Palestinian political activism could push toward a one-state solution
Most Israelis seemed nonchalant about the recent Knesset election, held last March. The outcome was totally expected. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was reelected and the overall political pendulum moved even further to the right. But one dynamic produced some shock and awe in the Israeli political system: For the first time ever, a political alliance of four Palestinian-dominated parties in Israel – Hadash, the United Arab List, Balad and Ta’al – joined forces in a Joint Arab List and became the third-largest faction in the 20th Knesset.
Just as the Israeli political right-wing thought it had squeezed Israel’s Palestinian citizens out of the national governance equation by raising the electoral threshold from 2 percent to 3.25 percent, these minority Palestinian parties joined forces. The Joint Arab List is not a strategic political platform (not yet, at least), but political survival dictated electoral unity, since several of these parties did not reach 3.25 percent in the previous Knesset election.
The significance of this historic political initiative by Palestinian citizens of Israel far exceeds the Joint Arab List’s 13 Knesset seats. The move brought greater focus to a potent strategic asset of the Palestinian struggle on both sides of the nonexistent Green Line; it highlighted, yet again, a still under-utilized source of Palestinian political agency.
A country for all its citizens
The first time Palestinian citizens of Israel displayed this mode of proactive political agency to such an impressive degree was back in 2006-2007 when the Palestinian community in Israel produced “future vision” documents, such as “The Haifa Declaration,” published by Mada al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Social Research in Haifa, and “The Democratic Constitution,” published by Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, describing how Israel can and must change to be a country for all its citizens, Jews and Arabs alike.
The collective challenge these documents posed to the particularistic Jewish foundation of Israel was so shocking that mainstream Israeli society, after an initial frenzy of outrage, opted mostly to ignore it altogether.
All of this happened inside Israel proper, not in the Israeli-occupied territory of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.
Source: www.haaretz.com