Only Joint List broke deep gloom of election result


April 1, 2015
Sarah Benton

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Letter from Israel
Naomi Wayne
March 21, 2015

On the night of the Israeli election I was in Jenin with a friend. Nobody there was talking about the culmination of Israel’s political bun fight. Nor in the rest of the West Bank as far as I could make out. ‘Why should we? What difference will it make to us?’ had been the reaction when I enquired what West Bankers knew about the election and what they hoped for. This also meant that nobody that night was glued to the huge flat screen television in the Jenin Cinema Guesthouse, being misled by the uniformly incorrect exit polls, or hanging onto every early count. So my own thudding disappointment at Netanyahu’s top placing, and the size of his lead over the Zionist Union (the former Labour Party), didn’t hit till 6 a.m, when I picked up Ha’aretz’s shocked report of the outcome on my IPad.

Two days later we were at Jaffa’s Arab-Jewish theatre for a production of the remarkable ‘Peacock of Silwan’, an award winning Palestinian/Jewish play set in one of the most contested parts of East Jerusalem. Half an hour before the performance, the company was contemplating a near empty house – by the time it started they had their biggest audience ever. Jewish leftists, desperate to feel better about something, had turned out in force to experience a rare and precious example of Israeli Jewish and Palestinian co-operation.

Because, make no mistake about it, Israel’s election outcome does matter, to all Israelis and to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. At minimum it means business as usual – continuing the settlements, house demolitions and expulsions for Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line, and no let up in the ferocious cost of living for Israelis, especially in a housing market whose insanity rivals London. But it could mean much more rapid settlement, crackdowns on freedom of speech and other civil liberties to try and kill overt criticism by Jews as well as Palestinians of government policy, and an Israeli society where hate speech and behaviour is so normal it no longer excites any comment, much less condemnation. And worst of all, it has certainly brought very little reason for hope.

For in spite of many ‘progressive’ Israelis’ insouciance, which often rivals that of West Bank Palestinians – they are all as bad as each other, the ZU won’t do anything differently – on the morning after the election night before, everyone from centre to far left in Israel knew that a ZU-led government would have represented a crucial shift in the politics of Israeli society. It would have meant that enough people had voted for change to make it a real possibility. Not that change would definitely happen, but that it could, that new opportunities could be created and seized, that repression was likely to get no worse, that racism of the baldest and crudest kind could be squeezed to the margins of public discourse, and that a just peace could creep onto the agenda of Israeli politics.

The one bright thread of cheer to break up the general gloom was the success of the Arab and Arab/Jewish Joint List. For the first time in many years the rapid downward trend in the rate of Israeli Arab voting was halted, indeed, sharply reversed, with a rise from a poor 56% to a respectable 68%. Especially encouraging was the way the Joint List held together and the skill of its new and previously unknown Hadash (communist) leader, Aymen Odeh, who saw off the extraordinarily bullying racism of extreme right winger Avigdor Lieberman, with a calm, dignified and humerous television performance which garnered widespread praise. If he can keep up this kind of leadership, then something and someone lasting and hugely positive may have emerged.

photo  - Naomi Naomi Wayne

A final anecdote from a complicated country. Our Israeli-born Mizrahi Tel Aviv taxi driver who drove us to Jaffa needed no prompting to tell us that he was a proud Netanyahu supporter ‘of course’. It is that ‘of course’ that Israel’s centre left needs to break down and capture. But he was also happy to describe how he regularly visited his relatives who had chosen not to come to Israel, but still lived in their native Morocco. ‘Why would they leave? They have good relations with Arabs – Jews and Arabs there, not a problem’ he said. Persuading Israelis like him that Jews and Arabs ‘here’ need not be a problem either – that’s the challenge for centre, left and Joint List during the years ahead.

Naomi Wayne is one of the founders of JfJfP and co-founder of the British Shalom Salaam Trust of which she is now Secretary. She is a former trade union officer and equal opportunities specialist in Britain and Ireland, and a retired charity chief executive. She currently chairs the national infrastructure charity, AdviceUK and is a trustee of the Migrants Resource Centre.

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