Lebanonwire, January 3, 2003

The Daily Star

The disqualification of two of the most prominent Arab-Israeli members of the Israeli Parliament from the Jan. 28 elections makes headlines in the Arab press, at the start of a new year, which many commentators are greeting with a sense
of trepidation.
Following its vote earlier in the week to prevent Ahmad Tibi from contesting the polls, the decision by Israel’s Central Elections Committee (CEC) to extend the ban to the outspoken legislator Azmi Bishara and his party, the National Democratic Association (NDA) or Balad, comes as no surprise.
While different explanations are offered for the measure, the implications are seen as ominous at a time when Israel appears to be moving inexorably to the right and positioning itself to exploit an US-led military action in the region to further its anti-Palestinian agenda.
The East Jerusalem Palestinian daily, Al-Quds, contrasts Israel’s latest actions with its self-styled image as “an oasis of democracy in a Middle Eastern desert swept by the winds of tyranny and dictatorship.” For 54 years, the paper reports, the Jewish state has boasted that its political system encompasses all political, religious and national groups, including the Arab minority. And it has made much political capital out of berating the Arab regimes for their despotic and corrupt rule and intolerance of dissent.
“But the events of the past few days have revealed how much dirt has been swept under the brightly colored carpet of Israeli democracy,” it remarks.
The disqualification of Tibi and Bishara by the CEC, which represents a cross-section of Israeli political parties, “has clarified to the world that Israel’s professed democracy is nothing more than a limited share holding company whose stock is held by Israeli Jews,” the East Jerusalem daily writes. Israeli democracy has shown itself to be an elastic concept that can be expanded or contracted in accordance with the prejudices and personal interests of Jewish politicians, “to which all minorities must submit without question or objections,” Al-Quds says.
Thus, the same Committee which barred the Arab lawmakers from seeking re-election on spurious grounds, refused to heed calls to exclude Baruch Marzel, the former head of the anti-Arab Kach movement, who has been included in the Herut Party’s election slate even though there is legislation in Israel preventing racist individuals or parties from contesting parliamentary seats.
Among other things, the paper sees this as another blow to hopes that the stalled peace process can be revived. “Although the Israeli elections are an internal Israeli affair that concerns only the Israelis, they have implications for many external issues, above all the peace process and the search for a settlement to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. What is happening at the moment can only strengthen the anti-peace forces on the right, while neutralizing the participation of the Arab minority in the Israeli political process. This is set to weaken the prospects of the other party blocs that support a just peace settlement and consolidate the status quo, which does not serve the interests of either the Palestinian or the Israeli peoples,” Al-Quds comments.
In Jordan, the Amman daily
Ad-Dustour says Israel has taken a step further toward becoming a full-fledged “apartheid state” like the former South Africa. The disqualification of Tibi and Bishara by the CEC, and Attorney-General Elyakim Rubinstein, “has uncovered the despicable racist face of the Jewish state, and exposed the fraudulence of Israeli democracy,” it says in its main editorial.
The paper says the pretext cited for the ban ­ that Tibi and Bishara don’t recognize the Jewish state and have had links with “terrorists” and their sponsors ­ is “even more egregious than the ban itself.”
How, Ad-Dustour wonders, can Israel possibly expect its Arab citizens to champion the idea of an exclusively Jewish state, thereby renouncing their own rights and their identity as the indigenous people of the country?
As for charges that the two lawmakers are linked to terrorism, if there had been any supporting evidence the Israeli courts would have invoked them long ago to put them behind bars. Their support for the liberation struggle of their fellow Palestinians is legitimate and just. All peoples are entitled under international law to resist foreign military occupation, “and the Arab legislators and masses in Israel are an inseparable component of the Palestinians people, duty-bound to support that struggle,” it points out.
“The fact of the matter is that the heated debate which the Jewish state has been witnessing, particularly over the past few years, about its Jewishness and its democracy was settled yesterday by means of the unjust and racist decisions taken by the Central Election Committee,” the paper remarks. “Israeli democracy is the exclusive preserve of the upper echelon of its citizens. For its third or fourth-class citizens, the Arabs specifically, it is only the Jewish nature of the state that applies.”
Israel is effectively “borrowing the apartheid model” from the former regime in South Africa, where only whites enjoyed the rights of citizenship, while the vast majority of the indigenous Africans were subjected to a regime of repression, land confiscation, displacement, negation and persecution, the newspaper charges.
The paper goes on to warn that “the battle against racism in Israel” can only be won if all the Palestinians left inside the country “stand as one man in the confrontation, and avoid being lured by any factional or partisan temptations that may arise as a result of the exclusion of strong candidates from the electoral arena. What Tibi and Bishara are facing today will be faced by all the Arabs tomorrow, and a unified stance, whatever form it takes or tactics it entails, is a must.”
Meanwhile, some NDA supporters in Israel are suggesting that all Arab-Israelis should boycott the Jan. 28 elections if the Israeli courts uphold the ban on the movement taking part.
In an article posted on the Arabs48 website, co-authors Omar Said and Khaled Khalil report that most of Balad’s members had qualms about taking part in Israeli elections in the first place, because of the fundamental incompatibility between their principles and program and the whole “Zionist enterprise.” The NDA’s decision to stand for Parliament was a “painful concession,” a “compromise” necessitated by various considerations, including the need to “maximize mass mobilization and block the road to opportunists,” they say.
They remark that while the Israeli political and intelligence establishment used to see the participation of the Arab minority in parliamentary polls as a way of containing it politically, it is now “changing the rules of the game.” By accusing Balad members of being complicit in “terrorism,” it is trying to create a climate of Israeli Jewish opinion that would facilitate a crackdown against the party, and perhaps also the radical wing of the Islamic Movement at a later stage.
That has precious little to do with alleged security concerns, but instead reflects the establishment’s fears that Balad and its ideas are becoming increasingly popular among Arabs with Israeli citizenship, especially young people ­ particularly its advocacy of a binational state instead of an avowedly Jewish one.
The Shin Bet intelligence services appear to believe that the NDA’s anti-Zionist program and outlook will sooner or later be adopted by all Arabs in Israel, as evidenced by the way other Arab forces ­ even those with which it is radically at odds ­ increasingly espouse and echo its views. Accordingly, ever since the October 2001 troubles (in which police shot and killed 13 Arab-Israelis), the Israelis have been employing a strategy of threats and intimidation against the movement and its supporters, with a view to weakening its mass appeal and deterring people from voting for it.
“The same happened in the past with other radical nationalist movements like Al-Ard and Abna al-Balad. As the intelligence services keep a close eye on the opinion polls, they are fully cognizant of the enormous pool of energy the NDA enjoys, which could enable it to emerge from the current elections as the premier political force on the Arab scene,” Said and Khalil observe in Arabs48.
The authors go on to argue that the Israeli authorities can only be “forced to reconsider” their drive to crush the NDA if the move against it is treated by the entire Arab public in Israel as an assault on their “legitimacy as citizens of this country and as a national minority entitled to adhere to its national aspirations and distinctiveness, and to strive to change its condition.”
Israel’s bid to deligitimize and eradicate the party should and can be countered by means of a mass election boycott ­ even if some “opportunist” politicians on the Palestinian scene, who relish the prospect of no having to compete against the NDA, have been urging people to turn out to vote in greater numbers, ostensibly in protest at the ban. They are playing into Israel’s hands by effectively agreeing to let it distinguish between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” Arab political groupings, and should be given short shrift.
“Faced with this reality, we must achieve the maximum degree of unity, prepare the public mood for a comprehensive boycott of the polls should the banning decision be formally upheld (by the Supreme Court), and make that stance the gauge of the patriotism and a responsibility of all political forces,” Said and Khalil argue.
Azmi Bishara himself writes in the Nazareth-based Arabic political weekly Fasl al-Maqal that the charges of support for terrorism, which the  Shin Bet concocted against him, were “a pack of lies,” and that the Israelis are targeting the NDA because of what it stands for politically, both locally and on the world stage.
Bishara points out that the CEC did not see fit to disqualify an acknowledged murderer like Ehud Yatom, the Likud candidate who as head of the Shin Bet in 1984 is alleged to have killed two Palestinians detained after an abortive 1984 bus hijacking, and then lied about the incident for years while the intelligence establishment tried to cover up for him.
Nor did it opt to annual the candidacy of Jewish politicians who owe their places on the party slates to corrupt deals between right-wing politicians and the criminal underworld aimed at delivering the votes of Oriental Jews.
The ban on the NDA, based on fabrications and hearsay, is part of a “blatant conspiracy to deny the Palestinian nationalist movement within the country political and parliamentary representation, and it will inevitably be a prelude to further steps,” Bishara warns. Its aim is not to prevent any alleged military operations that were being planned, but to prevent the “ongoing operation” by which the movement has been steadily gaining popularity and strength.
Bishara points out that the NDA’s ideas have been gaining ground, with Arab-Israelis increasingly asserting their inalienable rights as the indigenous inhabitants of the country, and refusing to allow the enjoyment of those rights to be conditioned on demonstrating loyalty to Zionism. They have also been adhering more strongly than ever to their Palestinian identity, and behaving as part of the Palestinian people and the pan-Arab nation. But arguably what angers the Israelis most is that they have “appropriated” liberal democracy for themselves and shown up the fundamental contradiction between it and Zionism, with their demand that Israel be turned into a “state for all its citizens.”
The challenge that the NDA has been mounting to “Jewish democracy” in recent years is evidently one which the establishment feels it can no longer tolerate, as the only political defense it is capable of mounting is an anti-democratic one.
Bishara, who also faces prosecution on separate charges of aiding Israel’s enemies, goes on to warn that the powers that be in Israel can be expected to use every means at their disposal ­ from spreading false rumors and employing divide-and-rule tactics to unleashing violence ­ in their endeavor to “get rid” of the resurgent Palestinian national movement within the 1967 borders.
“I do not rule out anything,” he writes. “The national movement within should prepare to defend itself and its achievements in the face of these conspiracies,” which are reminiscent of the plots that the US used to hatch at the height of the Cold War. “If the democratic national current can pass this test, its triumph will be great,” he concludes.

Copyright©Daily Star