The Huge Gap Between the Representation of the Arab Sector in National and Local Politics and the Actual Achievements of Arab Elected Officials

By: Jihan Haider Hasan The Arab sector in Israel suffers from many problems, including poverty, violence, and housing shortages. Given the fact that there are ten Knesset members from parties representing Arabs in the Knesset—slightly less than 10%—alongside respectable representation of the Arab sector in local councils in every Arab and mixed city, it would have been expected that Arabs would have a clear address for addressing these problems, and that their elected officials would achieve at least a trend of improvement in these areas. This is especially so considering that, unlike the national level—where Arabs constitute 21% of Israel’s citizens but their representation in the Knesset is less than 10%—local elections see significant Arab participation and respectable Arab representation both in municipal councils and in their governing coalitions. Not to mention Arab cities where virtually all representatives are Arab and were expected to deal with these issues, particularly since poverty problems are far more severe in the periphery than in the center.

As stated, Arab Knesset members and Arab local council members have not succeeded in translating their political weight into tangible results on the issues of violence, housing, and poverty in the Arab sector. Regarding violence, despite numerous protests against the state’s failure to address violence in the Arab sector and the abandonment of the public to criminals, organized crime in Arab society has reached unprecedented levels. Since the police are not dealing with organized crime, Arab elected officials have failed to exert pressure on the Ministry of National Security and on the police. Instead, they have placed the responsibility on the indifference and disregard of Jewish state institutions, while absolving themselves of any responsibility or serious search for solutions.

In addition, most Arab families live below the poverty line. In order to secure budgets, political deals can be made even from the opposition. Therefore, the claim that the Jewish state disqualifies Arabs as coalition partners is not an excuse for Arab Knesset members not to fight for an economic program of affirmative action in budget allocation to improve the economic situation of the Arab sector. In Arab localities, this is also reflected in poor infrastructure and public transportation that does not meet the population’s needs. Arab Knesset members and Arab mayors have likewise failed to bring large industrial zones to Arab localities—something that would have significantly reduced unemployment and created jobs, especially for young people.

In the field of housing, the situation is extremely dire. The state does not grant building permits to Arabs and demolishes homes built without permits. To avoid investing in homes that may be demolished, young families are forced to expand their parents’ homes. As a result, in Arab villages everything is connected to a single house because there are no permits for building additional homes. Beyond residential overcrowding, this also creates parking problems, since many apartments and/or workplaces require parking spaces near the same house. People are therefore forced either to crowd into limited parking areas or to park far away and walk to their homes or workplaces. This is one of the most painful problems facing the Arab sector. It was expected that Arab Knesset members would not suffice with attending demonstrations against home demolitions, but would instead use their power and political weight to prevent demolitions—whether by obtaining retroactive building permits or securing permits in advance. In reality, Arab Knesset members have not succeeded in stopping demolition operations, and beyond the overcrowding that results, entire families are left without a roof over their heads. This situation creates a crisis of trust between the citizen who sees his home demolished and his parliamentary representative, who limits himself to condemnations and even participation in demonstrations against the demolitions.

On the political and international level, particularly with regard to wars, a sharp contradiction stands out between the role of Arab Knesset members as Palestinians and their role as members of the parliament of the state that conducts those wars. Arab Knesset members have limited influence on decisions of war, since these decisions are made by the government cabinet, and Arabs are always in the opposition and are not part of the government or the security cabinet. Therefore, the opposition of Arab Knesset members to wars is perceived as merely “symbolic,” without any legal weight capable of stopping the wars. Moreover, they are accused by Jews of neglecting their own domestic problems, as described above, in order to manage the struggle of their brothers across the border. This serves, in the eyes of Jews, as justification for discrimination, since they are viewed as a “fifth column” supporting the enemy. At the same time, this accusation is used to justify the exclusion of Arab Knesset members from decision-making, on the grounds that instead of caring for their voters—Arab citizens of Israel—they allegedly prefer to care for Arabs who are not Israeli citizens in the West Bank and Gaza. Consequently, it is claimed, they would represent in government not the interests of Israel’s citizens but those of Israel’s enemies in the Palestinian Authority and Gaza.

Following the raising of the electoral threshold—possibly done from the outset to further weaken the political power of Arabs in the hope that they would have no representation at all in the Knesset—the four Arab parties united into a single Joint List. In the first election they ran together, they achieved greater political power, increasing their representation from a total of 11 seats to 13 seats for the Joint List. At the height of the political crisis, during three consecutive election rounds, the Joint List achieved 16 seats in one of the elections—a historic all-time high for the Arab sector. However, Mansour Abbas later concluded that in order to achieve gains in civil issues such as poverty, violence, and home demolitions, it was necessary to completely abandon the struggle for their brothers and against wars, and to offer votes to both the right and the left in exchange for budget allocations to address the sector’s problems, similar to the approach taken by the ultra-Orthodox parties at the end of the previous century. This position contradicted the views of the other parties and led to a renewed split, which again reduced the total number of seats of the two lists to 10.

After one term in which Mansour Abbas was part of the coalition—and during which the handling of the violence problem indeed improved—while the other lists remained in the opposition, this coalition included parties from across the political spectrum: from the right, such as Yamina and New Hope, and from the left, such as Labor and Meretz. The cooperation of left-wing parties with right-wing parties that categorically reject the two-state solution alongside the State of Israel led the Balad party to conclude that even technical support for the left against the right was not their path, and that they were unwilling to cooperate with any Zionist party that supports a Jewish state. This contrasted with the position of Hadash and Ta’al, which view the left as the lesser evil and Prime Minister Netanyahu as the worst possible option for the Arab sector, leading to another split. Thus, despite the high electoral threshold remaining unchanged, Arabs once again ran in three lists, one of which failed to pass the threshold. Although the number of Arab Knesset members remained 10, votes equivalent to three seats were effectively wasted because they did not pass the threshold. This outcome is reflected in every poll, in which the two lists represented in the Knesset each win five seats, while Balad fails to cross the threshold and votes equivalent to two seats are wasted.

Thus, the fragmentation of the Arab parties—Ra’am, Hadash, Ta’al, and Balad—reflects a split between currents such as Ra’am under Mansour Abbas, which calls for influence from within the coalition, and currents that call for Palestinian nationalism and a boycott of the Zionist establishment. This fragmentation has also dismantled the voting power of the Arab public and has turned engagement with global issues into one in which the Arab parties lack a shared strategy. It also makes it difficult to formulate a unified strategy in the civil sphere and to ensure that all ten seats are leveraged for the benefit of the Arab sector.

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