While world media quickly reacted to Bibi’s deliberately inflammatory campaign statement that Israel belongs only to the Jewish people, a far more sinister step related to the election campaign took place last week — without much attention outside Israel.
That step — the outright banning of one of the 2 main Palestinian-Israeli “Lists” (a List is a party, or a group of parties running together) — has both proven that Bibi was merely stating a fact of life in Israel, and that he’s far from alone in this view. In fact, his main contenders in the upcoming election literally shot themselves in the foot by supporting the ban, just in order to demonstrate that when push comes to shove, they stand with Bibi on this line in the sand: Arab citizens can perhaps be tolerated, but only if they behave, i.e., when they don’t demand a partnership stake in the country’s future.
More, below the salmon-hued info box.
Since 1967, Israel has controlled the lives of the Palestinian people living in East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza, without giving them citizenship; the vast majority have been forced to live as stateless, rightless subjects under military rule.
Even now, as Occupation-tolerant advocates often deny and discount this basic reality (or are shamefully ignorant of it), Israel controls the freedom of movement of these territories' residents, in particular their ability to go abroad and return; controls their residency status; their airspace, currency, water supply, fuel supply, most of their electricity, and their ability to import and export products. All the while, deeply exploiting their day labor and natural resources — and further controlling their social and intimate lives via a secret police that extorts an extensive network of collaborators. THIS IS A VERY PARTIAL LIST.
This Occupation regime has continued unabated for nearly 52 out of the Israeli parliament’s 70 years of existence, covering the last 14 out of Israel's 20 general elections. Apart from a couple of elections in the 1980s-90s, no major Israeli party has campaigned on ending it.
As long as this continues, the Israeli elections cannot be considered really democratic. That said, one should never give up hope, and elections might open the door to the Law of Unintended Consequences, in a good way.
Besides, it’s one of the world's most entertaining electoral circuses. So I'm writing this series.
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Oh the Poor Foxes
Literally. I don’t like dissing on any wildlife. Foxes are fine. But the rationale of Israel’s election rules is that if we let a bunch of rival predators all guard the prey, it will serve as a sort of check and balance.
Our Central Election Committee (CEC), for example, is roughly a 4:1 reduced copy of the Knesset parliament, with a High Court justice as chairman. So the majority:minority relationships are largely replicated there. In 1985, the Knesset amended election law to allow the CEC broad latitude to ban parties. Ostensibly, this was a response to the frightening first entry of the explicitly racist Kahanist party into parliament in the 1984 election (in fact, it was Kahane himself who sat in parliament). And indeed for the 1988 election the Kahanists were banned by the CEC. But of course, the 1985 amendment included a back door to allow the wholesale banning of Arab parties as well, as long as they can be framed as undermining the notion of “a Jewish state” (which is pretty easy to frame you into, if you are a Palestinian-Israeli who somehow fails to see the light of Zionism). So together with the Kahanists, one Arab party was banned in 1988. It wasn’t the first time an Arab party was banned, nor the last.
After a lull during the relatively liberal 1990s, the banning of Arab parties has become a pre-election ritual. In every election this century except 2006 (that’s 5 out of 6), the majority in the CEC voted to ban at least one major Arab party. Fortunately, Israel’s High Court also wears a hat called “High Court of Justice”: a check-and-balance of last resort, potentially willing to quickly hear appeals against any government action, without snaking through lower courts first. In all cases this century, the banning of Arab parties was overturned by a wide margin, or even unanimously, by the High Court.
There will be an appeal. But in recent years, “Justice” minister Ayelet Shaked (a far-right rising star) managed to pack the high court with more right-wing justices, so the outcome is not so certain this time around.
The devastating irony is that Yesh Atid (Yair Lapid’s supposedly centrist opposition party) had the votes to block the ban, or at least to enable the presiding justice (who can vote if he chooses to, but skipped the honors, probably in order not to recuse himself from sitting on the case) to block the ban with his single vote. But Yesh Atid voted in favor, as they’ve done in the past too. As a figleaf, they voted against banning the other main Arab List, which of course was also proposed to be banned by the right wing. But they did support the banning of the other list’s top Jewish candidate, for a series of inflammatory statements about right-wing politician; that ban also passed for good measure; foxes and henhouses don’t help us here, another idiom is needed — perhaps one involving pots, kettles and the like.
Lapid is running this time in a List together with 3 ex-super-generals, a List that is currently ahead of Bibi’s Likud in the polls (more about that List, in a future Circus Act diary). However, if the ban that Lapid told his minions to support is not overturned, they will have almost zero chance of defeating Bibi and heading the next government. This is because the government is set up not by the largest party, but by the party allied with the largest coalition. Lapid et al. are surely not allies of the banned Balad-Raam List. But take away the 4-5 seats that Balad-Raam is likely to gain if unbanned (and maybe some of the other List’s voters who become disgusted with the entire process) — and Bibi’s hard-right/far-right coalition of parties is all but certain to win the >60 seats needed to control the government again. Way to be a fighting opposition, idiots! Oh, and a special thanks for carrying the torch of “Israeli Democracy”.
And the Kahanists, you might ask? The Kahanists, whom Bibi famously ushered into a grand List for the 2019 elections together with some more legit (but scarcely less racist) far-right parties? The Kahanist, for whose banning the CEC had received its sweeping ban rights in the first place? The Kahanists were also candidates for banning. But the venerable CEC rejected the ban proposal by a single vote.