Much too little, and very late: Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, went to the town of Tamra in the Galilee on 26 February to hold election hustings. He rented a wedding hall designed to hold a thousand people. Thirty people turned up: there were more security guards and protesters outside, than there were curious members of the public inside the hall.
According to Israeli think tanks, at the last elections in September 2019, more than 95% of Tamra voted for the Joint List, in this town of some 33,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel. The Joint List is an alliance formed in 2015 of parties that oppose the Zionist and securitist consensus of all the other parties running in the Israeli elections. The third largest party in parliament, the Joint List has been a political pariah in the feverish, bitter, and failing negotiations around forming an Israeli government over the past year. No Jewish Israeli politician wants to be seen to be including the Arabs, as they are reductively labeled, in any form of national governance, even if this exclusion entails political paralysis.
So untouchable are the Arabs, that Netanyahu uses the “threat” of their contamination of government as a way of smearing his opponents: The posters show a picture of Benny Gantz of Kakhol Lavan (Blue and White, the new centrist party), sitting at a desk with Ahmad Tibi of the Joint List, with the caption: “Without Ahmad Tibi, Gantz doesn’t have a government”. It must take a particularly trained eye to spot the threat in Ahmad Tibi: alongside his parliamentary work since 1999, he is an obstetrician who is known for his populist witticisms.
