Special Report

Israel’s Arab Community Boycotts Election

By Christopher Slaney

Stuck in traffic late in the afternoon of Israel’s recent election day, I tuned the radio to a local station hoping to hear some music. The host said he was going live to a news reporter on the scene at a polling station in the Galilee town of Sakhnin. The reporter came on the air and said the polls had now been open for 10 hours and they were waiting for a possible fourth voter to appear. The electoral officials whose job is to monitor the polling booths were having trouble staying awake, he said. I laughed to myself, thinking this a nicely scripted, well timed piece of political satire. When I eventually arrived at Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s campaign headquarters that evening, however, I discovered the radio reporter had not been joking. Israel’s Arab community had chosen to boycott the election, voting for neither Barak nor Sharon, and causing Israeli politicians on all sides to sit up and pay attention.

“The ballot was a significant turning point in the history of relations between the Arab community and the state of Israel,” says Ibrahim Sarsur, chairman of the Islamic Movement in Israel. “It marked the end of the era of being slaves of the Labor Party.”

Mr. Sarsur is deeply satisfied with the result, which he sees as a clear message to the Labor Party and whoever replaces Barak at its head, that they no longer can count on having the Arab voters in their pocket.

The Arab community in Israel (not counting some 100,000 Palestinians holding Israeli ID cards in Jerusalem) comprises almost 20 percent of the population and 12 percent of eligible voters. The vast majority are Muslims residing in the Galilee and an area known as “the triangle,” which lies between Netanya on the coastal plain and the northern bulge of the West Bank. Traditionally the Labor Party has been able to count on massive Arab support at election time. Current Israeli election law mandates separate balloting for Knesset members and prime minister. In a general election, voters cast their ballots for parties, or “lists,” of Knesset candidates. When the votes are tallied, a counting system aimed at blocking fringe candidates, and a method of trading votes between “lists,” means some votes are wasted. A prime minister, however, is elected by direct popular vote, and every ballot slip is crucial.

An examination of polling data from the previous election in May 1999 reveals a massive turnout in Arab towns and villages for Ehud Barak—over 95 percent in some places. This figure rivals that of the kibbutzim, the traditional Labor Party power base.

This time, however, most Arabs stayed home. By the time polls closed in Sakhnin just 1.1 percent of eligible voters had taken part in the democratic process, and the picture was much the same throughout the Galilee. Only in the big towns of Nazareth and Shfar’am was there any sizeable Arab voter participation. Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister by a massive 25 percent margin—although the turnout of Israel’s Jewish electorate was the lowest in the country’s history.

Ibrahim Sarsur comes from K’far Kassem, a prosperous town on the pre-1967 border between Israel and Jordan. K’far Kassem achieved notoriety in 1956 when Israeli border policemen shot dead 49 Arab civilians they claimed were violating a dusk-to-dawn curfew announced just hours earlier. “Two months after the massacre there was a general election and 99 percent of the townspeople voted for the incumbent Labor-led government,” Ibrahim said. “It was as if we were looking out from a prison cell and couldn’t see the whole picture.”

Times have changed and Arab voters increasingly see the whole picture. The killing of 13 Arab protesters by Israeli policemen during disturbances last October was the main catalyst for the election boycott. The 13, mostly young men from the Galilee, were shot when they took to the streets in a show of solidarity with Palestinian demonstrators enraged at Ariel Sharon’s visit to Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif.

Arabs in Israel are angry at being treated as second-class citizens. They have a long list of grievances, including inadequate schools and poor infrastructure, but the 13 deaths and the fact that there has been no serious official inquiry into last October’s bloodshed has incensed them.

Sarsur says that, during the run-up to the vote, community leaders were ready to cancel the boycott had one of two things happened—either an announcement of a timetable for a peace deal with the Palestinians, or an apology from Barak for the 13 deaths. “We just wanted to hear the word ‘apologize,’” he says. “Barak spoke about his deep agony, but we didn’t hear an apology.”

In addition to anger over the 13deaths, many Israeli Arabs feel badly let down by Ehud Barak and the party he headed. One reason for the massive show of support in the May 1999 vote which brought Barak to power was a tacit understanding that a pact existed between the Arab parties and Barak’s Labor-led ‘One Israel’ coalition. Arabs in Israel expected that, in return for their votes, the new administration would appoint an Arab to a ministerial post and/or an Arab ambassador, and in general would work to erase decades of discrimination. During their 20 months at the helm, however, Barak and his unruly coalition spent all their energies alternately fighting one another and pursuing elusive peace deals at the expense of all other legislation. Eventually Nawaf Masalha was made deputy minister of foreign affairs and a Druze, Bahij Mansour, has recently been appointed ambassador to Angola. But for the Arab community in general, nothing much changed.

As the votes were counted and the size of the defeat became clear, Labor politicians carefully avoided apportioning blame. “I think the Israeli Arabs expressed their anger without thinking of the morning after,” Knesset Member Yael Dayan said, “and it’s very upsetting because obviously they are hurting the very idea of peace, but more than that they are hurting themselves.”

Outgoing deputy defense minister Epraim Sneh called the Arab boycott “a terribly wrong decision.” He understood the pain and anger in the Arab community, he said, but “pain is a bad counselor for voting in such fateful moment.”

Over coffee in his office a week after the election, Ibrahim Sarsur said he was relieved the Barak years were history—a sentiment obviously shared with an overwhelming majority of Israelis who voted on Feb. 6th. “Barak’s policies crushed the Arab community and made Israel and the West Bank look exactly the same,” he says.

Echoing mainstream Arab sentiment, Sarsur went on to dismiss fears that Ariel Sharon will lead a dangerous, right-wing government and plunge the entire region into war. “We are sure there is no difference between Barak and Sharon, left and right, concerning us as a minority inside Israel,” he said. “We decided it can’t get worse if Sharon comes to power.”

The Arab voters count the election boycott as a victory. Unfortunately, it is doubtful they will be able to achieve the same degree of solidarity and organization in the next general election—which some Israeli crystal-ball gazers see happening before the end of the year. In recent Knesset races Israeli Arabs have split up into numerous small factions, lessening their political clout.

In the meantime, however, comes the acid test of whether or not Ariel Sharon as prime minister really is no worse than Ehud Barak.

Christopher Slaney is a free-lance journalist who covers the Middle East.