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| Joint List Chairman Ayman Odeh |
by Samah Salaime March 4, 2020
We did not wake up to a new Israel on Tuesday morning, following the third election of the past year. Every Palestinian citizen of Israel knows the moral ground upon which Israel was founded. We all know the heavy price Palestinians have paid for the historic crimes committed by others against the Jewish people.
From its inception until today, Israel has not ceased in meting out harm to its Palestinian citizens. It has oppressed them, dispossessed them of their land and their rights, attempted to erase their identity, and passed racist laws against them. Arab society is undergoing a process of reconciliation between its Palestinian identity and its Israeli citizenship. And as that process has taken shape, the attacks from the Israeli establishment have only intensified.
Every time it seems we’ve reached a new low, Israel’s extreme-right government surprises us with new forms of incitement, discrimination, and erasure, while simultaneously dragging Israel’s Jewish public to normalize racism. The results of Monday’s elections, in which Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc will likely end up with 58 Knesset seats, reflected just how widespread racism has become in Jewish-Israeli society. It is yet another step toward undoing whatever democracy is left here.
But from under the rubble left behind by the Zionist movement has risen a new Palestinian people. Victims of Zionist colonialism, represented by the four Arab slates, and with the help of a few Jewish partners, formed the Joint List.
The latest elections revealed just how deeply hatred runs in Israeli society. Everyone is now against everyone. The ethnic slurs, Ashkenazi elitism, and delegitimization of various minority groups have left the Joint List as the last bastion fighting for basic democratic rights in this country.
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