תמלול הכתבה: תיקון עולם – ממשלת שמאל בישראל? כנראה שלא

 

There’s a common story within the Israeli and foreign media that the election results show a close race between forces of the right and left.  They display charts showing the right with 61 seats and the left with 59.  You even hear some Israeli political consultants spinning pipe dreams about Yair Lapid being the next prime minister leading a center-left government.

These analyses are terribly superficial, and for one reason: the right is united and the left is not.  It’s not only fragmented, it’s dysfunctional.

Take the notion of a Prime Minister Lapid.  What would have to happen for this to become reality?  He’d have to carry not just the political center he occupies along with Labor; he’d have to embrace the moderate left, Meretz and the Israeli Palestinian MKs.  Lapid himself gave the answer today, saying that he would never join a government that included Haneen Zoabi.

That statement perfectly represents the dysfunction of not just the Israeli center-left, but the entire political system.  Israelis like to say they’re a democracy.  But that’s not the case.  Israel is at best an ethnocracy offering inferior rights to Palestinians.

If Israel was a democracy, the votes of Palestinian citizens would count equally to those of Jewish voters.  But not only does Yair Lapid shun Haneen Zoabi, no Israeli ruling coalition has ever included a Palestinian party.  This was even true when Labor last won 94% of the Palestinian vote in 1994.

The Israeli far-right has so demonized Palestinian leaders like Haneen Zoabi that she’s radioactive as far as Israeli Jewish voters are concerned.  Unless and until Israelis can distance themselves from such racist attitudes, Israel will not be a democracy.

The Israeli political consultant Tom Wegner posted on his Facebook page some thoughts about the election.  Among them were the astute observation that no Israeli center-left coalition will ever rule again, as long as Palestinians are closed out of the system.

The question of course is how you change things, and that is easier said than done.  Racism has ruled in Israeli politics for so long that it’s almost impossible to change attitudes.  In the U.S., it also took decades from the 1950s when Blacks could not vote, until the 1970s when they began to recognize their political power and win contested elections.  And not until 2008, did we get an African-American president.  That took nearly 60 years.  In Israel, the racism is even deeper and will take even longer to renounce.

Parties like Hadash and Daam are a good start because they embrace Jews and Palestinians campaigning together.  But these are clearly minority parties that are shunned by much of the Jewish majority.  That doesn’t minimize their importance.  It only shows how far Israel has to go.

One thing that must happen is that Israeli Jews must criticize the sort of racism inherent in statements like that of Yair Lapid concerning governing along with Haneen Zoabi.  Another is to insist that parties of the Jewish left like Meretz become parties of the Israeli left.  That their ranks and their platform fully express the aspirations of not just Jewish voters, but Palestinian voters as well.

 

סוף תמלול הכתבה: תיקון עולם – ממשלת שמאל בישראל? כנראה שלא
 
 

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