After Gantz, will Israeli Arabs ever return to the ballot box?
A Palestinian casts his ballot in Israel’s general elections on 9 April 2019 in Kafir Qasim
Shlomi Eldar writes in Al-Monitor:
Knesset members have been switching party allegiances and moving from one party to the other. Some parties are splitting, while other parties merge. The jaw-dropping series of events over the last few days has left many voters stunned, not to mention upset. So many election promises tossed aside as a novel coronavirus bears down. Even the most creative mind could not have imagined Blue and White splitting into two factions (Hosen Yisrael, which will retain the Blue and White brand, and Yesh Atid-Telem) and four of its Knesset members switching from one faction to another.
All this transpired because Blue and White leader Benny Gantz swore before the March 2 election that he would never sit in a government with someone under criminal indictment, but has now abandoned the effort to form a government of his own — even though President Reuven Rivlin granted him a mandate to do so — and decided instead to form a government with interim Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. More than 2 million people voted in protest against Netanyahu, hoping that they could prevent him from forming an “immunity government” that would protect him from a trial on the criminal charges against him. This week they learned that they had really voted for a government to extract Netanyahu from his troubles.
…. ….
The feeling among the Arab public is not that they were betrayed by politicians who promised to stand by their principles and then reneged on their promise. Rather, they feel enormous disappointment in the Israeli political system as a whole. True, they had boycotted it after the events of October 2000 — when police shot and killed 12 Israeli Arabs and a Palestinian — but over the last year alone, they had begun to once again feel a glimmer of hope.
In a conversation with Al-Monitor, Ahmad Mahajna, an Umm al-Fahm resident, explained that the long lines outside the polling stations in his town in March had been an expression of hope. Residents of the town that the right-wing parties disparage more than any other went out to vote in large numbers, hoping that this time their votes would have an impact.