institute, Jerusalem.)

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