WHERE'S ARIEL WHEN WE NEED HIM?:

Although the participation of Palestinian-Arab citizens has been slowly growing, the dominant discourse of the protest movement does not resonate with them. They have long believed that, as the veteran Palestinian-Israeli politician Ahmed Tibi famously put it, "Israel is a democracy for Jews and a Jewish state for Arabs." Israel's Palestinian-Arab minority--which lived under military rule for the first two decades of Israel's existence (from 1949 to 1966), faces persistent discrimination, and is largely excluded from political decision-making--has long regarded Israeli democracy as exclusionary and deeply flawed. Unlike Israeli Jews, they have long insisted that for Israel to be a genuine democracy, it must cease to be a Jewish state--certainly not what the current protest movement is demanding.

Nor is protecting the power and independence of Israel's Supreme Court a cause that inspires and energizes Palestinian citizens of Israel, despite the fact that their rights would be most at risk if the Court is enfeebled; the government could, for instance, disqualify Arab political parties from running for parliament. In a 2022 survey, just 40 percent of Arab citizens expressed trust in the Supreme Court, down from 78 percent in 2012. This decline is understandable given the court's refusal to strike down many illiberal laws that have targeted Arab citizens: notably, the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law, the 2011 Nakba Law, the 2014 Admissions Committees Law, the 2016 Expulsion of MKs Law, and the 2018 Nation-State Basic Law, which effectively enshrined Arabs as second-class citizens.

For the protest movement to include more Arab citizens of Israel, it would need to address their concerns as well as those of Israeli Jews. Instead of idealizing Israeli democracy and mythologizing the Supreme Court as a bastion of liberalism, the movement could acknowledge the flaws in Israeli democracy and the imperative to improve it so that it genuinely works for all citizens of Israel, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. Such a discursive shift could alienate some Israeli Jews, but it could also herald the emergence of an egalitarian pro-democracy movement that reshapes Israeli politics by creating the basis for sustained Jewish-Arab political cooperation. The unprecedented participation of an Arab party (the United Arab List [Ra'am], led by Mansour Abbas) in the previous coalition government suggests that such a possibility exists.

There is, however, another issue that not only discourages Palestinian citizens of Israel from joining the protest movement but also calls into question the movement's professed commitment to democratic principles and values: Israel's military rule over approximately 3 million stateless, disenfranchised Palestinians in the West Bank. (Palestinians in Occupied East Jerusalem have at least the theoretical ability to receive Israeli citizenship and voting rights.) The occupation is now in its fifty-sixth year, with no end in sight. This repressive regime, which international and Israeli human rights groups now characterize as apartheid, has undoubtedly corroded democracy in Israel.

As long as a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seemed possible, the tension, or contradiction, between Israel's democratic identity and its occupation of the West Bank seemed temporary. But now that a two-state solution increasingly appears impossible, and successive Israeli governments have only entrenched the occupation and advanced the de facto annexation of most of the West Bank, it is more clear than ever that Israel cannot continue to rule the West Bank undemocratically and call itself a democracy. It must either fully enfranchise its Palestinian subjects or withdraw and accept Palestinian statehood. Needless to say, the Israeli government staunchly opposes both of these options, as do most Israeli Jews. In fact, the coalition agreements that Netanyahu signed in December with the far-right Religious Zionism and Jewish Power parties officially announce their intent to annex the West Bank. Moreover, the government's recent decision to give Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of Religious Zionism, significant powers in governing large parts of the West Bank (the Civil Administration, Israel's governing body in the West Bank, is now mostly under his authority) already amounts to de jure annexation, since Smotrich is a civilian politician, not an Israeli military official.

Tweet   @brothersjudd