A particularly nasty commentary by British Palestinian Yara Hawari makes the following claim in The Independent concerning Israel’s elections:
In fact, approximately 4.5m Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have no say in deciding which Israeli political party will control every aspect of their lives.
But why should they have a vote in an Israeli election? That would only be possible if a one-state solution came to fruition where the aforementioned 4.5 million Palestinians would simply vote Israel out of existence as a Jewish state.
And what of Israel’s Arab citizens who came out and voted?
Although they have citizenship, it is on a nominal basis, and there is an entire body of Israeli laws designed to discriminate against them. Their situation is one of an internally colonised people and the type of occupation they face, although subtle, is very real.
Hawari links to the radical Adalah organization, which maintains a database of “50 discriminatory laws.” NGO Monitor states that “contrary to Adalah’s ongoing attempts to portray Israel as anti-democratic and racist, including frequent events in the UN and other international platforms, many of the laws listed have nothing to do with Israeli Arabs nor could they be described as “discriminatory”.”
Perhaps Hawari should be turning her attention to the real issue facing those Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank. Evelyn Gordon explains in Commentary:
A veteran Palestinian journalist from Ramallah summed up the prevailing sentiment succinctly. “We say all these bad things about Israel, but at least the people there have the right to vote and enjoy democracy,” he told Jerusalem Post reporter Khaled Abu Toameh before the election. “We really envy the Israelis. Our leaders don’t want elections. They want to remain in office forever.”
Ghanem Nuseibeh, an East Jerusalem Palestinian now living in Britain, put out an illuminating series of tweets throughout Election Day, including, “Over a million Arabs take part in Middle East’s most democratic elections today”; “The Arabs in Israel are the only Middle East Arab group that practices true democracy”; and “Israel is secure not because it will elect Bibi or Buji, but because of what it is doing today.” He was rooting for Isaac Herzog (“Buji”) and deplored Benjamin Netanyahu, but after acknowledging that his candidate had lost, he nevertheless tweeted, “Israel is the world’s most vibrant democracy” …. “If an Arab country had the same wide spectrum of political parties as Israel does, it would be fighting a civil war unseen in human history.”
Just in case Hawari hasn’t made it clear just how much she despises Israel, she implies that Israel has no right to exist given that a “colonial state” where only non-Jews can be indigenous has no legitimacy:
A state that exerts its control over a people by means of a decades-old illegal occupation is not a democracy. And neither is a state that declares itself only for Jews and ignores the rights of the indigenous non-Jewish people.
Israel doesn’t belong to all its citizens and those under its control. It is an ethnocratic, settler colonial state that flouts international law on a daily basis by oppressing the Palestinians in varying states of occupation.
This opinion piece was published before the election therefore demonstrating that The Independent, by publishing it, is less concerned by the election results (which it clearly doesn’t like) and more interested in attacking the only real democracy in the Middle East despite Yara Hawari’s claims to the contrary.
