يهود إسرائيليون سينتخبون نوابا عرب اليوم Israeli Jews who will vote for the Arab
Meet the Israeli Jews who will vote for the Arab
ticket
Thousands of Israeli Jews, many of them young and
educated Tel Avivians, are casting their ballots with the country's perennial
underdog.
By Judy Maltz |
Mar. 17, 2015 | 11:06 AM | 3
An Israeli woman posing for a photo with Joint List
candidate Aida Touma-Suliman, at an event held in a Tel Aviv bar. Photo by
Tomer Appelbaum
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A week before Election Day, several dozen Jewish
Israelis, most in their 20s and 30s, gathered around the bar of a hip basement
club in Tel Aviv waiting for the guests of honor to arrive.
The event was billed as a chance for undecided voters
to hear the candidates and for those already decided to mix and mingle with
them. More than an hour and a half past the scheduled start, the two candidates
finally showed up, and as they entered, Dov Khenin and Aida Touma-Suliman
received a loud round of applause.
Khenin and Touma-Suliman are both members of Hadash,
the Arab-Jewish (but mainly Arab) communist party that recently linked up with
three Arab parties to form the Joint List. According to recent polls, the
ticket is expected to win 12 or 13 seats in the 120-seat Knesset and has a
decent chance of coming out the third largest party. Khenin, who is Jewish, and
Touma-Suliman, who is Arab, are keen on getting more Jews to vote for the
slate; the event at the club is part of this effort.
Who are these Jews who are determined or are
considering to vote for the Arab list? Many are voters on the far left who have
traditionally cast their ballot for Hadash. According to Rachel Leah Jones, a
longtime Balad voter — An Arab partying the joint tickets that calls for a
state for all its citizens — the overwhelming majority are from Tel Aviv-Jaffa
and Haifa, with a smaller group in Jerusalem.
“You don’t have
to be a sociologist to figure out that by and large we’re talking about voters
with above-average incomes and education, predominantly Ashkenazi, who come
from the arts and humanities and are a kind of intelligentsia,” says the
44-year-old American-born filmmaker who grew up in Israel.
“Making a
choice as an Israeli Jew to step away from Zionism is a privilege, and you have
to feel safe in your society to make a choice like that because it’s a serious
minority position. So these are definitely people who feel they don’t have
anything or much to lose by coming out about their decision to vote for this
list.”
It’s hard to know exactly how many Jews vote for Arab
parties in Israel, but Hadash is thought to draw between 6,000 and 10,000
Jewish voters each Election Day, and Balad several hundred to 1,000. In the
last election, 3.8 million Israelis voted, the vast majority of them Jewish.
Hadash MK Dov Khenin (Tomer Appelbaum)
Giving Labor and Meretz a miss
The other Arab parties have never attracted a
meaningful number of Jewish voters. Joint List campaigners hope that in
Tuesday’s election the Jewish vote can contribute an entire extra seat to the
ticket (that could be around 25,000 votes), though they realize it’s a long
shot. The Joint List’s Hebrew-language Facebook group had close to 1,000
members at last count.
Ruthie Pliskin, a 32-year-old doctoral student in
social psychology at Tel Aviv University who voted for Hadash the last two
times, says she feels it has become more legitimate for Jews to vote for
non-Zionist parties.
“I don’t get
the backlash I used to,” she says, speculating that this itself may be a
backlash against incitement against the country’s Arab minority since the Gaza
war last summer.
“This
government has made it legitimate to hate Arabs, and many people are finding it
hard to accept this reality," she says. "For them, the idea that the
Joint List could become the third largest party in the Knesset is
hope-inducing.”
This will be the first time Noam Tirosh votes for a
non-Zionist party, having always cast his ballot for the more mainstream
parties on the left, either Labor or Meretz. A 32-year-old doctoral student in
communications at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev, Tirosh says his is in
many ways a protest vote.
“It was the
Jewish majority represented in the Knesset that forced the Arab parties to
unite by raising the minimum threshold to get in, so my feeling is that if they
forced them into this, as an act of solidarity, I’m going to vote for them,” he
says.
Beyond that, he believes it’s the only slate that
strives to tackle Israel’s growing racism problem. “And that to me is the most
important issue to be dealt with today,” he says.
The thought that the Joint List could emerge as the
third largest party and even lead the opposition in the event of a
national-unity government is also titillating for him. “Just imagining
[Benjamin] Netanyahu having to brief [Joint List chairman] Aymen Odeh before
the next war in Gaza – now that’s going to be a game changer,” Tirosh says.
(The prime minister is required by law to brief the head of the opposition
during wartime.)
Like many Jewish supporters of the Joint List, Tirosh
is concerned that his vote for the Arab ticket could be the missing vote that
drives leftist-Zionist Meretz under the 3.25-percent electoral threshold,
keeping it out of the Knesset. “I certainly won’t be happy if Meretz doesn’t
get in, but that’s not a good enough reason for me to vote for them,” he says.
The underprivileged and the weak
Ayelet Ben-Yishai, a 47-year-old lecturer in English
literature at the University of Haifa, will be voting for the Joint List but
without a full heart. Ben-Yishai says she has always voted for Hadash and
without compunction. But this time, like many progressive-minded Jewish
Israelis, she has reservations about voting for a slate that includes the
nationalist Balad and people from the Islamic Movement, with its anti-feminist
and anti-gay bent.
“Still, for me
right now, the most important thing is to fight those who are trying to drive
20 percent of the population here out of civil society and to delegitimize
them,” she says. “I certainly have many reasons not to vote for the Joint List
and to vote for Meretz, but I see protecting Israeli civil society as the
important objective today.”
Echoing this sentiment, Daria Shualy, a mother of two
from Tel Aviv, says she feels a moral obligation to vote for the Arab slate.
“For me, the prime motivation is to give my vote to the most underprivileged
and weakest segment of society,” says the 42-year-old web entrepreneur who has
typically voted for Hadash.
Orly Noy represents a tiny minority within the already
small minority of Jews who will vote for the Arab ticket: She is Mizrahi, a Jew
with roots in the Middle East or North Africa. The 44-year-old Iranian-born
translator voted for Balad in the last election but cast her ballot across the
spectrum in previous races.
Noy belongs to a small group of Jewish intellectuals
from Muslim countries who see a natural alliance between themselves and those
they view as the other underdogs of Israeli society.
“The emergence
of this new joint ticket presents an opportunity to break the old alliance with
the Ashkenazi Zionists and form a new one with the Palestinian citizens, creating
an entirely new balance of power in the country,” she says.
Matan Kaminer would never vote for a Zionist party, so
he didn’t have trouble deciding this time around either.
“For the past
15 years I’ve been active in Hadash, but now, because the Joint List will be an
even more powerful force in the Knesset, I feel more motivated than ever to
vote,” says the 32-year-old doctoral student in anthropology. “There is a real
opportunity now to make a difference.”
For some undecided voters on the left, though,
crossing over to the non-Zionist camp is still too daunting. Eitan (who asked
that his full name not be used) was among the crowd in that Tel Aviv basement
club, even though he has already made his decision.
“I did consider
voting for the Joint List because their message certainly appeals to me.
Democracy, peace, equality – I’m all for that,” he says.
“But I also
feel a bit Zionist, and I think it’s a good thing that the Jewish people have
their own state in the Land of Israel, even though we definitely don’t need the
entire Land of Israel. My question is this: What does this list offer 70
percent of those Israelis who like me carry some Zionist sentiment?”
Eitan will be voting for Meretz.
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