Home » Israel goes to vote, forgetting the Palestinians – Pierre Haski

Israel goes to vote, forgetting the Palestinians – Pierre Haski

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Israel goes to vote, forgetting the Palestinians – Pierre Haski

November 01, 2022 11:12 am

The polls are currently unable to indicate a winner between the two sides running in the Israeli political elections today, November 1, because the distance in voting intentions is too close.

Yet we have two certainties: the first is that the vote will change almost nothing with respect to the Palestinian question, a guest of stone in the Israeli debate. The second is that, regardless of its composition, the next government will have to deal with the explosive situation in the Palestinian territories willy-nilly.

Gone are the days when Israeli left and right clashed over peace with the Palestinians. The word “peace” itself disappeared from the political vocabulary with the failure of the Oslo accords. Today in Israel the left is reduced to a minimum.

The Labor Party, that of Ben Gurion but also of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Perez, who together won the Nobel Peace Prize with Yasser Arafat in 1994, is now a shadow of itself. Meretz, the other historical leftist party, has sounded the alarm because it fears it will not exceed the 3.25 percent barrier to enter the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.

The Palestinian question, however, has by no means vanished, and it will not disappear unless some solution is found. The problem is that Israeli society only addresses this issue in terms of security.

Israeli society addresses the Palestinian problem only in terms of security

On the Palestinian front, the same causes produce the same effects. The frustration of the absence of any political perspective, the continuous and violent aggression of Israeli settlers, the growing discredit of the Palestinian Authority led by Abu Mazen and the legacy of the failure of the Oslo accords produce an explosive cocktail. Violence threatens to overwhelm the West Bank once again, animated by a new generation that did not experience the first two intifadas, the rebellions of the 1980s and 2000s.

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Since the beginning of the year there have already been 120 dead in the West Bank, in a third creeping intifada that has not yet been proclaimed. The incidents occurred in Hebron, the only location where settlers control part of the Palestinian city center, in Jenin, where in June the famous Palestinian-US journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by an Israeli soldier, and more recently in Nablus, the great city in the north of Palestine.

In Nablus, young Palestinians of all orientations have created the new armed group “Areen al Oussoud”, the Lions’ Den, of which many leaders have been killed in clashes with the Israeli army.

But this situation is not even mentioned in the Israeli election campaign. However, distances are very short within the territory made up of Israel and the Palestinian territories, which the Jewish state conquered in 1967. It takes an hour by car to reach Tel Aviv from Hebron, passing from the most nightmare city of the territories to the carefree and prosperous paradise on the shores of the Mediterranean. Two worlds that have their backs, separated by a wall and the checkpoints of the Israeli army.

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The paradox is that the outcome of the November 1 elections could be decided by other Palestinians, those who have Israeli citizenship and have remained in Israel since 1948. This community today represents 20 percent of the country’s population. All analysts agree that the participation rate of Arab voters will be decisive for Benjamin Netanyahu’s hopes of obtaining a majority: with less than 50 percent of the Arab Israeli turnout, Netanyahu will win; with more than 70 percent he will certainly be defeated.

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This is a paradox because this role of arbiter does not allow the Palestinians of Israel to weigh on the question of peace, which instead remains out of the debate. It is just one of the many paradoxes of an equation without solution.

Translation by Andrea Sparacino

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