Daniel Levy's analysis of the Israeli election. Extremely detailed and complex. Not for the faint of heart

 Steve Slocum

 ·

Follow

 ·

I've been waiting for this to drop. Daniel Levy's analysis of the Israeli election. Extremely detailed and complex. Not for the faint of heart or for those without some awareness of the political situation in Israel.

I like him because he has a deep historical awareness from years of hands on work as a negotiator in the region. And he's not one of those that goes into cognitive dissonance mode claiming that Israel is a functioning democracy because they hold an election and Palestinians are allowed to vote. Here are some excerpts:

------------------------------------------------------------------

Possibly the main headline of the election was the dramatic increase in voter participation in the ‘48er Palestinian community (referring to Palestinians and their descendants who remained in what became Israel after the Nakba expulsions). That community delivered a nearly 80% voter turnout rate, a 27% increase from the last election, with electoral participation outpacing that of the majority Israeli Jewish electorate.

The two parties—the Joint List and the United Arab List—received 11 and 8 seats respectively. (That is mostly votes from ‘48er community and a small percentage coming from Jewish Israelis).

It’s worth noting that while the representation in the Knesset jumps from 10 seats to 19, another layer to this is that seats were wasted in the 2022 election when the Tajammu’/Balad party ran independently, scoring the equivalent of three MKs, but failing to cross the threshold. So in terms of actual votes received (not seats), it’s the equivalent of an increase from 13 to 19 worth of seats—still highly consequential.

While there was a significant dedicated get-out-the-vote effort in the Arab sector, most of that additional turnout was driven by the harsh realities of life in the past four years under a Netanyahu/Ben-Gvir/Smotrich administration. The death and destruction being visited on Palestinians in Gaza, and to a different order of magnitude in the West Bank, the ongoing gratuitous cruelty were of course a motivating factor.

For the ‘48er community, there was though a growing sense of the precariousness of their own predicament. The relentless racist assault coming from the government and the institutions of state went beyond what this community had become familiar with under decades of systemic discrimination. It also led to a huge deterioration in law and order: intra-communal crime, racketeering, and homicides proliferated in light of the intentional neglect and provocation, and that has only intensified under the harsher policing approach of minister Ben-Gvir.

Not only did petty apartheid increase several notches, but THE GENUINE FEAR OF DISPLACEMENT REARED ITS HEAD. IT WAS NOT FANTASTICAL TO CONSIDER A SECOND NAKBA TO BE IN THE OFFING. Participation in a system so stacked against one’s equal rights is never an easy decision. The ‘48er community chose to use the opening that was available to them. The sense is that they did so with eyes wide open, under no illusions as to the kind of change (limited while important) that might be possible."

He goes on much further down to say this and to discuss possible options that I've not heard anywhere else. Full post from you know where it is included in the replies.

"The way this election has played out, and in particular the fact that the Zionist opposition parties are vacillating and leaning towards rejecting the opportunity to oust Netanyahu based on their rejection of the non-Zionist Palestinian parties, is being seized on in many quarters to prove the irredeemable nature of the Israeli Zionist regime. I understand that, it is a point I have myself made."