Oops, look, there are Arabs in Israel.
Israelis woke up on October 28 to realize that the Arab vote could change the picture, and many of them reacted as if they had only just discovered that Arab citizens live here. The Joint List and Ra’am won 19 seats between them, up from 10 in the outgoing Knesset, on an Arab turnout of about 80%. Those are the facts. The surprise is the story.
The invisible neighbors
This is not new. Israelis have always had a talent for not seeing the Arabs who live among them. In May 1967, weeks before the Six Day War, when Jordan ruled east Jerusalem, Naomi Shemer wrote “Jerusalem of Gold” for the Israel Song Festival. Looking across the border at the Old City, she described its market square as empty. It was not. Arab Jerusalemites lived there, traded, and prayed there. They simply were not in the song.
Amos Oz once told Shemer as much. The square was not empty, he said, and “we are not alone in this land.” Shemer answered with a marriage analogy: another man’s presence does not make a wife any less yours. The others are not denied. They are simply noticed only when they seem to threaten what is “ours.” The rest of the time, they are scenery.
Arab citizens make up about a fifth of Israel’s population. Nearly half of Israel’s pharmacists are Arab, and Arab nurses and doctors fill hospitals and clinics across the country. We trust them with our bodies. We rarely think of them as voters.
Part of it is the way we live. Most Jews and Arabs in Israel live in separate towns, send their children to separate schools and, until university or the hospital ward, rarely share a room.
Part of it is language. Arabic is the mother tongue of one in five Israelis, yet only about 10% of Jewish Israelis understand some Arabic. And part of it is the words we use. In Hebrew, Arab citizens are “the sector” (hamigzar), or “the minorities,” terms that keep them at a polite distance. Arab towns make the evening news when there is a murder, rarely when there is a vote.
None of this belongs to the Right alone. In fact, the surprise was loudest among those who see themselves as liberal, open, and democratic.
Votes without partnership
Israel’s Center-Left likes to think of itself as the camp of coexistence. It praises the Arab doctor in the COVID ward and speaks warmly of a shared society. But when it comes to power, it keeps Arab citizens at arm’s length.
Its leaders ruled out Arab partners in advance and, in the words of a TheMarker analysis recently, dug their own pit by turning their backs on Arab voters. The Arab parties reached out. So far they have been ignored.
For much of the Center-Left, the Arab public is not a partner but a reservoir: votes that should turn out against Netanyahu, quietly, and then disappear from the conversation. Arab citizens are welcome to tip the balance, as long as they do not ask for a seat at the table.
Channel 13 presenter Lucy Aharish put it bluntly on her program: “In the last elections, the Israeli Center complained that the Arabs didn’t show up, and so brought the extreme right-wing government to power. Now that they have shown up, the parties reject them.”
When Arab citizens turned out in force, many liberal Israelis were as taken aback as anyone. They had hoped for help. They got a public with its own parties, its own leaders, and its own demands.
Equal citizenship, forgotten
Israel’s founders saw it differently. The Declaration of Independence, signed on May 14, 1948, by the 37 members of the People’s Council, calls on the state’s Arab inhabitants to take part in building the country “on the basis of full and equal citizenship, and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions,” as the Democrats’s Naama Lazimi recalled.
On the Right, Ze’ev Jabotinsky went further. In The Jewish War Front, published in 1940, he wrote: “In every Cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab, and vice-versa.” The founders of the Labor movement’s state, and the father of the Israeli Right, agreed on this much. It is their heirs who are surprised.
To be precise, Arab citizens have always voted. In Israel’s first decades, turnout was even higher than today, reaching 90% in 1955, according to the Israel Democracy Institute, but under military rule, those votes went mostly to Mapai and its affiliated lists, not to parties of their own.
In the last 20 years, Arab turnout has never come close to this year’s 80%. What is new is not that Arabs vote, but that they voted as a public with a voice of its own.
That is the paradox. For years, Right and Left alike have asked whether Arab citizens are integrating into Israeli society. This election they did the most integrated thing a citizen can do: they stood in line at a polling station, in an Israeli school, and dropped a ballot into an Israeli box. And that is what startled us.
There are real arguments to be had with some of the parties they voted for, as there are with many parties. But an argument with a party is not the same as discomfort with its voters.
“The Arab citizens are not guests in the country,” Nimrod Dvir, founder of the Darkhenu movement, wrote in Ynet this week. That this still needs to be written, by a liberal, to liberals, says it all.
The “market square” was never empty. It was full in 1967, it is full today, and on October 27 its people showed up in numbers that made them impossible to overlook. We can keep acting surprised every few years, or we can finally look at the square as it is.■