For Palestinians, Israel’s third round of elections only reinforced what we already knew

The entire Israeli political class is hell-bent on keeping Palestinians imprisoned. All that distinguishes their members is how willing they are to show their disdain for our existence

For the third time in less than a year, Israelis headed to the polls in an attempt to elect a government. In the previous two elections, Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party had the most votes (though not in the most recent poll, in which they were narrowly beaten by Blue and White); in all three, they failed to amass a majority of the seats in parliament. While pundits in Israel debate the antics of representative democracy, the differences between Netanyahu and his rival Benny Gantz, and the costs of continued elections, Palestinians have watched silently from the sidelines.

It is quite ironic that the Joint List alliance, filled with Palestinian Arab lawmakers, is helping to prevent a majority of seats for the Likud. In fact, it’s something that I relish. I cannot help but be impressed by MK Ayman Odeh and others of the Joint List, who remain a thorn in the side of Netanyahu and the Israeli right. This speaks less to Israel’s self-proclaimed “democratic values” that are boasted of whenever the existence of its Palestinian citizens and their participation in Israeli elections are brought up, and more to Palestinian resiliency in the face of horrid dehumanisation.

Not all Palestinians who live under Israeli military rule and law voted. From their point of view, Israel’s elections are merely bickering between a multitude of jailers who are seeking to win over voters with promises of how they will further cage Palestinians.

The average liberal Zionist would find what I say to be radical. Netanyahu is problematic, they would agree, but his centrist rivals would do a lot of good for Palestinians. They remind me of liberals in America, who see Donald Trump as the very end of the spectrum of racism and can’t understand how a political rival on the other end of the spectrum could also be racist (cc Michael Bloomberg).

Regardless of their differences on Palestinians and policy detail, all major Israeli politicians are much like Bibi – the “butcher of Gaza” and the mastermind of the Nation State Law.

Take Netanyahu’s main rival, Gantz, for example. Following the announcement by the Trump administration in January of the “deal of the century”, which was immediately condemned by Palestinians, Gantz matched Netanyahu’s elation in hailing the plan.

We can go back even further, to Gantz campaigning in Israel by boasting of how, as a former general in the Israeli Defence Forces, he sent Gaza back to the stone ages.

Avigdor Lieberman and Ayelet Shaked have been openly racist in the past, proclaiming that “the enemy” deserved to have their heads chopped off with axes, that “the entire Palestinian people is the enemy”, and that they “birth snakes”.

Even Yair Lapid, who is seen as centre-left, has engaged in a horrifying denial of the Nakba (the 1948 Palestinian exodus) on his Twitter account, and praised the Trump administration’s cutting off of aid to the UN’s Relief and Works Agency.

To Palestinians, it is clear why elections in Israel won’t make a difference. The entire political class is racist and hell-bent on keeping Palestinians imprisoned; they only differ in how willing they are to frame their disdain for our existence. On the issues of annexation, settlement building, Jerusalem, the status of Palestinian refugees, and the blockade in Gaza, the parties that are winning big in Israel are in utter agreement. The Israeli parties that are willing to challenge these positions and assert Palestinian humanity, such as Meretz, are smeared as traitors not only by the political class but by the Israeli public as well.

It is important to note that despite this election being the third, and despite the threat of coronavirus, the turnout was actually much higher than the previous ones. Israelis came out to vote. To Palestinians, this shows another reality: that the Israeli public is very much in agreement with the positions of the Likud and the right, and that the Israeli public is looking for a solution that involves the least disruption to their lives and the least possible visibility of the question of Palestinians.

What can be said when thousands of people go out and give Netanyahu and his party the most votes for a third time? Zionists constantly smear Palestinian society as hateful, but is it wrong to note that the majority of the Israeli public is willing to vote for and endorse the hate and racism of the Likud and its allies? Or will this too be blamed on Palestinians for not being “peaceful” and “kind” enough to change the hearts of millions of Israelis?

For the past year, Palestinians in Gaza have been marching peacefully to the border in order to demand their right to live with freedom and dignity. While the Israeli government did its part to smear these protesters as terrorists, it cannot be discounted that average Israelis in the media, online and in their communities did so as well. They claimed that hundreds of everyday Gazans were human shields, that they were terrorists, that they were being paid, and that they were feigning for foreign cameras.

The truth is that the culture of encouraged ignorance in Israel over Palestinians has led the Israeli public to so severely dehumanise them that any disruption of the bubble in which Israelis live is seen as an attack, any reminder that the Palestinians exist in the backyard is an affront, and any political platform that doesn’t promise to quell the Palestinian people will not be viable.

For Palestinians, this third round of elections only reinforced what we already knew: that the Israeli government is racist and cannot be negotiated with.

For Israelis, I hope this third round of elections serves as a mirror to the society at large: how much of a blind eye do you turn to institutionalised hate, the continuation of the status quo, the acceleration of the occupation, the demonisation of Palestinians, and the nail in the coffin of any sort of political solution?

For the rest of the world, this third round of elections proves my point: Palestinians have been right all along.

Nooran Hamdan is a recent graduate from the University of New Hampshire, where she studied economics and political science, and minored in Middle Eastern studies