Ending the game of citizenship

By Graham Usher
A drive through Um Al-Fahim or any other Palestinian village in the Galilee betrays the real meaning of the prime ministerial election for the 1.2 million-strong Palestinian national minority in Israel. First of all, there are no pictures of Ehud Barak or Ariel Sharon. There are not even election offices, with Labour Party or Likud Party activists abuzz with the usual work of registration and canvassing. The only election flyers are peeling remnants of the 1999 campaign. The only poster is lined with black showing the 13 victims of the 'internal intifada' when Palestinians in Israel took to the streets in solidarity with their compatriots in the occupied territories and, like them, were shot dead by Israeli security forces. The only slogan is the call to boycott the election from the Committee of the Martyrs Families. "We will vote when our sons will vote," it says in Arabic, not in Hebrew.
Palestinians make up 12 per cent of the Israeli electorate or just over 500,000 out of the 4.1 million voters. In 1999, there was a 75 per cent turnout in the Palestinian sector, with 95 per cent casting their vote for Ehud Barak. Each of the three Arab lists in the Knesset either actively or passively endorsed his candidacy.
This time round the projection was that less than 50 per cent of the Palestinian electorate would vote, with 15 per cent backing Sharon. And all the lists are refusing Barak's candidacy, with the Islamist United Arab List calling for an outright boycott, the Communist-backed Democratic Front calling for a blank vote and the nationalist Al-Balad movement hovering somewhere between the two.
Even by the standards of Barak's enormous unpopularity this is some fall. Nor -- as certain Israeli analysts would have it -- is it a case of the Palestinians' extremist leaders leading their flock astray. "The opposite is true," says Amir Makhoul, director of the Union of Arab Community Organisations in Israel. "None of the Arab parties wanted a boycott, for fear of the precedent it would set for future elections. They adopted it due to the real consensus for a boycott expressed by the Palestinians in Israel."
Barak at least is aware of the consensus. On 4 February -- four months after the intifada in which the 13 Arab citizens of Israel were killed, and three months after he reluctantly agreed to an independent commission of inquiry into its causes, he bit hard on the bullet of contrition. "I express sorrow over the death of the Arab citizens," he told the last meeting of his cabinet.
But two days before the vote -- and trailing 18 points behind in the polls -- few Palestinians saw the gesture as anything other than an electoral ploy. The politest response came from the veteran leader of the UAL, Mohamed Darawshe. "The apology comes too late," he said.
It also comes too late to reverse the "deep processes" among the Palestinian national minority in Israel that has brought the boycott call to the fore, says Makhoul.
The first -- and despite "enormous pressure" to do otherwise from the Israeli left, the Palestinian Authority and one or two Arab leaders -- is that in calling for a boycott the Arab parties are effectively ending their "historic dependency" on Barak's Labour Party. In the phrase of Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, "they are ending the game of citizenship."
Virtually since the inception of the state, the game consisted of Palestinians voting for Labour -- either at the party of leadership level -- in exchange for promises that were never kept. This has been the signature of every Labour administration vis-à-vis the Palestinian minority. But it reached its nadir with Barak.
In 1999, he vowed to turn over a new page in Israel's relationship with its Palestinian citizens by becoming the Prime Minister of "everyone." In particular, he gave the Arab parties 28 pledges, from ending the state's confiscation of their lands to equalising their municipal budgets. "He delivered on none of them," says Makhoul.
On the contrary, he cut budgets for the Palestinians in every sector save education and refused any increase in their overall allotment of government monies despite three explicit promises to do so. Worse, he oversaw the establishment of a new security regime for the Palestinian areas -- modelled on those in the occupied territories and often staffed by the same officers.
This explains why when the internal intifada erupted it was met not with truncheons and tear gas -- as any civic protest in, say, Britain or the US would have been -- but with snipers and shotguns loaded with live ammunition. This is also why the abiding memory of Barak among Palestinians in Israel is not his "apology" on 4 February. It is rather his interview with Israeli Radio on 2 October at the height of clashes in Um Al-Fahim and elsewhere in the Galilee. "I told them [the police]: You've got a green light to do whatever is needed."
The second process is the ethnic nationalism at the heart of the Israeli state the intifada revealed. For Israel's Palestinians, the real fear was caused not just by the Israeli police shooting dead 13 Palestinians and arresting 800 more without a single officer being reprimanded. It was produced more by the vicious racial backlash the Palestinian protests in Israel and in the occupied territories drew in their wake.
They read it in learned articles in the Israeli media that called for the demographic or "constitutional" transfer of the Palestinian minority to a "state" in the West Bank and Gaza. They witnessed it in the attacks on mosques in the mixed Jewish-Arab cities of Tiberias, Jaffa and Hadura and in the Jewish boycott of Palestinian businesses and workers. And, above all, they suffered from it in the pogrom by Jewish mobs in Nazareth on 8 October when two Palestinians were shot dead, 25 were injured and Palestinian homes were fired upon.
It is this memory that has made the consensus for the boycott so strong among the Palestinians in Israel. It is not just a strike against Barak and the Labour government, says Makhoul. It is a denunciation of a state whose ethnic character continues to define those one in five of its citizens who are not Jewish as the "enemy."
"In October, every state apparatus -- from the police to the press -- was activated to de-legitimise the Palestinians in Israel as a people and as citizens," he says. "And because we are weak in terms of political power, we will now de-legitimise that system. This is our only weapon. And on Tuesday we wielded it by not voting."
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