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#Post#: 7142--------------------------------------------------
Israel got a new prime minister. But the most surprising is the
United Arab List.
DIR By: Zhang Caizhi
Date: June 14, 2021, 12:34 am
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HTML https://time.com/6073019/mansour-abbas-arab-israel-coalition-government/
'It's Possible to Do Things Differently.' The Arab Kingmaker Who
Joined Israel's Far-Right to Oust Netanyahu
--- Quote ---
>
> It was a picture that nobody in Israel could have imagined:
the leader of the political party of the Islamic Movement,
Mansour Abbas, sitting alongside Naftali Bennett, the envoy of
religious ultra-nationalist Zionism. But there they were with
the secular centrist Yair Lapid on June 2, pens in hand, ready
to sign documents bringing a devout Muslim and Palestinian
citizen of Israel into a coalition government with the two
Jewish Zionist leaders. “It was a historic moment,” Abbas tells
TIME a few days later from the offices of his United Arab List
party in Kafr Qana. “Some people in the room teared up.”
>
> Over the past two years Israelis have gone to the polls four
times to elect a government to run the country, and each time
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, leader for 15 of the
last 25 years, failed to muster up support to form even a narrow
coalition. The people on the left, center and right who wanted
to bring him down couldn’t form one either.
>
> But in the latest election, in April, a kingmaker emerged:
Abbas, the Islamist politician who made the remarkable
declaration that he would be willing to be part of a right-wing
coalition, something no Arab-led party has ever considered.
>
> The deal was delayed by a war. In May, hostilities sparked by
forced evictions of Palestinian families in East Jerusalem set
off communal violence in mixed Jewish-Arab cities across Israel,
and precipitated a conflict between the Israeli military and
militants in Gaza. The rioting and violence in the mixed cities
especially shone a spotlight on the conditions facing
Palestinian citizens of Israel, sometimes called ‘Arab
Israelis’, who live within the borders of the state as founded
in 1948. Although they make up about one fifth of the country’s
population, they face systematic discrimination in housing,
education, and employment. Their inability to improve their lot
has been compounded by a lack of power at a political level: no
Arab-led party has joined a coalition government since 1977,
when the right-wing Likud first came to power.
>
> That changed when Abbas, 47, signed the June 2 agreement. On
Sunday June 13, the Israeli parliament is expected to vote to
put the new ‘Change’ coalition in government, with Bennett as
prime minister — a historic moment in Israeli history that not
only will end the Netanyahu era, but also, Abbas hopes, be a
pivotal moment for Arab-Jewish relations. “The very act of our
participation in this government and in this political process
brings, and I could be wrong, it brings calm to the region, a
feeling of hope, that it’s possible to live together,” he says.
“That it’s possible to do things differently.”
>
> For the first time in generations, Palestinian citizens of
Israel are being treated as legitimate political partners on a
playing field that has long been the exclusive terrain of the
Zionist and religious Jewish Israelis. Whether it’s better for
Arabs to compromise with or to boycott Israeli governments is a
fundamental question that goes to the heart of Israel’s future.
If Abbas’s alliance with the government can help the country’s
Arab citizens it could have a wide-reaching impact.
>
> Plenty are hoping he fails. His partners on the far-right are
being attacked by their supporters for bringing a “terror
supporter” into the coalition. Meanwhile, many Arab citizens
accuse him of abandoning the Palestinian cause. “He probably
thinks he can improve the lot of the people by joining the
government, but that’s not how I view the system,” says Diana
Buttu, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, who is an analyst and
lawyer in Haifa. “I don’t see that we will be beneficiaries.”
>
> Abbas says he rejects the kind of attritional politics that
have led to the current, fractious moment in which Israel finds
itself. “I have been called every name imaginable. Traitor,
servile, submissive,” he says. “It’s very easy to stand before
the other and hold a lengthy battle. That’s not me. I don’t have
a goal to vanquish you, for example, but rather to bring your
positions closer to mine.”
>
> An Islamist in Israel
> Abbas was born and raised in a traditional Muslim family with
10 siblings in Maghar, northern Israel. His parents were farmers
who grew chickpeas, watermelon and wheat and raised goats. His
father only finished elementary school and his mother only went
to first grade. “I was very lucky,” he says. “My teachers saw in
me something special, a potential, and they pushed me forward.“
When Abbas was studying at the top dentistry school in Israel at
the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he became a disciple of
Sheikh Abdullah Nimr Darwish, an Arab Israeli
jihadist-turned-peace-proponent who founded the Islamic Movement
in Israel.
>
> “Everything I do today I absorbed from the legacy of Sheikh
Abdullah Nimr Darwish,” Abbas says in his office, which is
decorated with photos and quotes from his mentor, who died in
2017. “He started in jail and ended with a religious peace
initiative. I don’t have to pass the same trajectory. I took his
teachings and I continued from where he ended.”
>
> Darwish believed that the route to improving the fortunes of
Palestinians in Israel, and pursuing Israeli-Palestinian peace,
was through political participation. Many in Israel, especially
on the far-right, believe Islamists in Israel are linked to
extremism and hardline Islamist groups like Hamas in the
Palestinian territories or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt;
Bennett once called Abbas a “terror supporter.”
>
> But Abbas says his movement has no links to Hamas or the
Muslim Brotherhood and puts this perception down to
unfamiliarity with what he really stands for. “Who ever didn’t
know me, like Naftali and others have said, maybe they thought I
am an extremist Islamist. But the moment that they sit with me
and they get to know the teachings of Sheikh Abdullah and they
get to know the path I’ve made in the last 20-30 years they
begin to think differently. And that’s how we got to the
situation today where we are trying to lead a new path of
political partnership and tolerant political dialogue.”
>
> His party, the United Arab List (also known by its Hebrew
acronym Ra’am), was established as the political wing of
Darwish’s Islamist movement in 1996. Abbas has been leader since
early 2019, the year he was first elected to the Knesset. “We
have two hats: on the one side we are Arab Palestinians. But we
are also Arab citizens of Israel,” he says. UAL supports a
Palestinian state and the end to the Israeli occupation, but its
active goals are to solve the problems that the Arab citizens of
Israel face. “We focus on the issues and problems of the Arab
citizens of Israel within the Green Line. We have cardinal
problems: crime, violence, economic distress, severe lack of
housing, unrecognized villages in the Negev. We want to heal our
own problems.”
>
> The ‘defining moment’ when a coalition became possible
> The odds against the United Arab List ever forming part of
Israel’s coalition government were long. Historically, Jewish
Zionist parties don’t make alliances with Arab parties, even if
it means they won’t be able to form a government, seeing it as
compromising the Jewish nature of the state. In April 2020,
then-opposition leader Benny Gantz, who ran on a campaign to
oust Netanyahu, ended up joining him in government after he got
cold feet about depending on the outside support of a coalition
of Arab parties.
>
> “That was a defining moment,” Abbas says. It was then that the
idea struck him to reach out not to the liberal left, but to the
powerful yet fractured right-wing. “I said that I am willing to
collaborate with the whole political spectrum and that’s how I
opened options and wide doors to Arab politics in the Knesset,”
he says.
>
> Of all people it was Netanyahu, who for years incited against
Arab citizens and leaders, who offered Abbas a hand in April
2019. Netanyahu wanted to break up the “Joint List” or coalition
of four Arab parties that included UAL and he needed the four
Knesset seats held by Abbas to form a narrow coalition in the
next elections. They held numerous talks. Abbas was promised
budgets and resources to deal with the severe problems that
Israeli Arabs face in crime, violence and lack of housing.
Senior ministers in Netanyahu’s Likud party began talking about
how important Jewish-Arab coexistence was.
>
> The talks did not produce a government, but Abbas says they
gave him a kosher stamp for the Change bloc to invite him into
its coalition — and showed others across the political spectrum
that his party, and his movement, had legitimacy. “If you do a
move like that with the right-wing, then of course you can do it
with the left wing,” he says.
>
> He’s under no illusions however that the Jewish parties in the
Change bloc would have invited him to join the coalition if they
had a majority in the Knesset without the four seats he brings.
And his coalition partners are not exactly friends of his
movement; Bennett resolutely opposes the creation of a
Palestinian state and once said, “I killed lots of Arabs in my
life, and there is absolutely no problem with that.” (The day
after signing the coalition agreement, Bennett publicly
apologized for his past criticism of Abbas and called him
“brave.”)
>
> In order to preserve this most contradictory of coalitions,
the leaders of the eight parties of the Change coalition have
already agreed that at least for the first year they will not
propose any issues that are in dispute. “Each party has its
principled issues.” he says.
>
> For the UAL, that means no pro-LGBTQ laws. Before Abbas became
known as a dealmaker, he opposed a bill in the Knesset banning
gay conversion therapy, a move for which he received criticism
from other Arab parties. He remains steadfast to his
conservative values, however. “Our position on this subject
comes from a religious and conservative Arab perspective,” he
says. “We don’t support religious coercion. But to approve
things that oppose the religion is something else.”
>
> What Abbas can achieve — and the question of Gaza
> Abbas will hold no position in government, and so his power
derives from his ability to bring it down by withdrawing his
party from the coalition. He hopes that he won’t need to use it,
he says. “There’s no doubt that the different parties needed to
accept the UAL and create a partnership with it. But I think
that with time, the UAL will become a natural part of the
political establishment and then they will act with the UAL in a
fair, accepting and positive way.”
>
> He has already solicited the promise of assistance for his
people. In the coalition talks, Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett
agreed to Abbas’ demand for more money for the Arab sector. They
doubled the budget of the five-year plan for developing Israel’s
Arab sector to 35 billion shekels ($10.75 billion).
>
> Yet despite that pledge, some Palestinians in Israel are
skeptical of what he can actually deliver. “Mansour Abbas won’t
be doing anything for anyone. Because that’s not going to be on
the agenda,” says Buttu. “It’s Naftali Bennett who is prime
minister. He’s not an Arab lover. He’s going to want to show his
right-wing credentials.’”
>
> And what if that desire leads to another massive military
operation against the Palestinians in the West Bank or the Gaza
Strip? During the coalition negotiations in May, it was Abbas
who froze talks when the conflict began. Abbas suggests that he
wouldn’t necessarily withdraw from a government that sanctioned
military activity against Palestinians.
>
> “By nature I’m a person of peace,” he says. “We need to
conduct ourselves in this issue in a smart way and not black and
white. But in any case there will be crises and the question is:
even if we aren’t in the government there won’t be a war or a
military operation? … I can’t say that I have an unequivocal
answer to how I will act in this crisis or another. There are
many things that need to be taken into account and need to be
considered before taking a decision.”
>
> There are red lines, he says, but he’s not specific. “I will
never give up on my values and my rights, the natural ones, the
civilian ones, the collective ones,” he says. “But you don’t
throw the baby out with the water.”
>
> Abbas hopes he can help bring an end to the conflict, but says
his primary concern is to improve the welfare of his people. “I
was elected to first serve the Arab citizens and to try to bring
solutions to the problems. That’s numbers one, two, and three in
priorities. But if I have the opportunity to advance the peace I
will do so.”
>
> Buttu says that, morally, you can’t ignore the Palestinians in
the West Bank and Gaza in order to improve the situation of
Arabs in Israel. “Being part of the government means maintaining
the blockade [of the Gaza Strip], dropping bombs on Gaza,
evicting Palestinians [in East Jerusalem] and building
settlements. You can’t say, ‘I’m part of the coalition but my
hands are clean.’ We are one people.”
>
> It’s clear that Abbas believes that the act of joining the
coalition is itself an accomplishment — but one that stands to
bring both rewards and risks for his people. “We made some sort
of a breakthrough on a path. We removed a wall that Arab
citizens faced. There was a feeling that we achieved something.
[But] there’s a lot of responsibility, a lot of dangers. Like if
you climb a tall mountain, and you succeed in reaching the top
there’s still a danger you could fall. And that’s why the
feelings are mixed, because if you fall, you crash.”
>
> This union between Arabs and Jewish politicians underpinning
Israel’s government might be tenuous, but symbolically it offers
a step towards progress in a relationship that has been going
backwards for generations. Yet if the new government takes
Abbas’ support for granted and refuses to help him achieve some
of his goals, he says he fears what the repercussions might be.
“Not just on a political level, a party level, or an individual
level, but in terms of the relations between the two peoples,
the Arab society and the Jewish society, between the Arab
society and the state itself. You fear that if this step fails,
the people will lose hope and then we’ll lose control.”
>
--- End Quote ---
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