'This time it was Gaza, but we're next'

[ProgressiveMuslim]

By Yoav Stern

He is 26 years old, a resident of Umm al-Fahm. He didn't manage to say his name before running back to the crowd of demonstrators that gathered in the city on Election Day. He was standing near the police vans that were taking away those who had been arrested, in front of the Al Razi School, the hub of the tension.

MK Aryeh Eldad (National Union) had arrived about an hour earlier, to serve as chairman of the local polling station committee, and upon hearing of his arrival, hundreds of angry young men thronged to the school. They clashed with the police, in the middle of the pouring rain, until Eldad was escorted away.

The young man complains that right-wing Jewish politicians had decided to exploit his city to win cheap points among their public. The ones who have been hurt by this are the residents, simple people like himself, he says.

A few weeks ago he was expelled from the Bnei Brak construction site where he had been working, on the grounds that there had been a stormy demonstration against the Gaza operation in Umm al-Fahm. Since then he has not told anyone where he comes from. "It's enough to say that I'm from the north," he says.

Even though it is early in the day, he has already cast his ballot. "Of course I voted. Precisely because of what is happening. I voted for Balad," he says, referring to the secular Arab party. The voices of the demonstrators rise like a siren, alerting everyone around, and he starts running toward the large iron fence surrounding the school complex. The fence towers some five meters above the school's parking lot, where the police vehicle that will escort Eldad out of the city stood. The young men start shaking the fence. Some of it comes apart and drops into the schoolyard. It is a miracle no one is hurt.

The Arab public's rate of participation in the 2009 Knesset elections was the lowest it has been since the state's founding: about 54 percent, two percent lower than three years ago, in the last election. In Arab (although not Druze) locales, the Zionist parties have disappeared from the street. They were still a feature before the war, but have since vanished. To the extent that Arabs did head out to vote, it was in order to respond to the threats directed against them.

All the Arab parties played the card they were dealt by MK Avigdor Lieberman, chairman of Yisrael Beiteinu. On the morning of Election Day, former MK Azmi Bishara, the founder of Balad, living in exile, went on the air on Al Jazeera, saying that a vote for the Arab parties would be a suitable answer to Lieberman. "Hadash is the opposite of Lieberman," that party declared during the two weeks preceding the election, in both Hebrew and Arabic.

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