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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 April 1999 Issue No. 424 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 April 1999 Issue No. 424
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Profile Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters To stand or not to stand?
By Graham Usher
Azmi Bishara's decision last month to run as the first ever Palestinian candidate for Israel's prime minister drew a predictably tart response from Ehud Barak's Labour Party, the historical beneficiary of the Arab vote inside Israel. "An unintelligent and irresponsible act," commented Labour's "Arab sector" spokesman, Turiya Nujidate.
Azmi Bishara
Less predictable was the outcry from the main Arab lists contesting the Knesset elections. Outgoing leader of the United Arab List (UAL), Abdul-Wahab Darawsha, described Bishara's decision to stand as an act of "political suicide", while Israel's Communist Party (Hadash) -- whose list Bishara's Tagammu (now Balad) Party had joined for the 1996 elections -- deemed the move "dangerous for the Arabs and the Israeli left".
Labour's trepidation is not hard to fathom. There are currently one million Palestinians living in Israel, representing around 15 per cent of the overall Israeli electorate. In the 1996 Knesset elections 63 per cent of these voted for either the UAL or Hadash (gaining them a total of nine Knesset seats), but a colossal 89 per cent voted for the then Labour leader, Shimon Peres.
If Ehud Barak is to have any chance of unseating Israel's present premier, Binyamin Netanyahu, he must maintain this level of Palestinian support. And his fear is that a vote for Bishara in Israel's first round of prime ministerial elections on 17 May will mean an indirect vote for Netanyahu or the other main PM challenger, the Centre Party's Yitzak Mordechai.
It is not a prognosis shared by Bishara. At the press conference in which he announced his candidacy on 25 March, Bishara denied that his purpose was to "steal" votes from Barak. Rather, "my goal is to raise the Arab issue [in the Israeli elections] and to create here a civil state rather than a Jewish state," he said. "It's high time that an Arab ran for prime minister, so that there can be a loud voice representing Arab issues, especially the issue of the discrimination Arabs face in Israel, and the need to defend a just peace."
There is little illusion among his supporters that Bishara can garner anything other than a small percentage of votes. The aim rather is tactical, says political analyst, Asad Ghanem.
In the past, "the Labour Party always assumed that the Arabs would vote for it out of the need to prevent a Likud government. By standing against Barak, Bishara is not saying that we don't want to remove Netanyahu, but that our support for Barak should be conditional on a Labour government combating anti-Arab discrimination in Israel and supporting a just peace in the negotiations with the Palestinian Authority."
In exchange for guarantees from Labour on these issues, Bishara would then tell his supporters to vote for Barak in the second round of prime ministerial elections on 2 June, says Ghanem. "He certainly won't be negotiating with Netanyahu."
It is clear why Labour is hostile to such a beginning, since it fears that any gesture to the Palestinians will be exploited by Netanyahu in the run up to the second poll. But why are the Arab parties so opposed to Bishara's candidacy?
In the past, both the UAL and Hadash have flirted with the idea of standing a Palestinian candidate for prime minister. They were "advised" not to do so, however, not only by Labour, but by the PA, which is no less keen than Barak to see Netanyahu and his Likud coalition defeated and fears that Bishara's candidacy could weaken this prospect. Due to Bishara's decision, therefore, the UAL and Hadash are being forced to support the openly Zionist Barak against an openly anti-Zionist and Palestinian candidate, a stance that -- to put it mildly -- weakens their Arabist credentials.
But there are other, less factional reasons being voiced against Bishara's decision. For the Palestinian analyst, Marwan Darwish, standing as a Palestinian alternative to Barak is right in principle, but wrong in the circumstances of the current Israeli poll. He believes the time for the Arab parties to bargain with Labour is before prime ministerial elections rather than between them. "Barak needs the Palestinians to vote for him rather than Mordechai on 17 May, so that he can be the sole challenger to Netanyahu," says Darwish. "After 17 May, he could say to Bishara that the choice is between voting for Barak or not voting at all, which in effect means a vote for Netanyahu. He could simply call Azmi's bluff."
But perhaps the most basic reason why many Palestinians inside Israel have been less than enthusiastic about Bishara's gambit is because of the old politics of horsetrading and opportunism that have so far accompanied it.
On 31 March, Ahmed Tibi announced that his Arab Renewal Party was leaving a joint election list with Hadash for a similar pact with Bishara's Balad. Although an Israeli citizen, Tibi has been a close adviser to both Yasser Arafat and the PLO's chief negotiator Mahmoud Abbas in recent years and a firm supporter of the Oslo process, as has Hadash.
Bishara and Balad, on the other hand, are perhaps the most prominent Palestinian critics inside Israel of Oslo and the PA leadership generally, of which Tibi was often an integral part. So how is it that Tibi could leave the pro-Oslo Hadash for the anti-Oslo Balad? The reason it appears is that Tibi could get only the fifth place on the Hadash list of candidates while Bishara offered him the second place on Balad's.
