NAZARETH // The biggest effect for Israel’s 1.3 million
Palestinian citizens of its assault on Gaza last winter has been to smash any
remaining illusions that there is a future for the minority in a Jewish state,
the community’s leaders have agreed.
They say that minority voters have almost completely abandoned
Zionist parties, even left-wing ones, believing that none is really interested
in a peaceful solution to the country’s conflict with the Palestinians.
That was reflected in February, one month after Operation Cast
Lead ended, in the lowest turnout ever posted by the Palestinian minority in an
election. Only 53 per cent voted, down more than 25 percentage points since the
mid-1990s, in the more optimistic Oslo period.
Haneen Zoubi, who was elected to the
Israeli parliament for the first time in 2009, pointed out that the minority’s
share of the vote for Jewish parties had fallen to an all-time low of 17 per
cent. Back in the early 1990s half of Israel’s Palestinian voters supported such
parties.
“More and more Palestinian citizens are understanding that Israel
is not serious about negotiations for peace,” she said. “People are
disillusioned with a leadership that is simply trying to buy time and manage the
conflict rather than solve it.”
That view was shared by Mohammed Zeidan, director of the Arab
Association for Human Rights, based in Nazareth. “We need a new way of dealing
with Israel. The two-state solution is starting to look impractical and that has
given a significant push to the idea that Palestinians inside Israel should be
campaigning for a single state for both peoples.”
This new-found political confidence was manifest during the Gaza
offensive, Mr Zeidan said, when Palestinian citizens held the biggest protests
in their history. The largest, in the northern city of Sakhnin, drew a crowd of
at least 100,000.
“There is much more certainty among the Palestinian public and
leadership inside Israel that it has a right to speak out on pan-Palestinian
issues,” he said.
“Once, we tended to remain on the sidelines, waiting to take our
political cues from the Palestinian leadership outside Israel. Now, the
Palestinian Authority is seen to be damaging the popular consensus among
Palestinians and people here are looking for their own answers.”
One Palestinian party, the National Democratic Assembly, even
went so far as to call for the resignation of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian
president, during the attack on Gaza after his Palestinian Authority was seen to
be suppressing dissent in the West Bank.
Ms Zoubi, a NDA member, said: “It was clear that Israel would
have had a much harder time dealing with the fallout from Gaza, including the
Goldstone report, were it not for the silence of Mahmoud Abbas. He is facing a
lot of anger and criticism from Palestinians inside Israel.”
Jafar Farah, director of Mossawa, a
Haifa-based advocacy group for the minority, said last year’s attack had led
directly to the current government of Benjamin Netanyahu, one of the most right
wing in Israel’s history.
“Ever since, we have seen an attack on freedoms and the rights of
Palestinian citizens,” he said. “There have been at least 25 discriminatory laws
proposed over the past six months. Most have yet to be approved but the
implications of the legislative push are clear.”
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