They also occur not long after an escalation of tensions between Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Israel, which saw Israel launch Operation “Pillar of Defense” in response to an increased barrage of rockets from Gazan territory. Although a ceasefire went into effect on November 21, 2012, tensions remain high in Israel and the Palestinian territories. As several Arab parties with different ideological positions will be competing for seats in the Knesset, these events thus raise the following questions:

• What impacts, if any, have the Arab Spring, the Israeli economic crisis and Operation Pillar of Defense had on Arab society and Arab politics in Israel?

• And what is the likelihood that Arab political parties will join together to achieve greater representation within the Knesset?

In recognition of the important role that political parties continue to play in representing and shaping public opinion, on November 27, 2012, the Konrad Adenauer Program for Jewish-Arab Cooperation at Tel Aviv University held a conference to discuss Arab politics in Israel ahead of the elections. The first session offered academic overviews and analyses of continuity and change within Arab politics in Israel, while the second session featured discussions by representatives from influential Arab political parties.

The past twenty years have witnessed increased distancing between the Jews and Arabs of Israel. In the 2009 elections, half of the Arab Israelis who could vote did not do so, a likely sign of their increased alienation from Israeli politics and perhaps also from the Arab parties meant to represent them. Dr. Ilana Kaufman of the Open University of Israel listed four factors that could change the relationship between potential voters and the Arab parties in the coming elections: (1) the political freeze between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, as well as the recent operation in Gaza; (2) a trend in the 18th Knesset, led by right-wing Jewish parties, to delegitimize the citizenship status of Arabs in Israel; (3) the Israeli economic crisis, which has not been fully addressed by the government; and (4) the Arab Spring uprisings and their influence on Islamists in the Arab Israeli political arena.

In 2009, the vast majority (82 percent) of the Arab electorate voted for one of three Arab political parties, who remain the three main Arab political parties today:

• The Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (“Hadash”), which promotes a secular communist agenda and a “two states for two peoples” solution, for which it advocates joint Arab-Jewish cooperation;

• the National Democratic Alliance (“Balad”), which promotes a secular, Palestinian nationalist agenda;
• and the joint party of the United Arab List and the Arab Movement for Change (“Ra’am-Ta’al”) led by the Islamic Movement, which aspires towards an Islamic state (Caliphate) but pragmatically works to guarantee the rights of Muslims within Israel.

The upcoming elections pose an ideological challenge to all three parties, as each will have to contend with the definition of Israel as a Jewish state. Mr. Arik Rudnitzky of Tel Aviv University detailed the positions and challenges of each of these three parties. Hadash, which has accepted the UN Partition Resolution of 1947 and calls for two states based on the 1967 borders, faces a decline in support among Arabs for the idea of “two states for two people,” as well as growing criticism from nationalists for their acceptance of the Partition Resolution. Balad’s platform calls for a “state of all its citizens” in which all citizens, regardless of ethnicity and religion, have the same rights but in which the cultural uniqueness of national groups is preserved. Finally, the Islamic Movement is divided into two factions: the southern faction, which participates in parliamentary elections, and the northern faction, which does not support such participation. The southern faction justifies its participation in religious terms, e.g. describing political participation as “civil jihad.” So far, the three parties have not managed to join forces due to their ideological differences.

Analyzing the repercussions of the Arab Spring uprisings on the Islamic movements in Israel, Dr. Mohanad Mustafa of the College for Academic Studies at Or Yehuda and Derasat, The Arab Center for Law and Policy, noted that the Islamic Movement in Israel supported the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria, but less so in Bahrain due to the Shi’i element there. The Arab Spring had no direct effect on the political position of the southern Islamic Movement, which now justifies its participation in parliamentary elections by pointing to the example of Islamic movements in Arab states also participating in civil government elections. With the recent rise of a powerful salafi movement in Egypt, however, we have seen a concurrent increase in the salafi movement’s popularity within Arab society in Israel, which poses a challenge to the mainstream Islamic Movement.

Pointing out that in the latest polls, only 36 percent of the Arab population of Israel said they would vote in the next election, Dr. Nohad Ali of the Western Galilee College and University of Haifa reiterated the idea that the Arab public has little faith in Arab parties to effect real change in the Knesset and in their daily lives. The increasing strength of the Jewish Israeli Right as well as structural problems in Arab parties have caused them to feel that their representatives are irrelevant.

Adv. Ayman Odeh, Secretary General of Hadash, and Mr. Mtanes Shihadeh, a member of Balad and a researcher at Mada al-Carmel Institute of Haifa, provided an inside perspective of their respective party’s political platforms.

Odeh stressed that Hadash is a completely secular party that continues to favor a two-state division of territory. He noted that despite the difficult environment of the current Knesset, Hadash has helped pass twenty laws in favor of the Arab community and blocked 93 of 97 proposed laws which would have “damaged the democratic processes in Israel.”

Shihadeh pointed out that Balad had also had successes in abolishing discriminatory laws, but unlike Hadash, does not advocate a two-state solution or the building of coalitions with Zionists or other parties it ideologically opposes. Balad wishes to make the state truly democratic for all its people, a move that would change the character of Israel as a Jewish state because “you cannot be both democratic and Jewish.” In practice, he claimed, this creates an “apartheid state”, in which for example Arab Israelis cannot live in certain places designated for Jewish Israelis.

Odeh and Shihadeh agreed that there was a possibility that their parties would join forces to create one Arab political list, although neither believed that only one party list, uniting all Arab political parties, would be healthy for the Arab public. Odeh believed that a single party list might actually diminish the Arab vote, particularly if polarizing figures were chosen to head the coalition. In agreement, Shihadeh asserted that competition between the Arab parties had had a positive impact on Arab society in Israel. However, he noted that Balad’s official position is that it seeks a single unified list.

Asked why they chose not to boycott Israeli elections, both Odeh and Shihadeh claimed that one reason was to keep the right wing from dominating the government. Shihadeh believed that if there were no Arab parties to vote for, Arabs would support “satellite parties” affiliated with Jewish-Zionist parties, and therefore their political strength would decline to what it had been in the 1950s and 60s. In conclusion, both Odeh and Shihadeh noted that the fate of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank was a continuing concern among Arabs living in Israel. The elections, they said, were an instrument through which Arab politicians in Israel could address not only the everyday needs of the Arab public in Israel but the greater national demands of the Palestinian people.