Why Is Netanyahu’s ‘centrist’ opposition leading the assault on Arab Israeli rights?

Ayman Odeh on the campaign trail in the Arab town of Kafr Yasif, northern Israel, in 2019.

Gideon Levy writes in Haaretz on 2 July 2025:

Israel’s fighting opposition is abuzz. Gadi Eisenkot quit the National Unity Party and the Knesset. Even more exciting, so did Matan Kahana. Our crowns have fallen, one by one. The sole consolation is that MK Orit Farkash-Hacohen remains. Who will Eisenkot partner with? We’re holding our breath. Will the retired general de jour join up with Naftali Bennett, or perhaps with Yair Lapid? The fate of the country is in doubt.

But the true face of the opposition was revealed a day before these dramatic moves, when the Knesset House Committee approved Ayman Odeh’s expulsion from the legislature.

Of the 16 committee members who were eligible to vote, 14 supported the motion, including lawmakers from the opposition parties Yesh Atid and the National Unity Party. Pnina Tamano-Shata together with the far-right Kahanist, Limor Son Har-Melech. Simon Davidson of Yesh Atid shoulder-to-shoulder with Moshe Saada, who said in April that it is Israel’s obligation to starve Gaza. One people, one fascism. Not one Jewish Knesset member stood up against this despicable ultranationalist move involving the exclusion of Arabs. Not one.

Lapid said it was personal. According to the leader of Israel’s liberals, Odeh supports terror on a personal, not communal, basis, and the voters of Lapid’s contemptible party can relax. They can continue to feel good about themselves, the enlightened versus the savages, the liberals against the benighted. How you grovel, Yesh Atid.

No one had any expectations from the old boys’ club called the National Unity Party. What do they have to do with democracy? The word is fine for when screamed at the demonstrations in Tel Aviv, but when it comes to the test, no Jewish member of the Knesset House committee is a true democrat.

Odeh doesn’t need defending. He is one of the best and most impressive members of Israel’s parliament, and one of its greatest democrats. Only someone who fights against the occupation as he does is a true democrat, and these are far and few between in the Knesset. Any political novice understands that expelling Odeh is a prelude to expelling all the Arab parties from the Knesset, followed by denying Arab citizens the right to vote. That is the plan. The right is leading it with determination, and the submissive opposition is carrying it out.

To cleanse their conscience, they fight the source of all evil, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Justice Minister Yariv Levin, his messenger. They are destroying the false democracy for whose soul His Majesty’s opposition is fighting to the last drop of its blood. But the democracy of the fake democrats from the opposition doesn’t exist. They are the ones who destroyed it a generation ago, at the beginning of the occupation, much more than Levin is doing now. There is no democracy in an apartheid state, and there never will be. When another test of Israel’s democracy comes along – the freedom of speech of its elected representatives – the opposition fails it ignominiously.

Anyone who voted for Odeh’s expulsion on Monday can no longer participate in demonstrations against the government coup. They themselves just lent a hand to the most grievous harm that can be done to a democracy, denying a minority’s rights based on ultranationalist motives.

Even hypocrisy has its limits. This act was graver than the elimination of the standard of reasonableness as a judicial tool that courts can use. Any minute now and it won’t be only one-half of the subjects of the only democracy in the Middle East who have no rights. The rights of one-fifth of its citizens will also be stripped from them permanently.

This won’t happen because of the bad guys, Levin, Netanyahu and their ilk. It will be because of the good guys, Lapid, Benny Gantz and their likes. They are the ones who will make it possible. There is no point wasting words on their foolishness: Arab votes are their only chance of ever attaining power. It’s all about appeasing their base, which hasn’t liked Arabs very much recently, especially since October 7. There are no innocent people among them, they know, just like in the Gaza Strip.

That is the nature of Israel’s futile, free-pedaling opposition, which is leading itself and us nowhere. If Eisenkot joins Bennett, and if that pair wins the election, what can we possibly expect? After all, neither one is a democrat. They support the occupation and apartheid just like the right does. They now support copy-pasting the occupation into Israel proper, in the form of excluding the Arabs.

Oh, what a democracy, what an opposition. There is something to look forward to in the post-Netanyahu days of light.

This article is reproduced in its entirety